“We need co-operation—not between food-raisers at the food-eaters’ expense, but co-operation in each class, leading to complete co-operation between both classes. If that is a dream, it is one that must come true when we all awake to the need of working together for the good of the whole community.”
Off again. Do you see what that boy is digging, down there? Sweet potatoes. They are called “semi-tropical.” As a fact, we have a semi-tropical climate; not for long at a time, but long enough for corn and tomatoes and tobacco, through a big stretch of the prairie—to say nothing of the coast. We have discovered that sunflower makes about as good fodder as corn, and grows a tremendous weight of crop. But the corn line, like the wheat line, is pushing farther and farther north. For this, and for a hundred other most practical benefits, we have to thank the quiet, ceaseless work of the experimental farms, started long ago by the Dominion Government—work now carried on by the Provincial Governments too, at their universities. We don’t all make the use of these that we might, we are so busy. Fortunately they come to us, if we don’t go to them, sending out “extension lectures,” and manning the “Better Farming Trains” which the railways lend.
Every Western Province has its own full-fledged university, a centre of light and leading, besides its normal schools for training teachers. Just over yonder, at Saskatoon, is the University of Saskatchewan.
Eastward again we fly, and look down on Manitoba—no longer a “postage stamp province,” for it has been growing in size, as well as in every other way. One extension followed another till in 1912 Manitoba pushed up to Hudson Bay, and the Province covers 232,000 square miles. Saskatchewan has 243,000 square miles, Alberta 253,000, and British Columbia 353,000.
Big figures these. The West is a big place, as I have observed. That is nothing to brag about. Its bigness should inspire us with a humble determination to do big things with it, and for it, each in our own little corner of it, looking beyond our own little corner, too; for if we have a broad country we are bound to take broad views.
A big country indeed, endowed with land and railways and roads and schools and all the machinery of Government for countless millions of citizens. We hold the West in trust, a sacred trust, not for ourselves and our children alone, but for the millions who might be here to use it with us. We shall gain, as well as they, by their coming; though even if we had nothing to gain, we cannot escape the responsibility of holding a realm so much vaster than we can use.