There has been talk of a railroad to Hudson Bay for a long generation. There were big-hearted railway builders in those days, who could not find bighearted financiers. Charters languished, and hopes were deferred. Rails to Churchill are in sight; and may be discussed without fear of the calamity that overtakes prophets who do not know. The proposition to carry wheat through Hudson strait is pre-eminently a short haul proposition. It has for the Britisher in Europe, and in every part of the world where the Britisher is, an imperial aspect. Imperialism has come to be largely an affair of transportation; for railwaymen and shipmasters are the

ice that has been performed for it since. Edward the Seventh was a young man.

The water route from Churchill to Liverpool is not ideal. No tremendously important thing ever is. The shores of the bay are ice-bound in winter; but that disadvantage could be overcome. The channel of Hudson strait is said to be ice-choked in early summer. No man, living or dead, has been known to sail those lonely waters in winter. That is no proof that they are unsailable; albeit the hardest optimist does not claim that the strait is navigable twelve months in the year. I shall deal with the evidence on these points later.

The land side of the proposition is

modern generals of a nation's development. As soon as the shipmaster and the railroader have proved the Hudson Bay route to be founded on five per cent they will have rendered to British imperialism perhaps the most notable serv

simple and safe. Churchill is as near to Liverpool as Montreal is, by way of Cape Race. The incomparable wheat fields of western Canada are nearer to Churchill than they are to Montreal-an average of 967 miles nearer. The country between

them and Churchill is more easily coverable than the country between them and Montreal was in the carly eighties. A stalwart of latter-day Canadian optimism used to say that he would not risk his life on the shores of Lake Superior in January. He laughs at his pessimism now, and, every three months or so, inquires when the bonds of the Hudson Bay extension will be on the market.

To get an idea of this Hudson Bay route, suppose you travel over it, on

the legs and with the eyes of the men who have already done it. Lord Selkirk's agricultural settlement, near the Red river, where Winnipeg now is, was founded nearly a hundred years ago with Scotchmen, who were brought in by way of Hudson Bay, the Nelson river and Lake Winnipeg. Winnipeg is the metropolis of western Canada and the home of the first attempts to finance a railroad to Hudson Bay. The early efforts to open this new line of communication

were bound to fail. There must be something more than faith in the future of a country, when such a stupendous innovation as that of making a grain port of Fort Churchill is undertaken. All the inhabitants of western Canada twenty years ago were but a handful; and in North Dakota the population was almost as sparse as in the Saskatchewan valley. The Hudson Bay route could only be supplementary to the main arteries connecting the East and the West. The certainty of a line to Churchill has come about because instead of less than a

thousand miles of railway between Winnipeg and the Rocky mountains, there are now 6,247 miles; and the country has twenty-five years of successful, widespread agriculture behind it.

The Canadian Northern itself is probably the most remarkable feature of this rare development. It began in 1896, with a hundred miles of line; starting at the village of Gladstone and ending nowhere it was then the Lake Manitoba Railway and Canal Company. It has now 3,434 miles west of Lake Superior. Of these 3,434 miles 2,166 are

Those of us who, for most of a lifetime, have assumed that nearly the whole of Canada was a frost-bound barren, bleak and desolate, incapable of growing life-sustaining crops, may be astonished at the idea of building a railway to within two hundred miles of Fort Churchill as a colonization road. But this is a serious proposal, all the same, and I shall take the liberty of summarizing the evidence given to a parliamentary committee last year by Mr. J. B. Tyrrell, who has traveled between thirty and forty thousand miles, over new routes, between Lake Winnipeg, the Rocky mountains and Chesterfield inlet.

Mr. Tyrrell, who is now a leading mining engineer, practicing in Toronto, was for fifteen years with the geological survey, and his scientific explorations are recorded in the report of that branch of the public service; and are innumerable. He laughs about his hardships; but they were real and numerous enough to eliminate every excess of optimism from his judgment of any part of a country he has explored.

In 1883 Mr. Tyrrell, as assistant to Dr. Dawson, explored the Kootenay, where the Crow's Nest coalfields and other mines in the southwest of British Columbia now are. In 1884 and 1885, he was in charge of exploration and surveys in central and western Alberta, and thereafter explored and surveyed Lakes Winnipeg and Manitoba and the country thereabout. No other scientist has so thorough an acquaintance with the country through which the Canadian Northern line to Hudson Bay will pass.

Mr. Tyrrell was the first man really to explore the west shore of Hudson Bay. In 1893 he went from Edmonton, down the Athabasca to Lake Athabasca; eastward across the lake, then northward by the Dubawnt river and Dubawnt lake to Chesterfield inlet, covering country never known to have been covered by a white man since Samuel Hearn

made his trip to the Coppermine river, a hundred and twenty years ago. From Chesterfield inlet, the trip to Churchill, in canoes, was almost a catastrophe; for the season was late, and food was mighty scarce. But, as Mr. Tyrrell says, if he could skirt the shore in a Peterboro

A CLOSER VIEW OF THE HERD.

canoe in October the navigability of the bay late in the season is, for steamers, an easy job. Mr. Tyrrell returned to Winnipeg by way of York Factory, the Nelson river and Lake Winnipeg.

The next year he went up the Saskatchewan river to Cumberland House, then northward by Reindeer lake to the Kazan river, and reached Hudson Bay by turning first east two hundred miles, south to Chesterfield inlet, and then down the shore to Churchill. That winter he walked from Fort Churchill to Winnipeg by way of Split lake and Norway House. The country between. Churchill and Split lake had never before been traversed by a white man, and the Indians knew nothing whatever about it. Mr. Tyrrell's route is practically that which the railway will take between Split lake and Churchill. He has also been from Prince Albert northward; down the Beaver river to the Churchill river, and has, indeed, crossed and re-crossed the territory through which the colonization road-to use Senator Davis' description-will be built.

The greater part of the Barren Lands, north of the tree line, is broken rock and boulders; a rough, stony country