Canada
May Not Possess Mines Of Gold Or Silver, But She Possesses All Those
Advantages Of Climate, Geological Structure, And Position, Which Are
Essential To Greatness And Prosperity.
Her long and severe winter,
so disheartening to her first settlers, lays up, amidst the forests
of the West, inexhaustible supplies of fertilising moisture for the
summer, while it affords the farmer the very best of natural roads
to enable him to carry his wheat and other produce to market.
It is
a remarkable fact, that hardly a lot of land containing two hundred
acres, in British America, can be found without an abundant supply
of water at all seasons of the year; and a very small proportion
of the land itself is naturally unfit for cultivation. To crown
the whole, where can a country be pointed out which possesses such
an extent of internal navigation? A chain of river navigation and
navigable inland seas, which, with the canals recently constructed,
gives to the countries bordering on them all the advantages of an
extended sea-coast, with a greatly diminished risk of loss from
shipwreck!
Little did the modern discoverers of America dream, when they called
this country "Canada," from the exclamation of one of the exploring
party, "Aca nada," - "there is nothing here," as the story goes, that
Canada would far outstrip those lands of gold and silver, in which
their imaginations revelled, in that real wealth of which gold
and silver are but the portable representatives. The interminable
forests - that most gloomy and forbidding feature in its scenery to
the European stranger, should have been regarded as the most certain
proof of its fertility.
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