In any case the good consul did much to bring about this present day by helping the settlers to select suitable grain. Many a time, for instance, did he bring, in envelopes, to my father on the old Red River homestead, samples of wheat he had received from different parts of the States. And he and my father, who were great friends, would plant these in garden plots and wait through the summer to see which would come to perfection during the season before the frost arrived. Some of this same wheat was given to others till the original contents of the selected envelope produced a harvest in many fields. Later on came benefactors like the painstaking Professor Saunders and Seager Whealler, and others who, through careful seed selection, transformed the face of the country by making it possible for harvests to ripen where nothing of that type ripened before. Thus it became possible in the year 1915, when our Empire was at war, for the great prairies to pour out their millions in wheat and flour to help in the battle for freedom. The soldiers in uniform at the front were supported by the soldiers in overalls at home, or the War could not have been won. And of these at home the soldiers of the soil deserve to be mentioned in despatches for their strenuous work in the greatest feeding industry of the world. And now, beside the stations along the pioneer Canadian Pacific and its endless gridiron of branch lines on the prairie, we have been seeing in these recent autumn months of 1923 the teams with the drivers, waiting their turn at a thousand elevators. The river of wheat on the main line is being swollen into floodtide from the tributary branches. Back of the railway and headed towards it, we have seen apparently interminable lines of wagons laden with grain. Like a long procession of industrious ants we have seen these wagons coming along the level plain, then up and down the ridges, to empty their loads at the capacious elevators. Thence the grain is poured into the cars which stand by on the steel trails behind panting locomotives—iron horses that chafe and tug with impatience to get way. And they must get away as quickly as possible, for other trains are ready to use the sidings to relieve the pressure caused by the wagons pouring their load into the elevators. A great army of men are at work and thousands of horses. But it is a beneficent, constructive army of men, with their lumbering artillery of horses and wagons engaged in the gigantic task of sending food supplies to the great centres of population all over the world. The elevators are the peaceful headquarters of a great staff employed to transfer foodstuffs from these prairie commissary stores to the railway trains which carry them in rushing torrents of speed to the great lakes, the canals and the open sea. It is in great and wonderfully significant contrast to the scenes from which we take this illustration, when militarism made its