reciate. For instance, there is the question of
grade over the mountains. The Canadian Pacific Railroad meets this
difficulty with its long tunnel through Mount Stephen. The Grand Trunk
declares that it has the lowest mountain grade of all the
transcontinentals. The Great Northern uses electric power for its
tunnels, and Los Angeles will tell you how its new diagonal San Pedro
road up through Nevada puts it in touch with the inland empire of the
mountain states by running up parallel with the mountains and not
crossing a divide at all.

IV

Take a look at the subject from another angle! At the present rate of
homesteading in the West, within twenty years the three prairie
provinces will be producing seven to nine hundred million bushels of
wheat a year. Possibly they will not do so well as that, but suppose
they do; the three grain provinces of Canada will be producing as much
as the wheat produced in all the United States. Now, the United States
to take care of its crop has practically seven transcontinentals and a
host of allied trunk lines like the Illinois Central, the New York
Central and the Pennsylvania; but when a big crop comes, the United
States roads are paralyzed from a shortage of cars. Canada has only
three big transcontinentals and no big trunk lines to take care of a
crop that may be as large as the whole United States crop. Panama
promises, not a menace, but the one possible avenue of relief to the
railroads.

Of course eastern cities may fight a diversion of traffic to the
seaboard of the West, but they can not stop it. Portland is already
one of the big grain shippers and will bid for a share of Canada's
west-bound grain, if Vancouver and Prince Rupert do not prepare for the
new conditions.

Not only terminals but elevators must be prepared on the Pacific.
Terminals mean more than railroad company tracks. They mean city-owned
trackage, so that the tramp steamer seeking cargo at cheap rates shall
have every inducement and facility for getting cargo. They mean free
sites for manufacturers, not sky-rocket boom prices that keep new
industries out of a city. Elevators and terminals have been announced
time and again for Vancouver, but up to the present the announcements
have not materialized. Regular grain steamers must be put on, steamers
good for cargo of three hundred thousand and four hundred thousand
bushels, as on the lakes, and with devices for such swift handling as
have made