ducts, they sold out, often to Americans moving from the eastern states, and began life anew on the Canadian prairies.

These people have made remarkably good citizens. In a very true sense it may be said that if eastern Canadians discovered the West, the Americans have opened the eyes of the western Canadian to the possibilities of his own country, especially on the material side. They are excellent farmers, understanding how to make the most of their land, and having brought with them the secret of the successful cultivation of the drier portions of the prairies. They are alert and shrewd in business, with an eye to money-making whether by trading in land, booming real estate, pushing the sale of farm implements, developing the lumber industry or advertising oil prospects. They show their initiative and common sense by their use of labour-saving devices and practical conveniences on the farm and in the house. In fact, the frontier characteristics so well known in the American West naturally repeat themselves on the Canadian prairies. In so far as these people have made permanent homes for themselves they have not exploited the land for their own advantage, but have become excellent Canadians, accepting the new order of things and the new institutions and endeavouring to take their share in working them.

Good feeling exists in the Prairie provinces be

tween the older Canadian and the American, unless here and there some prejudice crops up where loyalists or recent English arrivals have settled. The action of the American in the West during the War occasioned no serious criticism. It is true that he did not respond so quickly as the British who leaped at once to the need of the Mother-land and led in enlistment; nor did he come up to the Canadian-born who made a good second; but he played a reasonable part. Hitherto he had known nothing of the outside world. "Iowa" meant more to him than all Europe, and it was difficult for a man who had never seen the ocean to realize for the first time that duty was calling him to cross it in defence of an ideal. But go he did, and that too long before his relatives south of the line had been persuaded that they must throw in their weight against Germany.

This American has learned much about Britain and to respect British institutions as they have been reproduced in Canada, and so he may be a useful interpreter of them to his folk across the border. Of eastern Canada, however, he knows little and is out. of sympathy with much that he hears about it. In fact a very acute observer has remarked that "in many ways we stand much nearer to the rural life of the northern middle states than we do to the urban life of eastern Canada." But the American immigrant has become a friend to the western Canadian, and

shows no sign of using this friendship to undermine his loyalty to the Dominion.

British Columbia, isolated from the East by her mountains, has had her own history and preserves her own individuality, but her incoming was necessary for the completion of the Dominion. When in 1871 Confederation was accepted by the people as a guarantee of their future, it was brought about chiefly through the influence of the few Canadians who had made leading positions for themselves on the Coast. The British-born and the Americans, who were in the majority, were not on the whole favourably disposed to it. In earlier years the population had come in by sea or through the United States. After the decision as to the Oregon boundary, the Hudson's Bay Company transferred its headquarters to Victoria on Vancouver Island, and for years little was known of the mainland. Fortunately the head of the Company, who was also the governor of Vancouver Island and afterwards also of the mainland, Sir James Douglas, was a man of unusual character and ability, with autocratic tendencies which, on the whole, led to good government. But growth was very slow. About Victoria the dominating influences came from the Hudson's Bay employees. With the discovery of gold in the Fraser river, however, the whole situation changed. People poured in from everywhere, most of them Americans. But owing to the

fluctuations of the gold prospects, the numbers rose and fell, and it was not until the province was linked with the East by the Canadian Pacific Railway that the growth went ahead with any degree of per

manency.

Of all the provinces British Columbia is that in which the British-born element bears the greatest proportion to the total population, that is to say 30.6 per cent., and Victoria is the most English city in the Dominion. About 45 per cent. of the people of the province are of Canadian stock and 10 per cent. American. This American influence has been felt in the mining and the lumbering districts, especially on the mainland. Though the political ties of the province are strongly British and it is now genuinely an organic part of Canada, the commercial and social relationships with Seattle, Portland and California are numerous and strong. This is due to the conditions imposed by geography. In many respects the Pacific coast is one. Movement is easily made north and south; towards the east it must be through mountains and across wide prairies. This coast also faces the Far East as a unit, and the attitude towards Oriental immigration is the same from British Columbia to California.

From this survey of the population of the Dominion it is obvious that the unifying of the provinces into a national life has been a process of extreme difficulty.

Confederation itself was a remarkable accomplishment. A sense of national unity does exist, but it has had to surmount great obstacles, geographical, racial and economic. The United States was given a much easier problem in the attainment of unity, though Canada has never had to meet anything like the slavery question and the Civil War, nor has she yet had to assimilate vast hordes of immigrants chiefly from south and south-eastern Europe with their new and perplexing difficulties; relatively however the loss of many of her best people through emigration has been much greater.

In the large elements of population so alike in character which are found in the dominant portion of the United States and in English-speaking Canada lies the possibility of a real understanding between these two countries. An analysis of the distinctive and the similar features of the life and thought of both will substantiate this judgment. Hitherto, however, the process of good understanding has often been inhibited by inherited dislikes and prejudices, which have been stimulated and renewed by disagreements over undetermined boundaries, by political antagonisms and by clashing interests in trade. These, therefore, will be considered in succession.