And his working partner?  Donald D. Mann is a man of deeds rather than words.  James J. Hill has declared Mr. Mann to be the greatest railway builder in the world.  Mr. Mann was born in Ontario not far from the sleepy town of Acton and just six miles east of Rockwood, the birthplace of James J. Hill.  These two boys learned to swim in the same swimming-hole.  One wonders from what roadside spring they quaffed the draught which sent them railroad-building.  Mr. Mann thinks it a great advantage to be born a country boy, for he says it makes a lad frugal, strong, and resourceful.  It worked out this way in his own case at least, for there is not a thing in railroad building that Mr. Mann cannot do with his own hands, from shoeing a mule to finding the best pass in the Rockies through which to slide his iron horse down to the sea.  Direct, strong, simple, he knows how to control himself and manage others.  D.D.  Mann is a conspicuous example of what a Canadian boy has managed to accomplish by his own efforts.  The beauty of this Western Canada is that it holds out opportunities to every plucky lad who has initiative and who is willing to work; nothing is stratified, the whole thing is formative.

While the steel kings are letting the light of day into this great granary, they are being helped by a government representative, as democratic and direct as any of the pathmakers whose visible work we have been noticing.  The Hon. Frank Oliver, Canada’s Minister of the Interior, is essentially a self-made man.  Before the railroad men realised their vision splendid, young Mr. Oliver and his bride rode into Edmonton on an ox-cart, with a modest little printing-press tucked away among the wedding-gifts and household goods.  Oliver was a practical printer and soon issued a hand-dodger called by courtesy a newspaper.  The editing habit sticks.  The Minister of the Interior owns and publishes the Edmonton Bulletin.  Mr. Mann says, “I like building railroads”; Mr. Oliver might parody him and say, “I like building newspapers.”

[Illustration:  Hon. Frank Oliver, Minister of the Interior]

Arrived at Winnipeg, we look back across this great prairie we have twice traversed.  The land stands ready to produce bread for the nations; Nature has done her part, now man must do his.  The two greatest needs of Western Canada to-day are transportation and immigration.  Of the one we have spoken; the other claims our interest even more compelling, for man is more vital than machinery.  Canada is a country with a meagre past, a solid present, and an illimitable future.

She, moreover, is the last unstaked Empire under a white man’s sky,—­where wilderness and man are meeting.  The flood of immigration hither is not the outcome of the temporary mood of mankind or of the immigration policy of a government.  It is the natural sequence of the economic conditions of a continent seeking the outlet of least resistance to a more favourable situation.  The people who are coming in are not dreamers but workers.  “The world’s greatest wheat-farm,” says the economist.  It is more than this:  it is a human crucible, and we are witnessing here the birth-throes of an entirely new nation.