Newfoundland

NEWFOUNDLAND. Newfoundland is said to be the tenth largest island in the world, forming a separate country. It is one sixth larger than Ireland, one-fifth smaller than England. It is approximately 317 m. in its widest place, and 317 m. long from north to south. Area 42,734 sq.m. Pop. (estimate 1925) 277,285. It is a country of great potential wealth.

Material wealth has been more easily and rapidly accumulated farther west, and the current of immigration from Europe has hurried past her shores only staying to profit by her more easily gathered raw products. New methods of using the resources of nature, new methods of controlling her powers, new methods of transportation and communication are beginning already to turn new attention to this oldest colony of the greatest empire in the world.

Position.

Newfoundland lies more to the south than England, and her position at the gateway of the St. Lawrence has given her a strategic position that is alone sufficient to raise her to a position of first importance to the federated nations of the British Empire, while the fact that her capital lies almost exactly half-way be tween New York and London made her the link that enabled the two great English-speaking countries to be first united together by the message-carrying transatlantic cables, decades before it would have been possible in any other way. Nor as a pioneer in uniting the two countries through the conquest of the air has Newfoundland played a mean part.

Newfoundland is part of the American continent, broken off. Her southern point, Cape Race, lies as far south as 46° 39' N. in the latitude of Bordeaux, France, and her northern point, Cape Norman, is in 50 38' N., the same as that of Brighton on the English south coast, while she falls in longitude between 52° 36' W., and 59° 3o' W. She is separated on the north from Labrador by the Strait of Belle Isle, fifty miles long, which ranges from nine miles wide at its narrowest place at the western end to forty miles wide at its eastern entrance. This is a shallow, mostly sandy bottomed strait, through which the ocean current, coming from the Polar sea runs into the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and through

which the great river of Canada, as it now is called, partly dis charges her waters (the rest flowing through Cabot Strait, a piece of water ninety miles wide at its narrowest place, between Cape Breton on the Canadian side, and Port au Basques, opposite it in Newfoundland). Belle Isle, or the Isle of Demons, lies in the centre of the eastern entrance. Its lofty cliffs are well lighted at both ends by fine lighthouses, and it is one of the best cod fish ing stations in the world.

Minerals.

The story of mines in Newfoundland is very different in 1928 from what it was in 1925. Then, excluding the great Wabana iron deposit at Belle Isle in Conception Bay, min erals gave little return to the country. In 1928, with the lead, zinc and copper of Buchan's mine on the Exploits, and the Red Indian Lake deposit, the new day had dawned. The huge deposit of titaniferous magnetite at St. George's, called Steel Mountain, the widely distributed deposits of copper in Notre Dame Bay, now that low grade ores can be so much more profitably worked, the silver lead zinc area of Placentia Bay, especially the La Manche lead mine, the vast deposits of coal in St. George's neighbourhood, all promise a real future in this third line of native wealth. As a copper producing country, experts say that the future is abso lutely assured. Gypsum for cement, fine slate, oil shale, and the annual output of oil on the north-west coast, need further work, but again the experts estimate them as a potential of great value. The final settlement of the "Labrador Question" by the Privy Council in 1927 entirely in favour of Newfoundland, has given the Colony an area twice as large as her own, with waterfalls that are, for potential power, now unequalled in the world, and all the timber, minerals, fisheries and wealth of one hundred thou sand square miles of virgin territory. Its value to her is esti mated at anywhere between $300,000,00o and $50o,000,000 on a conservative estimate. Yet a few years ago, she offered the whole of it to Canada for $30,000,000, and the offer was declined.