Note 20 — Chapter XV · THE PROVINCES OF THE NORTH-WEST.

“It was here that Canada, emerging from her woods and forests, first gazed upon her rolling prairies and unexplored North-West, and learned, as by an unexpected revelation, that her historical territories of the Canadas—her eastern sea-boards of New Brunswick, Labrador, and Nova Scotia; her Lawrentian lakes and valleys, corn-lands and pastures—though themselves more extensive than half-a-dozen European kingdoms, were but the vestibules and ante-chambers to that till then undreamt-of Dominion, whose illimitable dimensions alike confound the arithmetic of the surveyor and the verification of the explorer. It was hence that, counting her past achievements as but the preface and prelude to her future exertions and expanding destinies, she took a fresh departure, received the afflatus of a more imperial inspiration, and felt herself no longer a mere settler along the banks of a single river, but the owner of half a continent; and, in the magnitude of her possession, in the wealth of her resources, in the sinews of her material might, the peer of any power on the earth.”—Lord Dufferin, Governor-General of Canada. Speech in the City Hall, Winnipeg, September 1877.