BOOK TWENTY-SEVENTH

MINOR AMERICAN STATES.

CHAPTER CLII—DOMINION OF CANADA.

RETURNING from this extended survey of the nations of Europe, we may now continue the narrative of events within the nineteenth century by considering the historical development of the Minor States of North and South America. It will be conceded that the one great Power of the New World is the United States, and that the rest are, either by recency of origin or slowness of evolution, of less importance in the view of general history than are our own country and people. Nevertheless, on both the north and the south, the processes of nationality are going on in some parts with marked activity. The Dominion of Canada, stretching geographically from the Atlantic to the Pacific, bounded northward by the frozen seas, and on the south by the territorial limit of the United States, may well be the first to fix our attention and command our interest.

The name Canada, as here employed, is intended to include not only the country between the watershed west of Lake Superior and the limit of Labrador, but also the British Provinces of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland on the east; and the tremendous region of the Northwest—Manitoba, Kewatin (a name which has since disappeared from the map), the Northwest Territory, British Columbia, and the whole vast region to the boundary-line of Alaska, running north and south for six hundred miles along the one hundred and forty-first meridian west from Greenwich. The country embraces a total area of about three million five hundred thousand square miles, nearly one-half of which was regained by the Government of Great Britain from the Company of Hudson Bay. Without entering again into the discussion of the physical character and resources of Canada, but assuming, rather, that such geographical knowledge is already in possession of the reader, we may enter at once upon the civil and political development of the great and growing people on our north.

The story of the early explorations and settlements made at the first by the French Jesuits in Canada has already been given in a former Book. The earliest type of society established beyond the St. Lawrence was