now going on, and this again shows a marked difference and improvement upon former years. Most of the new-comers are not the idlers and poverty-stricken offscourings of Europe, but well-to-do farmers from the older States and settlements, from Northern Iowa, from Wisconsin, and other of the newer States of the Union, but old in comparison to this; from Canada, and especially from the best parts of Ontario, and from the richest and most fertile districts of the older provinces. These are men principally who have sold their old farms at high prices, who are accustomed to pioneer life, and who have brought their experience and the families they have raised in the old homestead to these newer fields, possibly to go again further west when these lands are reclaimed from the wilderness and brought into good cultivation. Nearly all of the new arrivals are of a class far in advance of the immigration of former years, and they include a great number of men with capital and experience who are going into Western farming with all modern appliances and ample means as the most promising speculation of the day. The dominant nationalities settling on the Minnesota farms are Americans, Scandinavians and Canadians in about equal proportions. The Americans are nearly all from Southern Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Illinois, all wheat-growing districts, and many of these settlers were pioneers in those States when these lands were new and unknown, who have sold the farms they originally made out of the prairie for 25 or 30 dollars per acre, and, moving to this new North-West with the money and experience they have accumulated, are buying land at from one-fifth to one-tenth of the price they have received for their old place, and will make in five or six years farms twice as valuable as those they have left.

The secret of all this is the knowledge, that seems to have been only lately arrived at, that farming is profitable, and that it pays to 'make land.' Farming is less exposed to vicissitudes than any ordinary business, and the depression, when it comes, is less disastrous and more easily evaded. There is really no better investment than wheatraising, and a prairie farm once brought under cultivation will always have a surplus, however disastrous external matters may be. Capitalists now going into these large farming speculations have gone into it after careful calculation as a business that offers the very best return for their money, and a certainty that at least there will be no bad debts; that Nature, however she may occasionally disappoint an oversanguine speculator, will average all right, and that the surplus after any partial failure will still net something tangible, the principal being always intact and the interest tolerably secure. The experience of some sharp experimenters on the St. Paul and Sioux Railway lands in large blocks, say from 600 to 3.000 acres, is, that a crop of No. 1 hard Minnesota wheat can be got into the railway elevators at a cost of from 7 to 8 dollars (say under 21. sterling) per acre, including fall ploughing, seed-sowing, harvesting, threshing, hauling to the railway, depreciation of land and machinery, wear and tear, and interest on

capital employed. Ten bushels of wheat at 75 to 85 cents per bushel pays, therefore, all these expenses, and twenty bushels more per acre (which is still under the general production from the first crop) pays for the land, preliminary expenses, and the breaking up of the prairie ready for the farming operations that follow. Thus 30 bushels to the acre of the first crop clears all outlay up to that time, returns the capital invested, and leaves a first-rate fenced farm in a high state of cultivation for succeeding agricultural employment. All over 30 bushels is a profit after capital and interest have been restored, the farm paid for and made within a year; and yet this land produces often 40 and 50 bushels to the acre, leaving 21. and 31. per acre profit over all expenses and outlay both for capital and revenue. Where else is there a business that in twelve months repays all advances of its purchase and establishment, and leaves as a profit a money return and plant worth four times the original outlay? It is this enormous profit that is bringing so many heavy capitalists into the ranks of this novel immigration, and inducing men who have already worked themselves into a good position to abandon for a time the amenities of a settled life, and embark once more in pioneer farming. A number of farms in all the districts alluded to broke up last year from 500 to 1,000 acres of land, and the Northern Pacific Company alone expected that not less than 125,000 acres of wheat would be gathered, and that that quantity will be at least doubled during the present season. Instances are numerous of large profits being made in wheat farming. A Mr. Dalrymple is quoted in the St. Paul Pioneer Press as having had in 1877 8,000 acres under wheat, which yielded him all round 25 bushels to the acre, or over 200,000 bushels. His total outlay for seed, cultivation, harvesting, and threshing was under 21. per acre, leaving him a margin of over 31., or 24,000l. on his 8,000 acres. Last year he had 12,000 acres under cultivation, and all in wheat. This was in Minnesota; but north of the Canadian line they get a much larger yield than this, and in twenty-seven miles along the Assiniboine River in 1877 over 400,000 bushels were harvested that averaged considerably over 30 bushels to the acre. In the North-western provinces of Canada wheat often produces 40 and 50 bushels to the acre, while in South Minnesota 20 bushels is the average crop, in Wisconsin only 14, in Pennsylvania and Ohio 15. The fact established by climatologists that the cultivated plants yield the greatest products near the northernmost limit at which they grow, is fully illustrated in the productions of the Canadian territories; and the returns from Prince Albert and other new settlements on the Saskatchewan show a yield of 40 bushels of spring wheat to the acre, averaging 63 lbs. to the bushel, whilst one exceptional field showed 68 lbs. to the bushel, and another lot of 2,000 bushels weighed 66 lbs., producing respectively 46 and 421⁄2 lbs. of dressed flour to the bushel of wheat. In southern latitudes the warm spring developes the juices of the plants too rapidly. They run into stalk and leaf, to the detriment of the seed. Corn maize, for example, in the West Indies runs often thirty feet high, but it produces only a few grains at the bottom of a spongy cob too coarse for human food.

Whatever be the cause, the ascertained results in this new North-West seem to prove that its soil possesses unusually prolific powers. In 1877 carefully prepared reports were made by thirty-four different settlements, and although lessened in many cases by circumstances local and exceptional-as, for instance, a series of very heavy rain-storms which caught the wheat just as it was ripening the yields per acre were: of wheat, from 25 to 35 bushels, with an average of 32; barley, from 40 to 50, average 42; oats, 40 to 60, average 51; peas averaged 32, potatoes 229, and turnips 662 bushels per acre. Individual cases were enumerated of 100 bushels of oats per acre, barley as high as 60 bushels, and weighing from 50 to 55 lbs. per bushel. Potatoes have yielded as high as 600 bushels to the acre, and of a quality unsurpassed, as are all the root-crops. Turnips have yielded 1,000 bushels to the acre, 700 being common, whilst cabbage, cauliflower, and celery grow to an enormous size and of excellent quality and flavour.

Having now glanced at the immigration that is taking place into this new district as to its extent and character, and got an insight into its agricultural capabilities per acre, let us try to arrive next at an idea of the size of this territory, which but nine years since was the property of 'the Company of Adventurers of England trading into the Hudson's Bay,' and whose charter, granted in 1669 to Prince Rupert and nineteen other gentlemen, made them despotic rulers over half a continent on the easy terms that two elks and two black beavers should be paid to the sovereign whenever he should come into the district. This enormous territory thus easily disposed of, and the value of which for agricultural and mining purposes is unsurpassed, the last and best acqui sition of the Dominion of Canada, comprises, as near as can be calcu lated, 2,984,000 square miles, whilst the whole of the United States south of the international boundary contains 2,933,600 square miles. Including the older portions of Quebec, Ontario, and the maritime provinces, Canada measures 3,346,681 square miles, whilst all Europe contains 3,900,000. Well may the Times, in reviewing Lord Dufferin's speech at Winnepeg (November 28, 1877), say:

We have hitherto had scarcely any notion at all of British America in the full sense of the terraqueous region between the Atlantic, the Pacific, the United States, and the Arctic. In the maps it looks all a mere wilderness of rivers and lakes, in which life would be intolerable, and escape impossible. The succession of enormous distances and strange surprises through which Lord Dufferin takes his hearers read more like a voyage to a newly discovered satellite than one to a region hitherto regarded simply as the fag-end of America and a waste bit of the world."

The late Hon. William Seward, at that time Prime Minister of the United States, thus writes his impressions of Canada:

Hitherto, in common with most of my countrymen, as I suppose, I have thought Canada a mere strip lying north of the United States, easily detached from the parent State, but incapable of sustaining itself, and therefore ultimately, nay right soon, to be taken on by the Federal Union, without materially changing or affecting its own development. I have dropped the opinion as a national conceit. I see in British North America, stretching as it does across the continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific, in its wheat-fields of the West, its invaluable fisheries, and its mineral wealth, à region grand enough for the seat of a great empire.

In the very centre of this great Dominion of Canada, equidistant from the Gulf of Mexico and the Arctic Ocean, and midway in the other direction between the Atlantic and Pacific, lies the low depression of Lake Winnepeg, 300 miles long, 50 to 60 miles wide-the future Black Sea of Canada. Its shape is roughly a parallelogram lying north and south; at three of its four corners it receives the waters of a large river, the main trunk of a hundred smaller ones: at the remaining north-east angle, a fourth and larger river, the Dardanelles of the system, conveys the accumulated waters of nearly a million square miles into Hudson's Bay. This Lake Winnepeg receives the drainage of the future wheatfield of the world. The Red River of the North, with its affluents, the Assiniboine, the Qu'appelle, the Red Lake River, the Souris, and a score of others, discharges its waters into it through the grass-covered deltas at the south-west angle. At the south-east, and only twenty-five miles distant along the shores of the lake, the large impetuous river which gives its name to the freshwater sea into which it rushes pours its wild majestic flood from the Lawrencian highlands which separate the waters of Lake Superior and the affluents of the St. Lawrence from those that seek Lake Winnepeg. In Lord Dufferin's speech at the capital of Manitobah, he describes so felicitously this noble river that any more meagre description than his appears almost presumptuous. After describing the route of the traveller from Lake Superior up the Kamanistaguia, over the height of land, down the beautiful Rainy River into the lovely Lake of the Woods

For the last eighty miles of his voyage (he says) he will be consoled by sailing through a succession of land-locked channels, the beauty of whose scenery, whilst it resembles, certainly excels, the far-famed Thousand Islands of the St. Lawrence. From this lacustrine Paradise of sylvan beauty we are able at once to transfer our friend to the Winnepeg, a river whose existence in the very heart of the continent is in itself one of Nature's most delightful miracles, so beautiful and varied are its rocky banks, its tufted islands; so broad, so deep, so fervid is the volume of its waters, the extent of their lake-like expansions, and the tremendous power of their rapids.

The Winnepeg, in its short but picturesque course of 125 miles from the Lake of the Woods, falls 500 feet, and, though not navigable in consequence for steamers, was for over two centuries the route by which all the trade of the interior continent was conducted by the great fur companies from and to their depôts at Mackinaw and Montreal. The Lake of the Woods itself is a noble expanse of water, and with its 2,000 islands offers some lovely places for settlement. At the outlet to the river an Icelandic colony has been lately formed, and its Indian name Keewatin has been attached now to the whole province, which covers the area between the old province of Ontario and Manitobah, the pioneer of the new Western Provinces. From Keewatin village the Pacific Railway is fast approaching completion to Winnepeg, 113 miles, and a large side-wheel steamer will meet the railway when it strikes the Lake of the Woods, and continue the communication, going east through the lake and Rainy River to Alberton, 120 miles from

Keewatin. Here the government are now constructing a dam and locks, which when complete will extend the navigation 80 miles further, through Rainy Lake to the Sturgeon Falls of its main affluent. Between Alberton and Lake Superior the different navigable reaches and lakes have been supplied with altogether ten small steamers, which, connected by good roads, form what is called the Dawson route from Lake Superior to Lake Winnepeg, by which emigrants from Canada have found their way into the territories of the North-West. This is the body of water that falls into the south-eastern angle of Lake Winnepeg. Passing now to the north-west corner of the same inland reservoir, the mouths of the two rivers being diagonally across the lake, about 275 miles apart, we find another great river, the Danube of North America, stretching its long twofold channel, each 1,000 miles in length, to the foot of the Rocky Mountains of the West. This is the Saskatchewan, whose two arms or branches, rising not very far asunder in the great backbone of the continent, gradually diverge until the distance between them is over 300 miles, and then converging up finally join at a point 773 miles from the source of the north branch and 810 by the south branch, from whence the united stream runs 282 miles to its debouchure into Lake Winnepeg, making the total length from the lake 1,054 miles by one branch and 1,092 by the other, to their sources in the Rocky Mountains. Both these rivers run their whole length through the prairie land of the North-West, and it is from isolated settlements on these rivers, such as Prince Albert and Carlton, that the largest returns of agricultural yields have been received. Both rivers are navigable throughout, excepting the 3 miles near the mouth, where the river passes over rapids and falls of a total height of 44 feet into the lake. Last year the Hudson's Bay Company constructed a tramway four miles long to overcome these obstructions, and they also placed a steamer, the Northcote,' at the head of this tramway, which during the season made five double trips from the Grand Rapids to Carlton, 550 miles, and one trip up to Edmonton, over 1,000 miles from the lake along the north branch. Last season a second steel steamer was placed on the river, and during the year the navigation of both branches was thoroughly tested. The two Saskatchewans drain what is especially known as the 'fertile belt,' containing not less than 90,000,000 acres of as fine wheat land as can be found in any country.

Such are the three main rivers that pour their accumulated waters into Lake Winnepeg, all of them of a size and capacity which in Europe would class them as first-class rivers. Their united length, with their most important affluents, is not less than 10,000 miles, of which certainly 4,000 are available for steam navigation. The outlet of this magnificent and comprehensive water system is the large but little known Nelson, which, issuing from the north-east angle of the lake, discharges its surplus waters into Hudson's Bay. This riverbroad, deep, first-class in every respect-may have probably an important bearing on the future prospects of all this northern section of America. Lake Winnepeg is 700 feet above ocean level; as far