The quotation from "The Song of the
Banjo," on p. 43, is made by kind
permission of Mr. Rudyard Kipling and his
publishers, Messrs. Methuen and Co.
CANADA
CHAPTER I
THE GREAT DOMINION
If you look at a map of North America, you will see that the whole northern half of it is one vast extent, coloured perhaps in red, and stretching north from the boundary of the United States to the Arctic Ocean; you will see that it is deeply indented by the great Hudson Bay on the north, and the Gulf of St. Lawrence on the east; that it has an outline projecting into many bold headlands, and a coast washed by three oceans, fringed with countless islands, great and small.
This is Canada, a land that comprises fully one-third of the 12,000,000 square miles of the British Empire, thirty times as large as England, Ireland, and Scotland combined—not much less in area, in fact, than the whole of Europe. You may realize its breadth by thinking that if you were to get on a train at Halifax on the east, on Monday morning, and travel by the Imperial limited—a very fast train—day and night without stopping, you would not reach Vancouver on the west coast till Saturday morning. In the course of this long journey you would pass through eight large provinces—Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Quebec, Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and British Columbia—and you would still miss the island province, Prince Edward, and the great northern territories. Here is a heritage of the Anglo-Saxon race, a new nation indeed, part of the greatest Empire in the world, being fashioned and built up with marvellous rapidity.