ments are now going the rounds of the American press! In this case the robbery is even more bare-faced than in the case of the Kootenay and Yukon for in those fields very great expenditure was needed before a mine could yield returns-in Kootenay because the ore had to be smelted, in Yukon because the distances were so great. But the cobalt-silver field of Ontario is only 300 miles by rail from Toronto, and the ore-beds are vertical fissures of almost solid slabs of silver. A prospector who stakes out that kind of a claim can mine it for himself with pick and shovel without floating a company for servant-girl capital. Meanwhile, the young man who took the hurried course in mineralogy and had staked out a claim before the rest of Canada had wakened up is estimated to be a millionaire. At least, a New York Company offered him $15,000,000 for his claim last June. The sale of his interests to the Guggenheims was reported in October.

UNDISCOVERED MINES

The discovery of the vast nickel beds and of the cobalt-silver resulted from railroads penetrating unexplored regions. As I said before, nine-tenths of Canada's mineral regions is unexplored. Again and again last winter in London, when I was going over the daily journals of the Hudson's Bay fur hunters, who tracked all parts of the wilds for furs, I found reports of "minerals here." But the company did not want minerals. They wanted furs. The report of minerals was ignored. "Mineral signs here," wrote Ogden of Nevada and Arizona and California. Prospecting has proved him right. "Mineralized stones reported by the Indians," wrote Ross of Montana and Kootenay. Exploration a century later justified his words. And the same HudAnd the same Hudson's Bay daily journals report minerals in this New Ontario of the Great Clay Belt, where nickel and silver have been uncovered. It is but yesterday that the world was astounded by the outpouring of gold from the Klondike. Since 1719, Hudson's Bay Company records have Indian legends of gold dust in Baffin's Land and vast copper beds somewhere north of Chesterfield Inlet. Fifty men the Company lost when Captain Knight perished looking for that gold dust in 1721. And Hearne, who explored the Coppermine, did not find the source of those copper bracelets and necklaces worn by the northern Indians. The mines are yet to be uncovered. If the old journals'

prediction of copper in Labrador and silver on the Coppermine and galena and gold from Mackenzie to the Rockies be likewise verified, Canada's lethargy regarding its mines will receive some rude jolts in the near future.

But it is from its coal beds that Canada will draw greater wealth than from the precious metals. The coal mines of Vancouver Island and Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, need not be described here. They have already produced coal of as much value as the gold placers of the Yukon-close on $100,000,000. But these are not the big coal mines of Canada. The big coal area is just east of the Rockies, above the boundary extending north with intermittent barren areas 500 miles, as far as Peace River.

CROW'S NEST PASS COAL FIELD

Only one part of this enormous field has been sufficiently exploited to give any definite data as to its capacity. That is the field at the Crow's Nest Pass, just forty miles north of the boundary. These mines have been opened only a short time. The yield of a million tons a year is purely an experiment. Nevertheless the results uncovered can hardly be grasped. I give the estimate of two different experts. Both were government geologists. Neither owned one cent's worth of stock in any mine. Both gave their estimate before the mines were taken over by a stock company. One declares that there is enough coal in the Crow's Nest Pass region alone to yield 4,000,000 tons a year for 5,000 years. The other declares that there is enough coal to yield 10,000,000 tons a year for 7,000 years. Space forbids giving the length and depth and number of seams examined on which these estimates are based. Value that coal at fifty cents a ton— which is absurd. Add that value to the national wealth of Canada in miner's wages, shareholders' returns, rail and ship freight; and one does not need to state the figures. And this is but one of its Western coal fields. There are still unexplored seams along the Saskatchewan, on the Peace River, and down the Mackenzie. Nature seems to have made a provision that is almost providential-that in those regions barren of fuel in forests, the earth should contain almost exhaustless resources of coal. New fields are now being exploited in the interior of northern British Columbia. Canada's hard times are past. As Laurier says-the twentieth century belongs to Canada, industrially, at least.

The story of Canada's timber wealth is the same. Two thousand miles long is its field of uncut timber to-day, comprising 1,500,000,000 acres divided into three great belts, which cannot be described here. To put it briefly according to Dominion authorities-Canada's timber area is four times greater than the timber area of the United States, three times greater than the timber area of Russia, twice as great as the timber area of all Europe. And this source of national wealth is practically untapped. In the west, not more than $2,000,000 worth of lumber is exported a year. In the east-though no figures are obtainable-at a guess, as much again; in all, a yearly revenue from its forests about equal to the gold from the Yukon. But this seven or eight million is a mere bagatelle to the revenue that will accrue from Canadian forests when the enormous limits recently bought by American capitalists in British Columbia are worked.

In thus enumerating the causes of Canada's present wonderful prosperity, I have not mentioned its manufactures, which have increased in number from thirty at the time of confederation to 75,000 to-day; or its railroads that have grown from two short lines of 2,000 miles to three transcontinental lines with numerous branches totalling 23,000 miles. Nor have I mentioned its fisheries and dairying and

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fruit growing. These industries are not peculiar to Canada. They are sources of wealth common to other nations, that grow as the farms and the mines and the forests develop; but in the wheat lands and mines and forests, Canada has a wealth peculiar to herself.

The greatest problem confronting Canada in the immediate future is the shortest route to Europe by Churchill, Hudson Bay. For twenty years this has been mooted, but now 100 miles of the railroad to the Bay are actually laid. Five years, at the least, will see trains running from the grain-growing areas of the West to Hudson Bay. What does this mean? It means that Churchill is nearer the shippers of the Western States as a route to Europe than New York is, by 1,500 miles. But the success of the route hinges on the navigability of the Straits-a distance of 450 miles. That is a point too controversial to be settled here.

If the development of resources in the twentieth century bring the same national expansion as the development of the same resources has brought about in the United States in the nineteenth century, Canada's future is that of a New Nation. And if it flies the British flag while American capital develops its resources, there may yet be that commercial compact of an Anglo-Saxon brotherhood of which idealists have dreamed.

T

HE startling fact about the boasted progress of medicine is that our lives, instead of lengthening, are growing shorter. We men and women of to-day are dying younger than our grandparents.

Pneumonia is increasing in fatality at a rate so alarming that it is now killing more people than tuberculosis-partly because tuberculosis has been somewhat checked and pneumonia has not been. Cancer takes off an increasing proportion of victims every year. So do heart disease, apoplexy, and Bright's disease-all diseases of adult life. Modern conditions of living are increasing so in deadliness that the man or woman of fifty, the vital statistics show, has a smaller and smaller chance every year of becoming a sexagenarian, not to speak of reaching the Scriptural age of seventy. But modern medical methods are saving the lives of children so efficiently that a baby born to-day has twice as good a chance to live as the baby of half a century ago. Yet the modern baby's father and mother stand less chance of escaping the fatal diseases of adult life than grown-up Americans did in the medically benighted days before the Civil War.

THE DECLINE IN THE DEATH RATE

The total death rate, to be sure, has come down wonderfully. A little more than a century ago, it was no small achievement to grow up. Smallpox was killing one person out of ten, and eighty per cent. of the deaths from smallpox were of children less than five years old. The disease was an ever-present scourge that swept the world. With the introduction of vaccination, the death rate went down rapidly as vaccination and sanitary methods were enforced, until now it reaps comparatively few victims. Cholera, typhus, yellow fever, and leprosy stalked abroad. To-day they have all but disappeared from civilized countries. The death rate of London fell with the conquest of these diseases and the enforcement of sanita

tion, from 50 per thousand of the population annually in the 18th century to 24 in the middle of the last century. The rate was this same 24 in Boston and New York as late as 1894.

The Census shows the rate for all the states where deaths are registered-Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, and the District of Columbia-to have fallen to 17.3 in 1900 and in 1904 to 16.7. Massachusetts gives less than 16 for 1904. The rate goes as low as 10 in Brookline, Mass., which is a large suburban community with a high standard of living. An average that approximates accuracy is that of the Census for the registration area of the country for the five years 1900-1904. This is a little less than 18 for cities and a little more than 14 for the rural districts. It is conservative to say that the death rate for the United States has declined one-half in a century and nearly one-fourth since 1890.

It was plain, however, as early as 1880 that this saving of life, which has been an even more important element than the birth rate in increasing the population and the strength of every progressive nation, was among infants and children. It was then shown in England that the death rate of men above 45 and women above 60 was increasing. Massachusetts records, which are better kept than those of other states, show that this tendency is steadily increasing; and Census figures, which cannot be wholly trusted but which are not at fault on broad deductions, verify the astounding fact. The Census shows that the increase of the death rate begins among people who have reached the age of sixty, but the more trustworthy Massachusetts observations indicate that the increase begins among people between forty and fifty. In 1880, for example, a man of fifty in Massachusetts could look forward to twenty-three more years of life. He can now look forward to hardly more than twenty.

It must be borne in mind, however, that whites live longer than negroes, the well-to-do longer than the poor, and country-dwellers longer than city-dwellers; and, since the death rate is made up from deaths in all these classes of people, it is probably true that those Americans who live as the grandfathers of most of us lived that is, in the country-live quite as long as their forebears. Just as the great saving in children's lives has been among the poor of the cities, negroes included, so it is true that the increase in the adult death rate has without doubt taken place very largely among the poor of the cities, and probably wholly among the people in cities, the well-to-do as well as the poor. It is the rush and bustle, the crowding, the physical inertia, the sedentary or indoor occupations of modern city life that account for the increasing deadliness of adult diseases. We Americans have gradually changed our whole mode of life almost in a generation and we have not yet learned how to live it safely.

THE GREAT SAVING OF CHILD LIFE

It will be well, however, to tell of some of the shining things that have been done in saving life before calling attention to the things that have not been done. The great fights the physicians have nobly fought and won, the campaigns of enlightenment they have carried on, the devoted services they have rendered, have contributed inestimably to make the great civilized nations what they are. Even though adults are dying faster than formerly, the huge saving of humanity indicated by a decline of one-half in the death rate has meant a rapid increase in the effective population of the United States, England, and Germany. That is one of the chief causes of the swift progress of these nations. "The public health,' said Disraeli, "is the foundation on which repose the happiness of the people and the power of a country." Savages have an appalling death rate. So do all backward people. "They have no stamina, these brats," said Kipling's doctor of the little Hindu, Muhammed Din. The modern civilized world has leaped into its lusty, many-sided activity-the United States has made its astonishing recent progress, for example-because the infants and children of the progressive nations have been preserved from fatal diseases. Two-thirds of the increased human life that has been brought about by this saving, it has been proved, is being lived in the active years between twenty

and sixty. Or, to put it in another way, even if there is an increase in the death rate beyond the age of forty-five, on the other hand the millions of children who would have died in another epoch, and are saved in ours, live long enough to do their work in the world.

How have they been saved? What lessons are there in the advance of medicine, of medical knowledge, of sanitary precautions, bearing on the guarding of children that point the way to the saving of adults too?

SAVING BABIES BY PREVENTIVE MEASURES

In the first place, there has been such an improvement in surgical methods and operative skill that more and more babies are born alive who would have been born dead under earlier conditions. In Boston, alone, last year, there were sixty-seven saved who would have perished if the death rate of twenty-five years ago still prevailed.

In the second place, as soon as the modern baby is born he becomes the object of many attentions that were not bestowed on his parents in infancy, because the physicians and sanitarians of thirty years ago were ignorant of the need of them. Dysentery and cholera infantum, to be sure, still slay their thousands of infants; but, as reliable figures show, only half as many as fifty years ago. Why? Because, chiefly through Pasteur's discovery of germs and the relation of germs to disease, physicians have learned to teach mothers to be careful what food they give to babies, and because the public has thrown precautions around the milk supply. Physicians now insist that infants shall have their natural food whenever possible. Dr. Böckh, of Berlin, in an investigation made in 1896, found that among the infants less than one month old who died that year in Berlin the death rate per million inhabitants was 19 for infants fed on mother's milk, 111 for those fed on animal's milk, and 308 for those fed on artificial substitutes. The investigation showed further that it was not cow's milk itself that proved so much more deadly than mother's milk, but infected cow's milk, for the deaths from the children in the second class were more than twice as frequent in the summer, when cow's milk speedily gets. bad, as in the winter. Since this discovery, the danger of substitutes for Nature's food has been a medical axiom. The artificial substitutes, physicians now agree, lack certain nutritive elements that an infant's food should

possess, and cow's milk collects dangerous germs with greater rapidity than any other common food of human beings.

Medical experience, however, corroborates Dr. Bockh's proof that for infants who must have some other food than the natural one and for babies more than one year old, cow's milk in most cases is best. Many babies do better on some artificial food, but frequently this is because the cow's milk obtainable is impure or is not properly modified. As a matter of fact, most babies do get cow's milk. It has been the progress of mothers and of communities in seeing that the babies are provided with as pure cow's milk as improved precautions will permit, that has cut the death rate of children from the diarrhoeal diseases in half in fifty years, and it has prevented other diseases too. Pasteur's discovery of the germ origin of disease paved the way to the pasteurizing or sterilizing of milk to kill germs. The necessity of sterilizing milk for infants in the summer was driven home by the results of Mr. Nathan Straus's splendid act of philanthropy in establishing milk depots in New York City, where bottles of sterilized milk are sold at a minimum price and even given away to the poor on authorization from the board of health. Nearly a million bottles, each containing one feeding, are now supplied in a single summer. It is estimated that 20,000 babies have been saved by this institution alone since it was started, for its establishment showed an immediate effect on the death rate.

In other cities, too, sterilized milk by one means or another has been furnished to infants. Cards, too, printed in different languages, are given out by boards of health, to be hung in homes where there are babies-cards that convey in terse, printed language directions covering all the important points that any mother needs to know about the feeding and the care of infants. In New York City, inspectors visit the tenements to add moral suasion and good advice to the sermons on the cards. The inspectors found in 1902 that 23,000 out of 27,000 infants examined were either nursed or fed on modified sterilized milk. To such an extent has the lesson been taught, even in the tenements!

SCRUTINY OF THE MILK SUPPLY

Pasteur's discovery, however, that diseases may be prevented by the killing of germs has been overshadowed by the realization in the

last ten years in all branches of medicine that the real desideratum is not to kill germs but to keep free of germs. So state, city, and town boards of health have been growing more rigid in their examination of the milk supply, and private enterprise has led at least some farmers and dairymen in all parts of the country to keep their milk as pure as possible because it pays to do so. Now, almost anywhere, pure milk can be secured from one source or another. Through a system recently established, dairymen can now have their milk "certified" in New York, New Jersey, Wisconsin, and other states, provided it meets certain standards of purity. And the number of certified dairies is growing.

Practically every settled community in the country now keeps up a more or less rigid inspection of the milk supply. Massachusetts, however, which always leads in this sort of thing, began an investigation of its dairies in March, 1905, which disclosed that out of more than 2,000 visited, 80 per cent. had objectionable features. The state board of health forthwith notified the objectionable dairies to clean up, but the investigation proved that with so much being done everywhere there is still much to do in regulating all the conditions that surround the supply. A point worth emphasizing is that since the public at large cannot yet be certain of procuring practically germ-free milk, it is not a safe food unless sterilized. For the milk supply has a vital bearing not only on the diarrhoeal diseases of infants but on all the infective diseases.

The death rate from measles in Massachusetts has declined in thirty-five years from 16 per hundred thousand to 5; from scarlet fever from about 70 to less than 10; from whooping cough from about 20 to less than 10

barring an epidemic in 1903, when it went up to 17. Similar declines have taken place throughout the country, perhaps not as notably everywhere but certainly in most of the large cities. It has come about chiefly through a more and more rigid isolation of sick and convalescent children, a more and more rigid insistence that they shall not go to school, and more and more thorough medical examinations in the schools. In New York City, for example, scarlet fever showed a noteworthy falling off after the disease was made subject to quarantine in 1888, and measles after it was quarantined in 1896. Other cities show similar good results from isolation. But