Closely connected with the immigration campaign was the Government's land policy. The old system of giving free homesteads to all comers was continued, but with a simplified procedure, lower fees, and greater privileges to the settler. No more land was tied up in railway grants, and in 1908 the odd sections, previously reserved for railway grants and sales, were opened to homesteaders. The pre-emption regulations were revised for the semi-arid districts where a hundred and sixty acres was too small a unit. Sales of farm lands to colonization companies and of timber limits were continued, with occasional excessive gains to speculators, which the Opposition vigorously denounced. Yet the homesteader remained the chief figure in the opening of the West. The entries, as we have seen, were eighteen hundred in 1896. They were forty-four thousand in 1911. Areas of land princely in their vastness were thus given away. Each year the Dominion granted free land exceeding in area and in richness coveted territories for whose possession European nations stood ready to set the world at war. In 1908, for {228} example, a Wales was given away; in 1909, five Prince Edward Islands; while in 1910 and 1911, what with homesteads, pre-emptions, and veteran grants, a Belgium, a Holland, a Luxemburg and a Montenegro passed from the state to the settler.[1] After and with the settler came the capitalist. The vast expansion of these years was made possible by borrowing on a scale which neither credit nor ambition had ever before made possible. Especially from Britain the millions poured in as soon as Canadians themselves had given evidence of the land's limitless possibilities. The yearly borrowings from the mother country, made chiefly by national and local governments and by the railways, rose to a hundred and fifty millions. French, Dutch, Belgian, and German investors followed. American capitalists bought few bonds but invested freely in mines, timber limits, and land companies, and set up many factories. By the end of the period foreign capitalists held a mortgage of about two and a half billions on Canada, but in most cases {229} the money had been well applied, and the resources of the country more than correspondingly developed. The railways were the chief bidders for this vast inflow of new capital. It was distinctly a railway era. The railway made possible the rapid settlement of the West, and the growth of settlement in turn called for still new roads. In the fifteen years following 1896 nearly ten thousand miles were built, two miles a day, year in and year out, and the three years following saw another five thousand miles completed. Two great transcontinentals were constructed. Branch lines innumerable were flung out, crowded sections were double-tracked, grades were lowered, curves straightened, vast terminals built, steamship connections formed, and equipment doubled and trebled.