With industrial prosperity, political unity became assured.
Canada became more and more a name of which all her sons were
proud. Expansion brought men of the different provinces together.
The Maritime Provinces first felt fully at one with the rest of
Canada when Vancouver and Winnipeg rather than Boston and New
York called their sons. Even Ontario and Quebec made some advance
toward mutual understanding, though clerical leaders who sought
safety for their Church in the isolation of its people,
imperialists who drove a wedge between Canadians by emphasizing
Anglo-Saxon racial ties, and politicians of the baser sort
exploiting race prejudice for their own gain, opened rifts in a
society already seamed by differences of language and creed. In
the West unity was still harder to secure, for men of all
countries and of none poured into a land still in the shaping.
The divergent interests of the farming, free trade West and of
the manufacturing, protectionist East made for friction.
Fortunately strong ties held East and West together. Eastern
Canadians or their sons filled most of the strategic posts in
Government and business, in school and church and press in the
West. Transcontinental railways, chartered banks with branches
and interests in every province, political parties organizing
their forces from coast to coast, played their part. Much had
been accomplished; but much remained to be done. With this
background of rapid industrial development and growing national
unity, Canada's relations with the Empire, with her sister
democracy across the border, and with foreign states, took on new
importance and divided interest with the changes in her internal
affairs.

From being a state wherein the mother country exercised control