APPENDIX. THE following Tables have been carefully compiled from authentic sources and Parliamentary Returns, and may be found useful for reference : Table showing the Rent of Cultivated Land, the Price of Provisions, the Wages of the Agricultural Labourer, the Rent of Cottages, and the average Produce of Wheat, in three periods during the last hundred years in England. Quantities of Foreign Wheat, and other kinds of Grain, and Value of Grain, and Live-stock, and Table showing the Annual Yield of Wheat per acre in the United Kingdom during each of the last thirty years, and in three periods of ten years each, reckoning 28 bushels as an average crop, and representing that by the number 100. THE NORTH-WEST TERRITORY OF CANADA. IN 1859 I published a small volume on American Prairie-farming, in which I gave the following account of this region, which is now coming into prominent notice : "There is a subject much agitated in Canada at present, and which is also of national importance, the opening of a direct route through the British territory from Canada to the Pacific. Hitherto, the vast territory proposed to be opened up by this route has been represented to be unsuited by climate for settlement, and capable of producing only furs and hides. It has been so used by the Hudson's Bay and North-west Companies ever since the French were expelled from Canada. And the urgent efforts of Lord Selkirk, so early as 1805, to colonise a tract which from his personal knowledge he estimated as capable of supporting thirty millions of people, were by a combination of obstructions and disasters finally extinguished in favour of the fur trade. More recent investigation has shown that the climate is not unfavourable to settlement, the summer temperature on the Saskatchewan being the same as in the fertile region of Northern Illinois and Southern Wisconsin, while the buffalo winters in the belts of woodland on these northern |