But the great Canadian land booms, carefully fostered and well developed, offered a curious illustration of the tremendous pressure of all the populations of the world for land and yet more land.
In the year 1911 the writer saw, all through the Peace River Valley and even in the neighborhood of the Little Slave Lake, the advance-guard of wheat farmers crowding out even beyond the Canadian frontier in the covetous search for yet more cheap land.

In 1912 I talked with a school teacher, who herself had homestead land in the Judith Basin of Montana--once sacred to cows--and who was calmly discussing the advisability of going up into the Peace River country to take up yet more homestead land under the regulations of the Dominion Government! In the year 1913 I saw an active business done in town lots at Fort McMurray, five hundred miles north of the last railroad of Alberta, on the ancient Athabasca waterway of the fur trade! Who shall state the limit of all this expansion?
The farmer has ever found more and more land on which he could make a living; he is always taking land which his predecessor has scornfully refused.

If presently there shall come the news that the land boomer has reached the mouth of the Mackenzie River--as long ago he reached certain portions of the Yukon and Tanana country--if it shall be said that men are now selling town lots under the Midnight Sun--what then?
We are building a government railroad of our own almost within shadow of Mount McKinley in Alaska.

There are steamboats on all these great sub-Arctic rivers.
Perhaps, some day, a power boat may take us easily where I have stood, somewhat wearied, at that spot on the Little Bell tributary of the Porcupine, where a slab on a post said, "Portage Road to Ft.
McPherson"-- a "road" which is not even a trail, but which crosses the most northerly of all the passes of the Rockies, within a hundred miles of the Arctic Ocean.
Land, land, more land! It is the cry of the ages, more imperative and clamorous now than ever in the history of the world and only arrested for the time by the cataclysm of the Great War.

The earth is well-nigh occupied now.