III
The Hudson Bay railroad hung in mid-air for almost a quarter century. It was regarded by the East as one of the West's mad impossible "boom" projects. Hadn't Canada, a country of seven million population, a railroad system of 29,000 miles? Hadn't the Dominion spent $138,000,000 on canals heading traffic to the St. Lawrence? Why divert half that traffic north to Hudson Bay? Surely three great transcontinental systems for a country with a population not larger than New York State were enough. So argued the East, and a great many conservative people in the West. Better make haste slowly, especially as it was becoming more and more evident that Canada would have to come to the aid of two of the transcontinentals or see them go bankrupt.
Then something happened. In fact, two or three things happened.
The population, which had remained almost stationary for half a century, jumped two million in less than ten years. Immigrants began pouring in at the rate of four hundred thousand a year—they were coming literally faster than the railroads could carry them.
It sometimes takes an outsider's view of us to make us realize ourselves. Do you realize—they asked—that your three grain provinces alone are three times the area of the German Empire? Here is a grain field as long as from Petrograd to Paris and of unknown width north and south. You have 480,000,000 acres of wheat lands. (The United States plants only 50,000,000 acres a year to wheat.) You are cultivating only 16,000,000 acres. If there is a grain blockade now, what will there be when you cultivate 100,000,000 acres? Yes—we know—you may send Alberta grain west by Panama to Liverpool; but even with half going by Panama, can the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence route take care of the rest? We hear about a constant shortage of cars; of elevators bulging with grain every September; of miles of lake cargo carriers waiting to get in and out of their berths every October before navigation closes. Do you know—they asked—that you have five times more traffic—seventy-two million tons—going through your canals than is expected for Panama? Do you know your rail traffic has jumped from 36,000,000 tons in 1900 to 90,000,000 tons in 1912? If you sent 200,000,000 bushels of wheat abroad in 1912 and 158,000,000 bushels in 1914—a poor year—what will you send in 1920 with twice as much land under wheat?
Two other comparatively unpondered facts were the hammers that drove the argument for a Hudson Bay route home and forced the Canadian government, irrespective of party, to back the project. The two facts were these—of Canada's agricultural exports eighty per cent. went to Great Britain. In spite of Canada spending a billion on her transportation system, look at the fact well—it is a poser—only from thirty-two to forty per cent. of her export trade went out by Canadian routing. Why was that? The Department of Railroads and Canals in its annual report explains elaborately that sixty per cent. of Western Canadian grain went out by the Duluth-Buffalo route instead of Ft. William-Montreal because the lake rate of the former was cheaper as three to six cents a bushel; but there is nothing in this argument because Montreal is tidewater. Buffalo is not. To the cheaper Buffalo rate you must add five cents to New York, proving the American routing really two cents a bushel higher. Yet sixty per cent. of Western Canadian wheat went out by the costlier routing. Why? For the same reason that if you jam a bag too full it bursts. Because the Canadian trans-continentals simply could not take care of the traffic blockading tracks and ports and elevators.
So in spite of the funny man's jokes about a Hudson Bay route being "iron tonic for the cows," Canada launched on another all-red, to-the-sea railroad project.