II
What with three transcontinentals, a complete canal system from seaboard to the Great Lakes and an outlet for western traffic through Panama, one would think that Canada had made ample provision for transportation; but she has only begun. If she is to be the shortest route to the Orient, she must keep traffic in Canadian channels and not divide it with Panama and Suez. If she is to feed the British Empire, she must establish the shortest route from her wheat fields to the United Kingdom; and if she is to overcome the disadvantage of harbors open only half the year, she must secure to herself some other advantage—such as access to the harbor having the shortest land haul and therefore the lowest freight rates in America. There is another consideration. If when Canada is raising less than three hundred million bushels of wheat her transcontinentals are glutted with traffic and her harbors gorged, what will happen when her wheat fields raise eight hundred million bushels of wheat? So Canada has cast about for a shorter route to Europe by Hudson Bay, and both parties in Dominion politics have backed the project.
At a time when the food supply of Great Britain must be drawn almost solely from her colonial possessions and the United States and Argentina, when her very national existence depends on the sea lanes to that food supply being kept open—a route which shortens the distance to that food supply by from one thousand five hundred to three thousand miles becomes doubly interesting.
Take a mental look at the contour of North America! All the big export harbors of the Atlantic Coast are situated at the broadest bulge of the continent—Halifax, St. John, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore are all where the distance across the continent from the grain fields is widest. That means a long land haul.
Take another look at the map—this time at a revolving globe! Any schoolboy knows that a circle round a top is shorter at the ends than around its middle. The same of the earth. East and west distances are shorter the nearer you are to the Pole, the farther you are from the Equator.
To England from Eastern Asia by Suez is fourteen to eighteen thousand miles. To England from Asia by San Francisco is eleven thousand miles, by Seattle ten thousand miles, by Prince Rupert and Hudson Bay seven to eight thousand miles—representing a saving by the northern route of almost half round the world.
Another point—take a compass! Stick the needle on Hudson Bay and swing the leg down round New York and up through the wheat plains of the Northwest. Draw lines to the center of your circle—to your amazement, you find the lines from the wheat plains to New York are twice and thrice as long as the lines from the wheat plains to Hudson Bay. In other words, Mr. Hill's wheat empire is one thousand miles nearer tidewater to Hudson Bay than to New York. The three prairie provinces of Northwestern Canada are from four hundred (for Manitoba) to eight hundred miles (for Alberta) distant from ocean front on Hudson Bay. They are from one thousand two hundred to two thousand four hundred miles distant from tidewater at Montreal and New York and Philadelphia.
That is—if land rates were the same as water rates—the Hudson Bay route to Europe would cut rates to England from the Orient by half, and from the wheat plains by the difference between one thousand two hundred miles and four hundred, and two thousand four hundred miles and eight hundred. But land rates are not water rates. From Alberta to the Great Lakes is roughly one thousand two hundred miles. From the Great Lakes to tidewater is roughly another one thousand two hundred miles—either by way of Chicago-Buffalo, or Lake Superior-Montreal. For the one thousand two hundred miles from Alberta to the Great Lakes, grain shippers at time of writing pay a rate of twenty-two to twenty-five cents a bushel. For the one thousand two hundred miles from the head of the Lakes to Buffalo, the rate is three cents, from the head of the Lakes to Montreal five to six cents. In other words, the rate by land is just five to eight times higher than the rate by water.
To the argument—shorter distances by half by the northern route—is added the argument cheaper rates as eight to one.
That is why for twenty years Canada has gone sheer mad over a Hudson Bay route to Europe. For obvious reasons the ports in Eastern Canada have fought the idea and ridiculed the whole project as "an iron tonic from rusting rails" for the cows. That has not stopped the West. Grading is under way for the railroad to Hudson Bay from the grain plains. The Canadian government is the backer and the builder. Construction engines, dredges, steamers now whistle over the silences of the northern inland sea; and Port Nelson, which for three centuries has been the great fur entrepôt of the wintry wastes, now echoes to pick and hammer and blowing locomotive intent on the construction of what is known as the Hudson Bay Railroad. Should the war last for years as wars of old, and Port Nelson become a great grain port as for three centuries it has been the greatest fur port of the world, the navies of Europe may yet thunder at one another along Hudson Bay's shallow shores, as French and English fought there all through the seventeenth century.