Excerpt from British Columbia: Lecture Delivered by the Hon. J. H. Turner, Agent-General and Ex-Prime Minister of British Columbia, at Brentwood, Essex, January 14th, 1909Vancouver and Victoria, is making a very important addition to their lines by carrying it over the Frazer River, and for some sixty-three miles through the rich farming lands, perhaps the best dairy lands on the coast, to the town of Chilliwack, a beautiful and rising place.These all will have a wonderful effect on the progress of the Province, opening up its far-lying districts and giving access to many million more acres. But I must pass on rapidly, as my time is limited and I want to speak of some other great natural resources of the country. British Columbia to-day possesses probably the largest acreage of standing forest in the world, of timber that is specially adapted to the requirements of the age, for the great railway bridges and other buildings going on, for which it is specially adapted. Then the demand for wood pulp for the making of paper is growing so rapidly that it becomes a serious problem as to where the wood for this purpose is to come from.American capitalists fully understand this condition, and are steadily acquiring forest lands in British Columbia. To give an idea of the value of the timber industry to British Columbia, I may state that the product last year was nearly 846 million feet of timber. But to pass on to another, and which to my mind is most important of all the industries of any country, which is indeed the natural strength of a country, for not only does it furnish the greatest item of riches for any land, but in its progress it provides life and health and makes a people great, I mean agriculture. It is on this, after all, we must depend, and it is a source which, while giving us all the good things, like the widow's cruse of oil, it never decreases, indeed, on the contrary, the more you take from it by proper methods the more you add to its stores of wealth it is a manu factory that never wears out if properly used, and grows more beautiful and more useful with age.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.