As a rule, the English know little more of Canada than that it belongs to us—that it is very cold there in winter and very hot in summer. I happened to be on board the _Worcester_ training-ship on the last occasion of the prizes being given away, and was not surprised to find that Canada was especially referred to as illustrating the defective geographical knowledge of the young cadets. In the _London Citizen_ a few weeks later there was still grosser display of ignorance on the part of a writer who had gone to Montreal to attend the meetings of the British Association there, and who complained bitterly of the lack of garden-parties and champagne lunches. This victim of misplaced confidence owned that he had to put up with tea and coffee and non-intoxicating beverages when he did so far condescend as to accept Canadian hospitality. Yet the writer of that letter was a barrister, at this very time a candidate for Parliament. Had he an atom of common-sense, he might have known—this distinguished barrister and ornament of the British Association for the Advancement of Science—that Canada is a young country; that its wealth is still undeveloped; that the greater part of it is prairie; that the settler—in his heroic efforts to subdue Nature, to make the wilderness to rejoice and blossom as the rose, to build up a grand nation in that quarter of the globe, to spread in a region larger than the United States the Anglo-Saxon laws and civilization and tongue—has to renounce luxury, to scorn delights, to live laborious days. Canada is not the place for members of the British Association who long for the flesh-pots of Egypt or the champagne-cup. In Canada one has to live simply and to work hard. He who does so work, though in England he may die a pauper, there becomes a man. Canada offers to all independence, a fertile soil, a bracing air. At present there is little chance of the majority of its people being enervated by luxury or demoralized by wealth.
Canada is a country, however, with room and scope for millions who must starve and die in Europe. Its area is 3,470,392 square miles, and its most southern point reaches the 42nd parallel of latitude. It possesses thousands of square miles of the finest forests on the continent, widely spread coal fields, extensive and productive fisheries, and rivers and lakes of unequalled extent. The country is divided into eight provinces, as follows: Nova Scotia, containing 20,907 square miles; New Brunswick, 27,174; Prince Edward Island, 2,133; Quebec, 188,688; Ontario, 101,733; Manitoba, 123,200; the North West, 2,665,252; British Columbia, 341,305. Newfoundland lies outside the Dominion, for reasons best known to itself.