n imposed by nature and geography and not by
her sister provinces.

It was not only in Manitoba that economic depression prevailed, though
nowhere else were the grievances so concrete and so irritating.
Throughout the Dominion the brief gleam of prosperity which dawned with
the eighties had vanished. After the completion of the Canadian
Pacific Railway stagnation was everywhere the rule. Foreign trade,
which had reached a total of $217,000,000 in 1873, was only
$230,000,000 in 1883 and $247,000,000 in 1893; these were, however,
years of falling prices. Bank discounts, the {99} number of tons of
freight moved, and other records of general business activity showed
creeping progress and sometimes actual falling back. Homestead entries
had risen to nearly seventy-five hundred in 1882, when the construction
of the Canadian Pacific was bringing on the first western boom, but a
great part of these had been cancelled, and up to the middle nineties
entries averaged fewer than three thousand a year in the whole vast
West.

The movement of population bore the same melancholy witness. Even the
West, Manitoba and the North-West Territories, grew only from 180,000
in 1881 in 250,000 in 1891, whereas Dakota alone grew from 135,000 to
510,000 in the same period. The Dominion as a whole increased at less
than half the rate of the United States, and Sir Richard Cartwright had
little difficulty in establishing the alarming fact that in recent
years one out of every four of the native-born of Canada had been
compelled to seek a home in the Republic, and that three out of every
four immigrants to Canada had followed the same well-beaten trail.
There were in 1890 more than one-third as many people of Canadian birth
and descent in the United States as in Canada itself. Never in the
world's history, save in {100} the case of crowded, famine-stricken,
misgoverned Ireland, had there been such a leakage of the brain and
brawn of any country.

Perhaps no incident reveals more clearly the stagnation and lack of
constructive courage of this period than the break-down of the
negotiations carried on in 1895 for the entrance of Newfoundland, then
still more nearly bankrupt, into Confederation, because of the
unwillingness of the Canadian Government to meet the financial terms
Newfoundland demanded. For the sake of a difference of fifty thousand
dollars a year the chance to round out the Dominion was let slip,
perhaps never to recur. Ten ye