e of
four hundred thousand homeseekers a year? What has doubled population
and almost doubled foreign trade?

It is almost a truism that the farther north the land, the greater the
fertility, if there be any fertility at all. There is first the supply
of unfailing moisture, with a yearly subsoiling of humus unknown to
arid lands. Canada is super-sensitive about her winter climate--the
depth and intensity of the frost, the length and rigor of her winters;
but she need not be. It should be cause of gratitude. Frost
penetrating the ground from five to twelve feet--as it does in the
Northwest--guarantees a subterranean root irrigation that never fails.
Heavy snow--let us acknowledge frankly snow sometimes banks western
streets the height of a man--means a heavy supply of moisture both in
thaw and rain. There is second the long sunlight. An earth tilted on
its axis toward the sun six months of the year gives the North a
sunlight that is longer the farther north you go. When the sun sets at
seven to eight in New York, it sets at eight to nine in Winnipeg, and
nine to ten in Athabasca, and only for a few hours at all still farther
north. It is the long sunlight that gives the fruit of Niagara and
Quebec and Annapolis its "fameuse" quality; just as it is the sunlight
that gives western fruit its finest coloring, the higher up the plateau
it is grown. It is the long sunlight that gives Number One Hard Wheat
its white fine quality so indispensable to the millers. So of barley
and vegetables and small fruits and all that can be grown in the short
season of the North. What the season lacks in length it gains in
intensity of sunlight. Four months of twenty-hour sunlight produce
better growth in some products than eight months of shorter sunlight.

These two advantages of moisture and sunlight, Canada possesses.[5]
What else has she? It doesn't mean much to say that Canada equals
Europe in area and that you could spread Germany and France and Austria
and Great Britain over the Dominion's map and still have an area
uncovered equal to European Russia. Nor does it mean much more to say
that in Canada you can find the climate of a Switzerland in the
Canadian Rockies, of Italy in British Columbia, of England in the
maritime provinces and of Russia in the Northwest. Areas are so great
and diverse that you have to examine them in groups to realize what
basis of fact Canada builds from.

Girt almost round by the sea are th