• A historical Geography of the British Colonies. Vol. V.
"Canada," Part Geographical. Vol. V., Part IV., "Newfoundland." By J. D. Rogers. With 'daps. Orford ; at the Clarendon Press. [4s. 6d. each.] not be allowed to pass into their place in reference libraries, where they will be indispensable, without a tribute to the author's skill and love of his task. No great history of Canada has yet been written; we daresay there is no other British Dominion in which all the small significant events that the historical geographer has to account for by the tests of his art are so difficult to discover. As for Newfoundland Mr. Rogers says that he has not seen a single unprinted docu- ment between 1757 and the present day. Fortunately he is concerned as an historical geographer only with the movement of events ; he does not speculate; he never argues or bombards you with proofs. " Of all stale, unprofitable things," he says, " argument, proof, and con- troversy seem worst to those who regard history as a tragic state rather than as a school of formal logic or a court of law." The history of Newfoundland is curiously immobile, and if Mr. Rogers's pages did not record a monotony of events they would not truthfully reflect the even and unvaried march of history. Of course there were vivid episodes in the making of Newfoundland—the Anglo-French struggles and the settlement of the wonderfully broken coast by the daring fishermen. But when the fisheries became a political question—now finally arranged with the United States, let us hope—it became, through all its phases, rather tiresome to read about, and the rest of Newfoundland politics are of limited interest. It is characteristic of the disinclination of Newfoundland towards change that the belief that it would become part of the Dominion of Canada has been continually disappointed. In the second edition of Judge Prowse's history in 1896 it was assumed that absorption was certain, and still that issue seems to be no nearer. In many happy phrases Mr. Rogers suggests the independence of Newfoundlanders as of sailors who steer their own course, and who, like sailors, are instinctively conservative. But we must leave this volume and turn to the more important volume on Canada. Mr. Rogers himself says that if he had had to write of Newfoundland as a province of the Dominion he would have given it no more space than is given in the Canadian volume to Nova Scotia. As it is, Newfoundland has to have its own volume, which is a reflection, if one cares to take it so, on the artificial methods inevitable in allotting space in a series in which each colony has its volume, and must blow itself out, if necessary, like a toad to resemble its brothers in importance.
There was a time when it seemed that Canada, like the United States, might develop into an industrial east and an agricultural west, but, after all, the provinces of Ontario and Quebec have found agriculture to pay well enough now that land is successfully worked which was looked at askance in the earlier days when men's eyes roamed more freely and ambitiously—well enough to prevent the old provinces from resembling Australia, where a few cities have grown out of all proportion to the rest. Mr. Rogers writes first of the brave explorers who penetrated the Arctic regions. The very names given to their sledges by some of the explorers little more than half a century ago are an inspiring and touching memory : " Persevere to the end," " Endeavour to deserve," "Be of good courage," "Go forth in faith," and so on. Sir Leopold McClintock divined that Franklin would have done all that he wished if be had known of the east coast of Ring William Island. The criticism was justified when Herr Amundsen (1903-6) sailed for the first time in one ship from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The error of about ten miles in a voyage of twenty thousand miles meant the difference between Franklin's glorious failure and Herr Amundsen's success. Next Mr. Rogers writes of the far eastern provinces—Nova Scotia and the two islands—with their successive immigrations, the Anglo-French conflicts, the Acadian ascendancy, and the impulsive and insufficiently organized colonization by New Englanders, Germans, and others. Next comes New Brunswick and the peninsulas and islands of the Gulf as the link between the far and middle east. Mr. Rogers says that, although historical evidence is incomplete and philological evidence scanty, yet both point to the Lower Loire, La Rochelle, and the country between them as the cradle of the Acadian race. Guided by the experiences of their countrymen and affectionate memories, they picked harbours like those they had left behind them in France. French naval experts always chose harbours with narrow mouths as the most easily defensible, and the French immigrants chose similar ones in Canada. The heart of Canada lies in the middle east.
" Quebec is the Province of two nations—Old French and New English—the former underlying the latter, and having the first choice of place, but both mingling and alternating in the centres of most disturbance, like successive geological strata. Both cleave to the St. Lawrence, but the French, who were there first, cleave most closely. The cities which were chosen by the French were on critical points on the great river, and are therefore most altered. In the chief cities as well as in the country districts the French are still first."
Till the railways came the waterways of Canada mostly determined the lines of advance. Canada is the land of lakes, yet what extraordinary differences there are between the pellucid lakes of the St. Lawrence system and the muddy shallow lakes of the prairie provinces ! It was the English who introduced townships in Quebec Province. In 1827 an Englishman was asked what a township was.
"'A township,' he said, ' is a parallelogram which some- times contains 20 to 36 square miles . . . or sometimes 100 to 144 square miles. It is divided horizontally and vertically by thick lines which are roads. All continuous lines divide it into 200 acre lots. Each block of 4 lots is a section, 4 horizontal sec- tions are (sometimes) called a concession, and 4 vertical sections a range. Each section is surrounded by roads, therefore afortiovi each concession or range is surrounded by roads.'" In Canada the township was primarily an agricultural unit for planting yeomen in 200-acre lots; but the plan enlarged was equally applicable to a building estate, and would serve as the plan of a town. Towns therefore were often carved out of townships.
When one goes from the middle east to the prairie provinces —Manitoba, Alberta, Saskatchewan—one goes from forest land which has been cleared acre by acre to vast open plains where trees are not man's enemy to be hewn out of the way, but are rare enough to be admired. The prairies are a new world to the inhabitants of old Canada. Not that old Canada is mountainous, for there is scarcely a tunnel to be seen any- where east of the Rockies, but, what with the flatness, the quality of the loam, and the muddy waterways, the prairie provinces are such as the early settlers in the east would have regarded as wastes.
"The lakes themselves—Lake Winnipeg, Lakes Manitoba and Winnipegosis, which resemble a split shadow of Lake Winnipeg, and their satellites, Lakes Red Deer, Swan, Dauphin, Waterhen, and St. Martin—are mutually connected, like the great inland seas of the St. Lawrence, but are mere puddles in comparison, Lake Winnipeg being until recently put down as twenty-nine feet deep at most, and Lakes Manitoba and Swan being only a little deeper than the so-called lakes in Hyde Park and St James's Park respectively."
Mr. Rogers shows bow the waterways as the natural line of progress were abandoned in the case of the prairie provinces even before the arrival of the railways. Three events may be named as these pre-railway directing causes— the Red River Expedition under Lord Wolseley in 1870, the enterprise of the North-West Mounted Police, and the coming of the colonists of the seventies. The prairie provinces differ from Eastern Canada in their cosmopolitanism. All foreign settlers, however, find it essential to know English as their second language, and it is thought that British predominance will fashion a new British type like, and yet unlike, the Cymric, Gael, Erse, Huguenot, and Danish types of the United Kingdom. Last of all, Mr. Rogers treats of the far west, the land of the mountains. When we have reached this last link in the chain of provinces which stretch across Canada, we have nothing but a feeling of grateful astonishment at the comparative simplicity of the elements to which Mr. Rogers has reduced his heart-breaking material.
The titles of these volumes are bewildering. The title of Part III. suggests that Canada is the subject of all the different parts of Vol. V., yet Newfoundland, which occupies Part TV., is not part of Canada. Can the editor have assumed, like Judge Prowse, that it was on the point of becoming so P
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