There was only one thing uniting these three regions—a sentiment. They all knew and felt that they were members of one great brotherhood, the royal republic known as the British Empire. The British Columbians could have “paddled their own canoe” and remained separate from the Canadians if they had wanted; but they did not want. Their legislature unanimously and wisely voted in favor of federating with the newly formed Dominion of Canada in 1871—on condition that within ten years a railway should be built connecting that far western province with the railway system of Eastern Canada.
The colony on the Pacific, with a small population, hemmed in both north and south, would have found it hard to maintain an independent existence if she had not joined forces with her fellow-countrymen in the East.
British Columbia, too, was the only possible gateway of Canada to the West. Without a transcontinental railway, the rest of our country would have been cut off from its natural and necessary outlet to the trade of the Pacific, a trade already large and destined to become enormous.
Just as urgent was the need of this railway to open up the land between the Rockies and the Lakes for the millions of British folk and others who desired new homes under the British flag, which stood then, as it stands to-day, for the union of steadfast liberty with steadfast law.
The United States, face to face with the same problem, [a]Saving the West] had just solved it by completing in 1869 a transcontinental railway system which linked California with New York and at the same time opened up the western plains of that country to the home-maker. That was not only an example but a warning.
The United States, of course, had plenty of land, enormous territories of its own to fill up; but the evil habit of coveting a neighbor’s possessions is found among those who have plenty as well as among those who have little. South of the line were many who looked with covetous eyes on the fertile land in the north. Their plan to “jump the claim” to this land might have become a serious danger if no one had been living here except fur traders and Indians.
What staved off the danger, to begin with, was the settlement of the Red River district, by the energy and self-sacrifice of Lord Selkirk. The settlers were only a handful; but they “held the fort” and set an example, and after a while others began to dribble in, as you have heard already. The situation would again have become serious, however, when the Union Pacific Railway brought settlers and adventurers crowding into the Western States, if an easy way had not been provided for our own people to settle our own western territory from Eastern Canada and from overseas.
If the prairie had passed into the control of an alien power, the Canadian people, and the people coming from overseas to join them, would for ever have been prevented from expanding westward, just as the American colonists themselves a hundred years before had found their westward expansion blocked by the French occupation of the Mississippi valley—only on that occasion, as we have seen, the Americans were able to break down [a]Government Railway Scheme Abandoned] the obstacle by the British mother-country coming to their rescue.
The very existence of Canada, then, as a complete Dominion worthy of the two great enterprising races which had laid its foundations, and worthy of the civilizing British brotherhood in which it had achieved self-governing membership, depended on the prompt connection of all its parts by a national railway line.
The puzzle was, how to do it? The line would have to be built through an almost uninhabited wilderness, and the cost of construction was bound to be enormous.