At the moment the prize is with Canada. It has a lock nine hundred feet long, and can do the business of lowering a great vessel from Superior to Huron with one action, where America uses four locks. The Americans have a larger lock than the Canadian, but the Canadians are quicker.
And this means something. The traffic on these lakes is greater than the traffic on many seas. Down this vast water highway come the narrow pencils of lake-boats carrying grain and ore and lumber in hulls that are all hold. They come and go incessantly. "Soo," indeed, handles about three times the tonnage of Suez yearly, and there is the American side to add to that.
With this brisk movement of commercial life within her, "Soo" has thrived like a cold. Where, in the old days, the local inhabitants could be reckoned on the fingers of two hands, there is now a city of about twenty thousand, and it is still growing. It is a city of graceful streets and neat houses climbing over the Laurentine Hills that make the site. It is breezy and self-assured, and draws its comfortable affluence from its shipping, its paper-mills, its steel works, as well as from lumber, agriculture and other industries.
It met the Prince as becomes a youth of promise. Crowds massed on the lawns before the red sandstone station, and in all the streets there were crowds. And crowds followed his every movement, however swift it was, for "Soo" has the automobile fever as badly as any other town in Canada, and car owners packed their families, even to the youngest in arms, into tonneaux and joined a procession a mile long, that followed the Prince about the town.
It is true that some of the crowd was America out to look at Royalty. Americans were not slow to make the most of the fact that they were to have a Prince across the river. From early morning the ferry that runs from Michigan to the British Empire was packed with Republican autos and Republicans on foot, all eager to be there when Royalty arrived. They gathered in the streets and joined in the procession. They gave the Prince the hearty greeting of good-fellows. They were as good friends of his as anybody there. They did, in fact, give us a foretaste of what we were to expect when the Prince went to the United States.
There were the usual functions. They took place high on a hill, from which the Prince could look down upon the blue waters of the linked lakes, the many factory chimneys, the smoke of which threw a quickening sense of human endeavour athwart the scene, and the great jack-knife girder bridge, that is the railway connection between Canada and America, but above the usual functions the visit to "Soo" had items that made it particularly interesting.
He went to the great lock that carries the interlake traffic. He crossed from one side of it to the other, and then stood out on the lock gate, while it was opened to allow the passage of several small vessels. From here he went to the Algoma Railway, at the head of the canal, and in a special car was taken to the rapids that tumble down in foam between the two countries.
The train was brought to a standstill at the international boundary, where two sentries, Canadian and American, face each other, and where there was another big crowd, this time all American, to give him a cheer.
He then spent some time visiting the paper mill that helps to make "Soo" rich. He went over it department by department, asking many questions and showing that the processes fascinated him intensely. In the same way he went through the steel works, and was again intrigued by the sight of "things doing." It was, as he said himself, one of the most interesting days he had spent in the Dominion.