Still, many a first-class American city could hardly afford to laugh at the growth of Toronto, particularly in recent years. She prides herself that she had doubled her population each fifteen years of her history and here is a geometrical problem of growth that becomes vastly more difficult with each oncoming twelvemonth. At the close of the second war of the United States with England, just a century ago, Toronto was a mere hamlet. Beyond it was an unknown wilderness. The town was known as York in those days, and although Governor Simcoe had already chosen the place to be the capital of Upper Canada, it was a struggling little place. Still, it must have struggled manfully, for in 1817 it was granted self-government and in 1834, having garnered in some nine thousand permanent residents, it was vested with a Mayor and the other appurtenances of a real city. Since then it has grown apace, until today in population and in financial resource it is very close upon the heels of Montreal, for so many years the undisputed metropolis of the Dominion. But perhaps the spur that has advanced Toronto has been the knowledge that west of her is Winnipeg, and that Winnipeg has been doubling her population each decade. And west of Winnipeg is Calgary, west of Calgary, Vancouver; all growing apace until it is a rash man who today can prophesy which will be the largest city of the Dominion of Canada, a dozen years hence. The Canadian cities have certainly been growing in the American fashion--to use that word in its broadest sense. And yet the strangest fact of all is that Toronto grows--not more American, but more British year by year. Within the past twelve or thirteen years this has become most marked. She has grown from a Canadian town, with many marked American characteristics, into a town markedly English in many, many ways. Now consider for a moment the whys and the wherefores of this. We have already told of the rapid progress of Toronto, now what of the folk who came to make it? In the beginning there were the Loyalists--"Tories" we call them in our histories; "United Empire Loyalists," as their Canadian descendants prefer to know them--who fled from the Colonies at the time of the Revolution and who found it quite impossible to return. In this way some of the old English names of Virginia have been perpetuated in Toronto, and you may find in one of the older residential sections, a great house known as Beverly, whose doors, whose windows, whose fireplaces, whose every detail are exact replicas of the Beverly House in Virginia which said good-by to its proprietors a century and a half ago.