But Canada has a third dimension, a diameter that cuts through the Belt
of Wheat and Belt of Fur, beginning south at the international boundary
and ending where in his winter-igloo the Arctic Eskimo lives and loves
after his kind and works out his own destiny. This diameter we are to
follow. To what end? Not, we hope, to come back like him who went from
Dan to Beersheba to say "All is barren," but to come near to the people,
our fellow-Britons, in this transverse section of a country bigger than
Europe. We want to see what they are doing, these Trail-Blazers of
Commerce, who, a last vedette, are holding the silent places, awaiting
that multitude whose coming footsteps it takes no prophet to hear.

We will take the great waterways, our general direction being that of
all the world-migrations. Colonization in America has followed the trend
of the great rivers, and it has ever been northward and westward,--till
you and I have to look southward and eastward for the graves of our
ancestors. The sons and grandsons of those who conquered the St.
Lawrence and built on the Mississippi have since occupied the shores of
the Red, the Assiniboine, and the Saskatchewan. They are laying strong
hands upon the Peace, and within a decade will be platting townships on
the Athabasca, the Mackenzie, and the Slave.

There has always been a West. For the Greeks there was Sicily; Carthage
was the western outpost of Tyre; and young Roman patricians conquered
Gaul and speculated in real estate on the sites of London and Liverpool.
But the West that we are entering upon is the Last West, the last
unoccupied frontier under a white man's sky. When this is staked out,
pioneering shall be no more, or Amundsen must find for us a
dream-continent in Beaufort Sea.

Kipling speaks of "a route unspoiled of Cook's," and we have found it.