COLONIES IN AMERICA
We have next to deal with the British colonial possessions in America, including the great Dominion of Canada and Newfoundland, and the minor holdings of British Guiana, British Honduras, and the several islands of Jamaica, Trinidad, Barbadoes, the Bahamas and the Bermudas. Of these Canada is the only one that calls for notice here.
Occupying the northern section of the western hemisphere lies Great Britain’s most extended colony, the vast Dominion of Canada, which covers an immense area of the earth’s surface, surpassing that of the United States, and nearly equal to the whole of Europe. Its population, however, is not in accordance with its dimensions, though of late it is growing rapidly, being now over 7,000,000. The bleak and inhospitable character of the far northern section of its area is likely to debar that region from ever having any other than a scanty nomad population, fur animals being its principal useful product. It is, however, always unsafe to predict. The recent discovery of gold in an arctic country traversed by the Klondike river, brought miners by the thousands to that wintry realm, and it would be very unwise to declare that the remainder of the great northern region contains no treasures for the craving hands of man. So far as the fertile regions of Manitoba, Alberta and Saskatchewan are concerned, the recent demonstration of their great availability as wheat-producing territory has added immensely to our conception of the national wealth of Canada, which promises to become one of the great wheat-growing regions of the earth.
First settled by the French in the seventeenth century, this country came under British control in 1763, as a result of the great struggle between the two active colonizing powers for dominion in America. The outcome of this conquest is the fact that Canada, like the other colonies of Great Britain, possesses a large alien population, in this case of French origin.