e maritime provinces--Nova Scotia,
Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick--in area within sixty-seven square
miles of the same size as England, and in climate not unlike the home
land.[6] Your impression of their inhabitants is of a quiescent,
romantic, pastoral and sea-faring people--sprung from the same stock as
the liberty-seekers of New England, untouched by the mad unrest of
modern days, conservative as bed-rock, but with an eye to the frugal
main chance and a way of making good quietly. They do not talk about
the simple life in the maritime provinces because they have always
lived it, and the land is famed for its diet of codfish, and its men of
brains. Frugal, simple, reposeful living--the kind of living that
takes time to think--has sent out from the maritime provinces more
leaders of thought than any other area of Canada. It is a land that
leaves a dreamy memory with you of sunset lying gold on the Bras d' Or
Lakes, of cattle belly-deep in pasture, of apple farms where fragrance
of fruit and blossoms seem to scent the very atmosphere, of fishermen
rocking in their smacks, of great ships plowing up and down to sea.
You know there are great coal mines to the east and great timber limits
to the north; you may even smell the imprisoned fragrance of the
yellowing lumber being loaded for export, but it is as the land of
winter ports and of seamen for the navy that you will remember the
maritime provinces as factors in Canada's destiny.

When gold was discovered in the Yukon and a hundred million dollars in
gold came out in ten years, the world went mad. Yet Canada yearly
mines from the silver quarries of the sea a harvest of thirty-four
million dollars, and of that amount, fifteen million dollars comes from
the maritime provinces.[7] Conservationists have sung their song in
vain if the world does not know that the fisheries of the United States
have been ruthlessly depleted, but here is a land the area of England
whose fisheries have increased in value one hundred per cent. in ten
years. It is not, however, as the great resource of fisheries that the
maritime provinces must play their part in Canada's destiny. It is as
the nursery of seamen for a marine power. No southern nation, with the
exception of Carthage, has ever dominated the sea; partly for the
simple reason that the best fisheries are always located in temperate
zones, where the glacial silt of the icebergs feeds the finny hordes
with minute infusoria