Page:Canada.pdf/9

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—it was no vain boast when the Speaker of her Legislative Assembly spoke of her as the first Province of the first Dominion of the first Empire the world has ever seen—Ontario, with her orchards and vineyards, her splendid farms and her noble forests, her flocks and herds upon a thousand hills, her busy cities and towns, her educational institutions second to none on the continent (boasting as she does of her universities, her common schools are not neglected), supports a happy and prosperous people from the peach groves of the Peninsula to where at Coe Hill and Copper Cliff and Cobalt and Gowganda, a beneficent Providence before the dawn of time, when the world was in the making, hid deep in the womb of the rock, copper and nickel, silver and gold and iron for the use of the twentieth century Canadian. Manitoba, small in extent but great in influence—whose name is a household word wherever the English language is spoken whose wheat fixes the highest standard for a world's market. And Canada's latest progeny, the twin sisters of the plain, with rolling prairie and flowing river, but whose soil needs to "be tickled with the hoe to laugh into a harvest"—with ear listening for the tramp of the coming millions, their arms are open wide to receive from the millions of the earth, men who desire to win a competency or a livelihood through honest toil—though indeed they have no room in all their ample bosom for the tramp or the laggard or the criminal. They welcome with especial joy the returning Canadian, who, having sought in the West and South his fortune, learns now that the plains of the Dakotas are not to be compared with

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