The value of every town lot and of every acre of land of the 395,000 square miles of the province will be greatly enhanced; town sites will be hewed out of the forests, and the forests themselves--every stick of wood of their 182,000,000 acres of forest and woodland--will be increased in value directly, by reason of cheaper shipping alone, to the extent of several dollars per 1,000 feet; and in the items of lumber and wood-pulp alone the Panama Canal will make as a free gift to British Columbia considerably more than the United States is spending on the whole canal. The mines of British Columbia, which have already produced over L70,000,000, will leap forward with renewed prosperity. Her fisheries, which have produced L21,000,000, will be more extensively developed and, let us hope, be made again a British asset--since they are wholly in the hands of the Japanese, who not only send their earnings home to Japan, but are criminally wasteful in their methods. The coal deposits of the province, which promise to be the most extensive in the world, will, with immense deposits of iron, be opened to the world's markets. It is said that the coal-fields of one small district in the Kootenay are capable of yielding 10,000,000 tons of coal a year for over seven thousand years, and a new district has been discovered within a twelvemonth which the provincial mineralogist told me on Christmas Eve was the most important economic discovery ever made in British Columbia, where there are known to be 1,000 square miles of the best of anthracite, and which is probably the richest known anthracite district in the New World west of Pennsylvania.[21] The references to coal are especially interesting in this passage. It is an evidence of the public alertness in this matter that the British Columbian government has just appointed a special commissioner "to investigate and report upon all circumstances and conditions incident to the production and sale or other disposition of coal in British Columbia."