Book Description

The country through which we shall travel in this book is the biggest on the North American continent. The Dominion of Canada is almost as big as all Europe. It is bigger than the United States and all its outlying possessions. It is thirty times as big as Great Britain and Ireland, and it has one third of all the land over which the Union Jack flies. We shall find the country one of magnificent distances and wide, open spaces. It lies just over our boundary and reaches from there to just below the North Pole. Moreover, it is so thinly settled that it could increase its lands now under cultivation fivefold and not exhaust its available farms. The Dominion has untold mineral and industrial wealth. It has enough natural resources to support many times its present population of nine or ten millions, and one day it will have, so Canadians tell me, as many white people as the United Kingdom and all the colonies of the British Empire have now. This book is the result of many journeys through Canada. I have visited the Dominion again and again in the various stages of its development, and have followed the star of the new nation as it moved ever westward. I have stopped with the French in the St. Lawrence Valley, have travelled along the Saskatchewan when the United States farmers rushed into the wheat belt, and have seen the Klondike and the Yukon when they were still pouring streams of gold into the world. We of the United States are vitally interested in the Canadians. We are largely of the same blood, and the lines of our national lives have run along side by side. Thousands of us have relatives in the Dominion, for more than a million former American citizens are now living on the other side of the border. We have so much faith in Canada that our financial investments there are already in excess of two thousand million dollars, and our trade with it is more important to us than that of almost any other part of the world. For this reason we shall start out knowing that we shall receive everywhere a most cordial welcome. The men and women whom we shall meet, for the most part, speak our own language, think much the same thoughts, and have the same high ideals of life. Indeed, we shall be surprised again and again at the vivid realization of our great similarity, and the rich inheritance we have received from our common ancestors.