The total area of these four States is about four-fifths that of Ontario, and yet their increase of population in ten years more than equals the entire population of the province.
In population, wealth, industries, and resources Ontario is the Dominion's gem; yet in a decade she could attract and hold but fifty-odd thousand persons,--not quite all the children born within her borders.
All political divisions aside, there is no reason in the world why population should be dense on the west bank of the Detroit River and sparse on the east; why people should teem to suffocation to the south of the St.Lawrence and not to the north.
These conditions are not normal, and sooner or later must change.
It is not in the nature of things that this North American continent should be arbitrarily divided in its most fertile midst by political lines, and by and by it will be impossible to keep the multiplying millions south of the imaginary line from surging across into the rich vacant territory to the north.

The outcome is inevitable; neither diplomacy nor statecraft can prevent it.
When the population of this country is a hundred or a hundred and fifty millions the line will have disappeared.

There may be a struggle of some kind over some real or fancied grievance, but, struggle or no struggle, it is not for man to oppose for long inevitable tendencies.

In the long run, population, like water, seeks its level; in adjacent territories, the natural advantages and attractions of which are alike, the population tends strongly to become equally dense; political conditions and differences in race and language may for a time hold this tendency in check, but where race and language are the same, political barriers must soon give way.
All that has preserved Canada from absorption up to this time is the existence of those mighty natural barriers, the St.Lawrence and the great lakes.

As population increases in the Northwest, where the dividing line is known only to surveyors, the situation will become critical.