232 233 234 (6) The isolated forts and factories of the country (7) The Hudson's Bay Territory annexed to Canada (8) The Company's rights. Their monopoly attacked (9) Compensation given. The new Government (9) The engineering difficulties in British Columbia. The (3) A comparative table showing the admixture of nation- (4) What will be the future of the Dominion? Three courses open to it-(a) Absorption into the Re- public on the South; (b) Independence; (c) A con- (10) The materialist triumph of the British Empire. How it is leavened. The heroes of the race LIST OF MAPS. I. The Highways of Commerce (with distances), with wanderings of Marco Polo II. The track of Vikings, Columbus, and Cabot to the New World III. Acadia and Newfoundland, 1534-1745 IV. The Huron Mission, 1640. V. Boundary wars between French and British, X. A Circumpolar Map, showing the progress of (See pp. 98, 124, 156.) XI. A Railway Map, with distances from Montreal B CHAPTER I. British Colonisation.-Its Methods and Results. (1) THERE are three methods by which a country usually acquires colonial possessions,—by conquest, by cession, and by occupancy. Great Britain acquired the Canadian Dominion by the first method, taking it from the French in 1763; South Africa by the second in 1814, when the Dutch finally ceded it to her; and Australia by the third in 1788, when a batch of English settlers was planted at Port Jackson. These three portions of her Colonial Empire are by far the most interesting, from the fact that they are peopled mainly by Europeans and men of our own kith and kin, governed in the same way, and situated, for the most part, in temperate regions where emigrants can develop to the utmost their energies of mind and body. In each case they form genuine states in political union with Great Britain. They have achieved a distinct life and character of their own, and within a marvellously short period have increased greatly in wealth and population. Their future should in each case be a grand one, from the physical fact that they possess unlimited room for expansion. The Dominion of Canada holds a territory nearly as large as Europe, extending over an area of 3,400,000 square miles, with a population of over 5,000,000. In the North-West Territories the finest wheat-fields in the B |