Behind the Atlantic ports, supplied by them with traffic, supplying them with traffic, is a provincial population of five millions.  Behind the Pacific ports in British Columbia and Alberta, one would be justified in expecting to find—­Strathcona said a hundred million people, but for this generation put it at twelve million.

Through the Atlantic ports annually come two hundred and fifty thousand or more immigrants, not counting the one hundred and fifty thousand from the United States.  What if something happened to bring as many to the Pacific, as well as those now coming to the Atlantic?

Then a century of peace has a sleeping-powder effect on a nation.  We forget that the guns of four nations once boomed and roared round old Quebec and down Bay of Fundy way.  If the Pacific becomes a front door, the guns of the great nations may yet boom there.  In fact, if Canada had not been a part of Greater Britain four or five years ago when the trouble arose over Japanese immigration, guns might easily have boomed round Vancouver long before the Pacific Coast had become a front door.  Front door status entails bolt and strong bar.  Front door means navy.  Navy means shipbuilding plants, and the shipyards of the United States on the Atlantic support fifty thousand skilled artisans, or what would make a city of two hundred and fifty thousand people.  The shipyards of England support a population equal to Boston.  In the United States those shipyards exist almost wholly by virtue of government contracts to build war vessels, and in Great Britain largely by virtue of admiralty subsidies.  Though they also do an enormous amount of work on river and coastal steamers, the manager of the largest and oldest plant in the United States told me personally that with the high price of labor and material in America, his shipyard could not last a day without government contracts for war vessels, torpedoes, dredges, etc.  Front door on the Pacific means that to Canada, and it means more; for Canada belongs to an empire that has vaster dominions to defend in Asia than in Europe.

But isn’t all this stretching one’s fancy a bit too far in the future?  How far is too far?  The Panama Canal is open for traffic, and there is not a harbor of first rank in the United States, Atlantic, Pacific, or Gulf of Mexico, that does not bank on, that is not spending millions on, the expectation of Panama changing the Pacific from a back into a front door.  Either these harbors are all wrong or Canada is sound asleep as a tombstone to the progress round her.  Boston has spent nine million dollars acquiring terminals and water-front, and is now guaranteeing the bonds of steamships to the extent of twenty-five million dollars.  New York has built five new piers to take care of the commerce coming—­and the Federal government has spent fifty million dollars improving the approaches to her harbor.  Baltimore is so sure that Panama is going to revive shore-front interests that she has reclaimed almost two hundred acres of swamp land for manufacturing sites, which she is leasing out at merely nominal figures to bring the manufacturers from inland down to the sea.  In both Baltimore and Philadelphia, railroads are spending millions increasing their trackage for the traffic they expect to feed down to the coast cities for Panama steamers.