church would be on the same footing as all other denominations.


IV

When one comes to Ontario, one is dealing with the kitchen garden of
the Dominion--in summer a land of placid sky-blue lakes, and
amber-colored wooded rivers, and trim, almost garden-like farms, and
heavily laden orchards, and thriving cities beginning to smoke under
the pall of the increasing and almost universal factory. Under its old
boundaries Ontario stood just eighteen thousand square miles larger
than France. Under its new boundaries extending to Hudson Bay, Ontario
measures almost twice the area of France. France supports a population
of nearly forty millions; Ontario, of barely two and a half millions.
Both Ontario and France are equally fertile and equally diversified in
fertility. Along the lakes and clustered round Niagara is the great
fruit region--vineyards and apple orchards that are gardens of
perfection. North of the lakes is a mixed farm region. Parallel with
the latitude skirting Georgian Bay begins the Great Clay belt, an area
of heavily forested lands about seven hundred miles north to south and
almost a thousand diagonally east to west. On its southern edge this
hinterland, which forms the watershed between Hudson Bay and the St.
Lawrence, seems to be rock-bound and iron-capped. For years travelers
across the continent must have looked through the car windows across
this landscape of windfall and fire as a picture of desolation.
Surely, "here was nothing," as some of the first explorers said when
they viewed Canada from Labrador; but pause; not so fast! Here lay, if
nothing else, an area of timber limits seven hundred by one thousand
miles; and as the timber burned off curious mineral outcroppings were
observed. When the railroad was graded through what is now known as