All the new towns have their own wants to consider, and the first of these is a railway.  If the town is on a line already, then a new line to tap the back country; but at all costs a line.  For this it will sell its corrupted soul, and then be very indignant because the railway before which it has grovelled rides rough-shod over the place.

Each new town believes itself to be a possible Winnipeg until the glamour of the thing is a little worn off, and the local paper, sliding down the pole of Pride with the hind legs of despair, says defiantly:  ’At least, a veterinary surgeon and a drug store would meet with encouragement in our midst, and it is a fact that five new buildings have been erected in our midst since the spring.’  From a distance nothing is easier than to smile at this sort of thing, but he must have a cool head who can keep his pulse level when just such a wildcat town—­ten houses, two churches, and a line of rails—­gets ‘on the boom,’ The reader at home says, ‘Yes, but it’s all a lie.’  It may be, but—­did men lie about Denver, Leadville, Ballarat, Broken Hill, Portland, or Winnipeg twenty years ago—­or Adelaide when town lots went begging within the memory of middle-aged men?  Did they lie about Vancouver six years since, or Creede not twenty months gone?  Hardly; and it is just this knowledge that leads the passer-by to give ear to the wildest statements of the wildest towns.  Anything is possible, especially among the Rockies where the minerals lie over and above the mining towns, the centres of ranching country, and the supply towns to the farming districts.  There are literally scores upon scores of lakelets in the hills, buried in woods now, that before twenty years are run will be crowded summer resorts.  You in England have no idea of what ‘summering’ means in the States, and less of the amount of money that is spent on the yearly holiday.  People have no more than just begun to discover the place called the Banff Hot Springs, two days west of Winnipeg.[1] In a little time they will know half-a-dozen spots not a day’s ride from Montreal, and it is along that line that money will be made.  In those days, too, wheat will be grown for the English market four hundred miles north of the present fields on the west side; and British Columbia, perhaps the loveliest land in the world next to New Zealand, will have her own line of six thousand ton steamers to Australia, and the British investor will no longer throw away his money on hellicat South American republics, or give it as a hostage to the States.  He will keep it in the family as a wise man should.  Then the towns that are to-day the only names in the wilderness, yes, and some of those places marked on the map as Hudson Bay Ports, will be cities, because—­but it is hopeless to make people understand that actually and indeed, we do possess an Empire of which Canada is only one portion—­an Empire which is not bounded by election-returns on the North and Eastbourne riots on the South—­an Empire that has not yet been scratched.