Canadians of the present take casually the fact that their country straddles a continent. They assume that the eastern settlements expanded through the pressure of population into the prairie country and beyond; that the spread of Canada westward was as inevitable as the growth of a sapling into an oak, that nothing else could happen but what did happen. Their assumption leaves out of consideration the effulgent political idealism that entered into the creation of their country. It was through the daring spirit of individual men and their faith in Canada's future that the Dominion was fashioned. The winning of the West was not the product of mass action, like the swarming of bees taking possession of a new hive. The majority of eastern colonists in the sixties knew nothing of the West, and were content to remain uninformed on the subject. A Nova Scotian of the period would have shaken his head in disbelief had he been told by a passing stranger that, in little more than fifty years, a city on the far-away Red River would possess one of the world's largest wheat exchanges, and that winding freight trains would draw the grain eastward on its way to the markets of Europe. The economic potentialities of the land beyond Lake Superior were a closed book to the average man. The school children knew of it only as the land where the Indian still hung his scalps in his wigwam, and hunted the buffalo. Adults read slender references to it in the newspapers with the mild interest with which their descendants scan the descriptions of Arctic territories discovered by a Stefansson. Had the acquisition of the West depended on popular agitation and action, it would not have become Canadian, and very likely would have become part of the American republic. It was won by the vision and faith of a few men, prominent among whom was McGee. He had abundant reasons for western expansion. Conspicuous among them was the desire to open up the unexploited prairie lands, where the indigent members of society in the East might, through their own effort, find a competence. For the same reason he had been an ardent champion of western settlement while residing in the United States. A more imaginative consideration was that the Canadian territory might constitute a pathway to the great East, and that thereby the hopes of early explorers in a north-west passage from Europe to Asia might be realized. "We cannot despair," he declared in a speech in 1860, "that the dream of Jacques Cartier may yet be fulfilled, and the shortest route from Europe to China be found through the valley of the St. Lawrence." Some twenty-five years later, the steel lines of the Canadian Pacific Railway made McGee's dream come true.