American settlers are pouring into the wheat-belt of the Northwest, and when the Dominion of Canada has paid the hundred million dollars she has just voted for a railway to open up the great lone northern lands between Quebec and the Pacific, it will be the American farmer and the American capitalist who will reap the benefit.

They approach us today with all the arts of peace, commercial missionaries to the ungathered harvests of neglected territories; but the day may come when they will menace our coasts to protect their markets--unless, by firm, resolved, whole-hearted action now, we keep our opportunities for our own people." They cheered him promptly, and a gathered intensity came into his face at the note of praise.
"Nothing on earth can hold him now," said Bingham, as he crossed his arms upon a breast seething with practical politics, and waited for the worst.
"The question of the hour for us," said Lorne Murchison to his fellow-townsmen, curbing the strenuous note in his voice, "is deeper than any balance of trade can indicate, wider than any department of statistics can prove.

We cannot calculate it in terms of pig-iron, or reduce it to any formula of consumption.

The question that underlies this decision for Canada is that of the whole stamp and character of her future existence.

Is that stamp and character to be impressed by the American Republic effacing"-- he smiled a little--"the old Queen's head and the new King's oath?
Or is it to be our own stamp and character, acquired in the rugged discipline of our colonial youth, and developed in the national usage of the British Empire ?"...
Dr Drummond clapped alone; everybody else was listening.
"It is ours," he told them, "in this greater half of the continent, to evolve a nobler ideal.