Thus was forged another link which bound the colonies to the Empire, for at last the people felt that the Mother-land could no longer be blamed for any blunders and wrong-doing in the administration of the governments on this side of the ocean; and the electors knew that if the government was not so good as it might be, it was at least as good as those who put it into power deserved to have. The system had also, like its British model, a flexibility and a capacity for readjustment to new situations or more advanced views, which made it peculiarly suited to a land where conditions are constantly changing.
The government has remained to this day essentially British in its underlying principle of the ultimate responsibility of the cabinet to the electors, though in some respects, since the confederation of the provinces, it has had in outward appearance a considerable resemblance to the government of the United States.
BREAKING THE PRAIRIE BY TRACTOR
AT VEGREVILLE, ALBERTA.
II
THE DOMINION OF CANADA
HISTORICALLY, the Dominion of Canada was evolved from the separate provinces; but it will be more convenient here to consider it as a whole before giving some account of each of the nine provinces separately. In this chapter, and generally throughout the book, when I speak of Canada, I mean the Dominion of Canada, though the name was first applied to the French province on the St. Lawrence, which was sometimes also called New France. Afterwards, for three-quarters of a century, from 1791 to 1867, the province now known as Quebec was called Lower Canada, or Canada East; and that now known as Ontario, Upper Canada, or Canada West.
The immense area of Canada is one of its most striking features. Its size is one of the reasons that it is a land of great opportunity; it is also the root of many of the most difficult problems of its government and development. In area it is over 3½ million square miles; that is to say, it is a little larger than the United States, or than Europe would be without France. It stretches from the Atlantic Ocean on the east to the Pacific on the west, and from the United States boundary on the south to the Arctic Ocean on the north. The distance from Halifax in Nova Scotia to Vancouver in British Columbia is about 3,660 miles, whilst that from Halifax to Liverpool is only about 2,820; and the traveller, wishing to go from Victoria in Vancouver Island to Dawson in the Yukon District, has to make a journey by land and water of over 1,500 miles.
It is just as well for the intending immigrant to try to realize that Canada is a land of “magnificent distances”; otherwise, on his outward journey, perhaps to some point in the far west, it may seem that the distance he is putting between himself and his old home is interminable. With modern conveniences of travel, however, the immigrant of to-day can come from England and cross Canada to Vancouver in a shorter time than it took the Loyalists to go from New York to Toronto.