is the new Colony of British Columbia, with Vancouver's Island (the
Madeira of the Pacific); while the largest portion is held, as one
great preserve, by the fur-trading Hudson's Bay Company, who, in right
of a charter given by Charles II., in 1670, kill vermin for skins, and
monopolise the trade with the Native Indians over a surface many times
as big again as Great Britain and Ireland. Still, all this land is
ours, for it owes allegiance to the sceptre of Victoria. Between the
magnificent harbour of Halifax, on the Atlantic, open throughout the
year for ships of the largest class, to the Straits of Fuca, opposite
Vancouver's Island, with its noble Esquimault inlet, intervene some
3,200 miles of road line. For 1,400 or 1,500 miles of this distance,
the Nova Scotian, the Habitan, and the Upper Canadian have spread, more
or less in lines and patches over the ground, until the population of
60,000 of 1759 amounts to 2,500,000 in 1860. The remainder is peopled
only by the Indian and the hunter, save that at the southern end of
Lake Winnipeg there still exists the hardy and struggling Red River
Settlement, now called 'Fort Garry:' and dotted all over the Continent,
as lights of progress, are trading posts of the Hudson's Bay Company.

"The combination of recent discoveries places it at least beyond all
doubt that the best, though, perhaps, not the only, thoroughly
efficient route for a great highway for peoples and for commerce,
between the Atlantic and the Pacific, is to be found through this
British territory. Beyond that, it is alleged that while few, if any,
practicable passes for a wagon-road, still less for a railway, can be
found through the Rocky Mountains across the United States' territory,
north-west of the Missouri, there have been discovered already no less
than three eligible openings in the British ranges of these mountains,
once considered as inaccessible to man. While Captain Palliser prefers
the 'Kananaskakis,' Captain Blakiston and Governor Douglas, the