Probably no single country in the world, certainly no portion of the British Empire, stands to gain so tremendously from the opening of the canal as British Columbia. England has not yet realized what enormous resources are locked up in this province of the furthest west, which looks out from a hundred harbours to the Pacific and across to the awakening East. The long haul across the continent, the interminable sea-trail round the Horn, twice crossing the equator, kept British Columbia, until lately, outside the thought and interest, not only of Englishmen, but even of the Canadians of the administrative East. Even with the gradual filling of the empty middle and west, geography would have continued to be against British Columbia. But the Panama Canal makes all the difference. This province will no longer look vaguely and dreamily to the western sea-spaces and a still half-slumbering Orient. She will suddenly find herself at one end of a sea-route which will shorten her distance from New York by 8,415 miles and from Liverpool by 6,046 miles. Her timber and other produce will no longer toil wearily in the holds of the "windjammer" down the whole length of Northern, Central, and Southern America. There at Balboa, less than halfway down, is the entrance of the long-desired short-cut to the world-centres of progress and enterprise. The electric thrill of this new circuit will be felt not only along the havens and fjords of the British Columbian coast, but nearly a thousand miles inland. We may say that almost the whole western half of Canada, where the golden wheat frontiers are ever advancing, will face about and henceforth look west instead of east. All the corn and produce of Alberta and Western Saskatchewan will flow, not eastwards as heretofore, but to the Pacific shores, there to be shipped for transit _via_ the canal to the southern and eastern United States, to the north and east of South America, and to the Old World over the Atlantic. Even the eastern and western fronts of the Dominion will feel the grip of a new link, which may serve important naval and defensive interests for Canada.