Lake Superior and the Rockies “the granary of the Empire.”  I am afraid it was more in bravado, hoping against hope, than in any other spirit; for we were raising little grain and exporting less and receiving prices that hardly paid for the labor.  That was back in the early nineties.  To-day, what?  One single year’s wheat crop from one only of those provinces equals more gold in value than ever came out of Klondike.  If Britain were cut off from every other source of food supply, those three provinces could feed the British Isles with their surplus wheat.  To be explicit, credit Great Britain with a population of forty-five millions.  Apportion to each six bushels of wheat—­the per capita requirement for food, according to scientists.  Great Britain requires two hundred and eighty to three hundred million bushels of wheat for bread only—­not to be manufactured into cereal products, which is another and enormous demand in itself.  Of the wheat required for bread, Great Britain herself raises only fifty to sixty million bushels, leaving a deficit, which must come from outside sources, of two hundred million bushels.

In 1912 Canada raised one hundred and ninety-nine million bushels of wheat.  In 1913, of grain products, Canada exported one hundred and ten million bushels; of flour products, almost twenty million dollars’ worth.  Under stress of need or high prices these totals could easily be trebled.  The figures are, indeed, bewildering in their bigness.  In the three prairie provinces there were under cultivation in 1912 for all crops only sixteen and one-half million acres.[10] At twenty bushels to the acre this area put under wheat would feed Great Britain.  But note—­only sixteen and one-half million acres were under cultivation.  There have been surveyed as suitable for cultivation one hundred and fifty-eight million acres.  The land area of the three prairie provinces is four hundred and sixty-six million acres.  If only half the land surveyed as suitable for cultivation were put in wheat—­namely seventy-nine million acres; and if it yielded only ten bushels to the acre (it usually yields nearer twenty than ten), the three prairie provinces of Canada would be producing crops equal to the entire spring wheat production of the United States.  Grant, then, two bushels for reseeding, or one hundred and fifty-eight million bushels, and six bushels for food, or fifty million bushels, the three prairie provinces would still have for export more than five hundred million bushels.  All this presupposes population.  Granting each man one hundred and sixty acres, it presupposes 493,750 more farmers than are in the West; but coming to Canada yearly are four hundred thousand settlers; so that counting four out of every five settlers children, in half a decade at the least, Western Canada will have five hundred thousand more farmers—­enough to feed Great Britain and still have a surplus of wheat for Europe.

In connection with wheat exports from the West one factor should never be ignored—­the influence of the Great Lakes and the Soo Canal in reducing freight to the West.  Great Lakes freight tolls are to-day the cheapest in the world, and their influence in minimizing the toll on the all-land haul must never be ignored.  Freight can be carried on the Great Lakes one thousand miles for the same rate charged on rail rate for one hundred miles.[11]