kened to find themselves a nation. They suddenly realized
that history, and big history, too, was in the making. Instead of
Canada being dependent on the Empire, the Empire's most far-seeing
statesmen were looking to Canada for the strength of the British
Empire. No longer is there a desire among Canadians for place in the
Parliament at Westminster. With a new empire of their own to develop,
equal in size to the whole of Europe, Canadian public men realize they
have enough to do without taking a hand in European affairs.

As the different Canadian provinces came into Confederation they were
like beads on a string a thousand miles apart. First were the Maritime
Provinces, with western bounds touching the eastern bounds of Quebec,
but in reality with the settlements of New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia,
and Prince Edward Island separated from the settlements of Quebec by a
thousand miles of untracked forest. Only the Ottawa River separated
Quebec from Ontario, but one province was French, the other English,
aliens to each other in religion, language, and customs. A thousand
miles of rock-bound, winter-bound wastes lay between Ontario and the
scattered settlement of Red River in Manitoba. Not an interest was in
common between the little province of the middle west and her sisters
to the east. Then prairie land came for a thousand miles, and
mountains for six hundred miles, before reaching the Pacific province
of British Columbia, more completely cut off from other parts of Canada
than from Mexico or Panama. In fact, it would have been easier for
British Columbia to trade with Mexico and Panama than with the rest of
Canada.

{vii} To bind these far-separated patches of settlement, oases in a
desert of wilds, into a nation was the object of the union known as
Confederation. But a nation can live only as it trades what it draws
from the soil. Naturally, the isolated provinces looked for trade to
the United States, just across an invisible boundary. It seemed absurd
that the Canadian provinces should try to trade with each other, a
thousand miles apart, rather than with the United States, a stone's
throw from the door of each province. But the United States erected a
tariff wall that Canada could not climb. The struggling Dominion was
thrown solely on herself, and set about the giant task of linking the
provinces together, building railroads from Atlantic to Pacific, canals
from tide water to the Great Lakes. In