“Birmingham,” I pointed out, “is a manufacturing centre.”
“Exactly,” said my companion; and he went on to tell me of Hamilton’s four hundred large factories, which annually produce I don’t know how many million dollars’ worth of cotton goods, farm implements, boots, furniture, and goodness knows what.
Still was I mystified when dinner-bells rang in the part of the city whither we had wandered, and from out great buildings there poured swarms of high-spirited toilers, who mounted their thousands of bicycles and swept hungrily over the hill.
I began to understand. The machinery in those factories was worked by the water plunging down the Niagara escarpment, over forty miles away. This was a sunny, white-coal Birmingham. I prefer it to the smoky, black-coal Birmingham.
When I first crossed the Atlantic, some nine years ago, the Americans were deriving light and power from Niagara, but the Canadians had merely begun preparations to that end, preparations which, by the way, provided a touch of romance. For a temporary breakwater had been constructed some distance above the Falls, thus laying bare a strip of the river bed, and on that area of polished rock, which during countless ages had been swept by a terrific force, little toddling children were engaged in innocent frolics.
Driving last year amid smiling homesteads, I saw the great steel cable which, suspended from a succession of lofty metal towers, transmits the power of the falls to municipalities of Western Ontario, a share even going to Toronto, which is more than eighty miles from the famous cataract.
The palatial power-houses, the illuminated cities, the smokeless factories, the superb systems of electric tramways—all combine to make a strong appeal to the imagination. Yet Niagara, with its yield of 400,000 horse-power, is but a sample of the Dominion’s unnumbered sources of force. Note this portentous fact—Canada’s supply of white-coal, which is fifty per cent. cheaper than black coal, greatly exceeds that of any other country. In Ontario, prospectors have surveyed readily-available sources to the extent of 3,500,000 horse-power. Some idea of British Columbia’s wealth of waterfalls is conveyed to everyone who travels through that glorious region. Quebec measures its available horse-power by tens of millions.
“When all the coal on the earth shall have been consumed by our machines,” said M. Fabrèques, an eminent French engineer, “Canada will be mistress of the world.” At the time those words were written, water-power and fire-power stood, or were supposed to stand, on an economic equality. The superiority of white-coal has since been demonstrated.
Thus to the future expansion of Canada’s manufactures, who so rash as to prophesy a limit?