The Art Loan Exhibit, selected by a resident agent in England, affords Canadians an opportunity to see examples of the great European Masters. Prominence is given to work done in the public schools of Canada, the co-operation of manual training colleges of the United States giving an international interest to this department. New inventions are another strong feature of the Exhibition. The first electric railway to be seen on the Continent was operated there, and that may also be said of the important developments in telegraphy, telephony, and other branches of applied science that recent years have witnessed. Nor does the energetic Board fail to provide high quality in music, military tournaments, and such frivolities as fireworks and variety-concert performances.
I cannot forbear in conclusion to quote the words used by the public-spirited directors to describe their achievement. “The Canadian National Exhibition,” they say, “is the one place to see Canada at a glance. It shows all that Canada makes, mines, and grows. It gathers the products of her homes, her farms, her forests, her waters, her mines and her industries, within the limits of the finest Exhibition Park on the North American Continent. It is recognised from coast to coast, and from the frozen north to the Gulf of Mexico, as the greatest of all annual Exhibitions, distinctly Canadian in its characteristics, and educational in its tendencies, and yet including so many high-class amusements and attractions as to make it the annual holiday centre for three-quarters of a million people drawn from all parts of North America. And the number is increasing every year.”
Bravo, Toronto!
CHAPTER VII
MANITOBA: CLUES TO PRAIRIE FARMING
Standing on high ground in Manitoba—and also, for the matter of that, in Saskatchewan and Alberta—you may gaze upon a vast encircling panorama of grey grass and gentle undulations, visible in the dry atmosphere and bright sunshine to a remote purple distance. That is one sort of prairie, the open sort, so suggestive of the sea. Also there is bush prairie, with trees and heavy undergrowth. A third kind is scrub—the resurrected bush after forest fires have swept it.
But, whether you be on moor or woodland, you will see flowers and birds and bees. For Canada is a land of sunshine, blue sky, and beautiful perfumed blossoms.
Only by hearsay do I know of the North-West when the ground is jewelled with violets, blue anemones, ladies’ slipper, and the bird’s-eye primrose. I know it well, and like it best, in the season of the prairie rose—surely the fairest flower anywhere to be found on the world’s circumference. It is petalled like our own wild rose, but of a sweet fragrance; the plant dwarfed and dainty, and nestling against the earth, with its upturned blossoms ruddy and conspicuous or of palest pink. I’m sure the fairies pluck buds of the prairie rose when they go to gather their posies. Indeed, I am sorry that the maple leaf—eloquently though it advertises the flaming glories of the autumn foliage—should have been chosen for the national emblem. Canada will always be to me the Land of the Prairie Rose.
The queen reigns not in lonely majesty. Prominent in her court is a royal relative (the three-flowered geum), an orange-red lily (Philadelphicum), a scarlet columbine that dances in the breeze, and the evening primrose, with fringed gentian and a campanula among the purples, not to forget the wild bergamot and flax and a mauve convolvulus. In autumn, Manitoba and her sister provinces are aglow with nodding sunflowers, gaillardias, golden rod, Michaelmas daisies, and three kinds of rudbeckia. Thus the wild nosegay of Canada has much in common with the garden bouquet of old England.
Manitoba is the smallest and (because it contains Winnipeg) the greatest of the prairie provinces. “It looks like a postage stamp on the map,” I happened to remark to its Prime Minister. “Well, sir,” replied the Hon. R. P. Roblin, with twinkling eyes, “there are half a million people on your postage stamp, and that is but a fraction of the population it is able and destined to maintain. You might report to the English and Scotch farmers that we have over twenty million acres of good agricultural land waiting for them here.”
It is, of course, the curious fact that, even in the smallest and most settled of the prairie provinces, oceans of superb land are still going a-begging. The area each year surveyed, and thereby rendered available for occupation, is as large as the area annually appropriated by the arriving stream of settlers. That stream is steadily increasing in volume, and to-day thousands of English and Scotch tenant-farmers, and tens of thousands of their agricultural labourers, are cogitating the question: “Shall we go to Canada?” Some persons counsel that course. Others attempt to dissuade them. But what those hesitating farmers and labourers are conscious of needing is, not advice, but information—and information in the form of definite facts rather than of general statements.