Many other schemes for the construction of new railways are now in the air," and one at least of these is certain to_ be partially realised at no distant date. The great progress made since 1894 by reef-Mining in the Kootenay district (which, judged by the results of placer-mining in the' past and the investigations of the Canadian Geological Survey, is not more fertile than any one of four or five other districts north of the ©. P. R.) would almost appear to justify the immediate construction of a railroad along the well-defined valley, which lies between the "Gold Range" and the Rockies—the second and first waves of geological disturbance in the ' Sea of Mountains "—and forms the natural highway between the northern and southern portions of the Province. Until these away back" mining camps, of which Cariboo alone has communication even by road with the south, are opened up by a railway nothing more can be done there; for the high prices of inbour and supplies and the prohibitive cost of importing machinery or exporting ore prevent the development of many" discoveries of auriferous quartz and silver ores; and for the same reason the hydraulic-mining of alluvial deposits too poor to be touched by the old time placer-miners, who could never afford to touch anything yielding less than ton dollars a day for each pair of hands, is, except in the case of Cariboo, out of the question, And when the time comes, if it has not already arrived, to open up' these Il forgotten fields it is to be hoped that the work will be done by Canadian and British capital, and not as in the ease of the Kootenay, by United States capitalists. Tt is estimated that nantly 80 per cent of ths capital vested in the Kootenay has its homo, 59 to speak, inthe Western States—a partial Amerieanising" of a Canadian estate, which dies not reflect credit on the capitalists of Eastern Canada and Great Britain, and must not occur a Until both the Fertile Belt" of Manitoba and the North-West. territories, and the "Gold and Silver Belt" of British Columbia and the Yukon district have been completely opened up by means of railways, the development of Greater Canada cannot be regarded as final. Fifty years have sufficed for the complete opening up of the Western and Pacific States, some of which have already passed their prime and it may be that 1929—half a century having elapsed since Lord Dufferin drove the first spike of the C.P.R. at Pemhina, and Canada emerged from her forests—will see the realisation of Sir John Macdonald's ruling ideal. For, even if Winnipeg has not by then attained the si and importance of the Chicago of to-day, and Canada's chief port on the Pacific be still somewhat inferior in wealth and greatness to the present San Francisco, yet s tolerably certain that Greater Canada will be as populous and prosperous as Canada itself, and that the contre of gravity of British North America will lie, not as at resent somewhere between Toronto and Montreal, but in Manitoba—midway between the two oceans. "Thirty years from now,"—prophesies a Mazzini of the new world, who has dared to look further into the Twentieth Century than any of the old-world political seers—the Dominion will have a population of ten millions, and in the production of wheat and precious metals will equal and perhaps, surpass the American West, of to-day." And student of North-Western statistics will
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.