Nothing in North American transportation quite equals the rise and fall of the Canadian Northern. Those who were intimately associated with its twenty-six years’ history scarcely realized the extent to which Mackenzie and Mann were unique among the roadmakers of all the continents. For the accumulation of wealth, and also for the domination of railway systems of huge mileage, James J. Hill was in a class by himself. He died worth sixty million dollars—without a will. He obtained vast riches through the iron ore deposits of the Mesaba range, in the Minnesota hinterland of Lake Superior—there was nothing like it in Canada. His railways connected Chicago with the cities and plains of the United States northwest, even to the Pacific Ocean. His ships sailed to Nippon and far Cathay.

Sir William Mackenzie and Sir Donald Mann made no enormous fortunes out of the railway they built from Atlantic to Pacific tidewaters. But they performed a feat which no American combination ever achieved. Their enterprise was more original than anything which Hill carried to profitable result; for they began beyond where Hill, and even the Canadian Pacific, had left off. Indeed, Hill pulled out of Canadian railway building rather than share responsibility for the first line on Superior’s northern shore.

Mackenzie and Mann’s original railway carried settlement a hundred miles north of the line beyond which implement manufacturers had refrained from extending their credit. They went, not only where railway obligations had not gone, but where, aforetime, railway obligation was afraid to venture. They looked ultimately to great fortune for themselves—there has never been any pretense to the contrary. But they had in them infinitely more than a lust for pelf. The first justice that is done to these two men is a frank recognition of the pioneering, constructive passion which made of them great Canadians.

Ambition that was all self-sacrifice never braced a continent with steel. The money changers do not open the purse of Fortunatus to Simon Pure altruists. Railways must be carried to completion on the financial engines that are available to mundane men. The Canadian Northern was brought into being because the time had come when more than the C.P.R. was needed in Western Canada. It is not good for a railway to be alone in so broad a land. The combination that had grown out of a contest over the ownership of a corral-full of mules away up in the Selkirks was the ordained instrument to prove that an impossible piece of work could be done.

Sir William Mackenzie, in his favourite car, the Atikokan—which was bought while it was being used by Admiral Dewey on his triumphal tour—was discussing with a guest one night in 1905 the prospects of the Canadian Northern, which had not yet reached Edmonton. His inveterate optimism then believed that Hudson Bay would be reached within three years. Asked if he had ever been to the Bay he answered:

“No; I haven’t been to Sao Paulo, either; but I’ve taken a million dollars out of there within the last three years.”

He told of having received an offer from the Grand Trunk to buy the Canadian Northern at the time the Grand Trunk Pacific scheme was brewing, and of refusing it, though there would have been millions of dollars in it for himself and his partner.

“Why didn’t you sell out?” his guest asked.

“I like building railroads,” was the simple, truthful, profound answer.

The money-grubber doesn’t talk that way. He doesn’t act as Mackenzie and Mann always acted.

Many of us, who never had personal control of millions of dollars, and to whom a moderate fortune is a hunger to be eagerly appeased, and a divinity to be constantly adored, cannot conceive of the possession of money being a mere adjunct to those who do great things through their capacity for changing other people’s money into enormous vehicles of commerce.

The money-making side of Mackenzie and Mann, the Canadians, was, if you like, what the penchant for fussing with detectors and amplifiers is to the radio fan. He’s after the result—the miracle of the perfectly reproduced voice, singing a thousand miles away. He cannot get his result by being indifferent to the peculiarities of the squeal that precedes the tone.

Mackenzie and Mann could not have built and acquired approximately ten thousand miles of railways by preaching altruism and despising the money market. They could not have done it if their sole propulsion came from love of money for money’s sake.

As construction contractors they would have piled up huge profits; and would have got out when the getting was good. As this is written the Mackenzie estate is being realized for the heirs. Without knowing anything of the details, I think it can be predicted that the popular notion that Sir William piled up fabulous wealth out of the opportunities furnished by Government guarantees, and construction contracts let to himself at his own price, will prove to be as vain as some of the other current delusions about him.

From time to time, base and baseless charges were made to the effect that moneys raised in London for railway construction were used for other purposes, and that excessive contractors’ profits were selfishly provided for. Two grosser libels were never perpetrated. The first is merely absurd. The second is almost equally so when the costs of construction per mile of the Grand Trunk Pacific and National Transcontinental and the Canadian Northern are compared.

It has already been suggested that the Canadian Northern was not conceived as a transcontinental railway, with the beginning of the Lake Manitoba Railway and Canal Company’s line between Gladstone and Dauphin. The scheme, as a scheme, growed, with Topsy-like inevitability. Before it could finally prosper it was perforce surrendered to its chief guarantors by its authors. It is not necessary to wait for Time’s final justification, in dollars and cents, before the nation understands its essential magnificence—and also the extent to which another sort of ambition in the political and railway worlds contributed to its temporary bafflement.

To judge it broadly, and surely, the first requisite is an appreciation of the prairie factor in any Canadian transcontinental railway. The reports and maps of forty-five years ago show the C.P.R. main line originally projected across territory, every mile of which, between the Red River and the ascent to the Yellowhead Pass was first given a railway by Mackenzie and Mann. In less than twenty years the Canadian Northern, developed from a pioneer piece of track, operated, in all departments, by a force of fourteen, into a system which, during the war, was running trains into centres of one thousand population and over, representing ninety-seven per cent. of the populations of Manitoba and Saskatchewan and ninety per cent. of the population of Alberta.

In 1915-16, the traffic year of the most prolific crop the West had ever grown, the Canadian Northern hauled 132,000,000 bushels of grain to Port Arthur from the prairies. We were then in the pinch of the constriction which finally brought about national ownership; and insufficiency of equipment caused us to lose a good deal of our share of the grain traffic.

Even so, although the C.P.R. had every advantage, including its double track all the way between Winnipeg and Fort William, and nearly all the way from Winnipeg to Moose Jaw, we hauled 31.1 per cent. of the total, against the C.P.R.’s 56.3 per cent., and 12.6 per cent. of all other lines.

Deferring allusion to the controversial question of the wisdom of projecting two new transcontinental railways in the first decade of this century, it is worth while glancing at the Canadian Northern’s relation to the growth of the nation’s business as affected by the construction of the sections north of the Great Lakes, and across the mountains to Vancouver.

Each of these sections is a timbered area; and each has contributed materially to the distinction earned by the Canadian Northern, of being the greatest Canadian carrier of forest products. Thirty per cent. of the capacity of all the lumber mills of Canada was on Canadian Northern lines. Thirty-two per cent. of the traffic created by Canadian lumber mills was water-borne; so that the C.N.R. competed for just about half of the rail-hauled lumber business of the country. Taking 1915-16 as a representative year, here are the figures of lumber hauled by the three great Canadian systems:

During 1917, the last year before nationalization, we hauled 3,850 cars, or eighty-five million feet, of lumber up the Fraser Canyon and over the Yellowhead Pass. The timber on territory tributary to the Canadian Northern main line in British Columbia was then figured at 30,380,000,000 feet; and on Vancouver Island, between Victoria and Alberni, at 25,000,000,000 feet.

While my own work was in the operating and traffic departments, it was, of course, concerned with the fundamental features of the system as a whole. Grades are as much a part of traffic as cars and cargoes. When we began to emerge as a potential transcontinental, what was the outlook for ultimate prosperity, so far as it would be governed by ease of operation, and the magnitude of population to be served?

Ease of operation is mainly a matter of low grades. The Canadian Northern main line from Atlantic tidewater to Pacific tidewater has better grades than all the other railways on the continent. The mountain sections, of course, are the most eloquent of grading advantage or disadvantage to the railways crossing them. The importance of low grades between the prairies and the Pacific was immensely enhanced by the Panama Canal, which has already made Vancouver a great grain port. The Canadian Northern maximum climb between Edmonton and Vancouver is four-tenths of one per cent., or twenty-six feet per mile. The Grand Trunk Pacific grades are almost equally good, but as they lead to Prince Rupert, 400 miles farther than Vancouver from the canal, the balance of advantage is obvious, as between the two junior routes.

The C.P.R. was first projected to reach the Pacific through the Yellowhead Pass, which is by far the best for railway purposes between Mexico and the Yukon. But the main line location being changed, two climbs over summits were necessary before the long descent to the ocean down the Thompson and Fraser rivers could begin—over the Rockies, at the Kicking Horse, and over the Selkirks, by the pass Major Rogers discovered, forty-three years ago. The maximum altitude reached by the Canadian Northern is 3,700 feet. The maximum of the C.P.R. is 5,332 feet, with a drop to 2,443, and a second rise to 4,340 feet.

The maximum Canadian Northern grade eastward is seven-tenths of one per cent. The C.P.R. maximum is two per cent.—it was over three during thirty years of operation. Put another way, by the time you are twenty miles beyond Calgary on the C.P.R. you are as high as the highest summit of the C.N.R., and on the C.N.R., instead of having to rise a further 1,600 feet, and then to climb in a few miles, 1,900 feet more, there is only a negligible second rise to get over the watershed of the Canoe and the North Thompson rivers, whence the road to the Pacific is downhill.

The contrast between the Canadian Northern and the more southerly American roads is even greater. The Union Pacific switchbacks to a maximum of 8,200 feet, and the Sante FÉ to 7,421 feet.

The difference made by the grades to operating costs can be judged by the difference in the load which an engine can pull up a four-tenths and a one per cent. grade. Up twenty-six feet to the mile—four-tenths—a 190-ton locomotive will haul 3,768 tons. Up sixty-feet per mile—one per cent.—she will drag only 1,780 tons. The disparity increases with the acclivity.

The Canadian Northern, then, had the elements of a great permanent success, given enough tributary population creating traffic to earn expenses and fixed charges during the earlier operating years. That there was calamitous overbuilding of Canadian railways nobody will deny. To attempt to fix responsibility for it might invite a certain degree of political controversy which no lover of a quiet life desires. This is a strictly moral tale, and a few facts will point out their own moral.

In 1904, when a general election solidified the Grand Trunk Pacific legislation, the Canadian Northern had already in existence 2,500 miles beyond Port Arthur, all aiding the Western development which was absolutely vital to Canada’s future. This railway was altogether a native growth, the executive force in which had been concerned with Western railway construction since before the first locomotive entered Winnipeg. There was no imposition from without—no grandiose scheme intended to dazzle an electorate, or fill a Parliament with swelling pride. The Canadian Northern grew in Time’s own fruitful womb; and struck its roots deep and wide all over the Western land.

From the point of view of the prairie provinces’ development, the nicer problem of the wisdom of hastening the Superior and Mountain sections may be put aside momentarily by this question: “What would be the relative positions of the two junior railways if their revenues depended solely on traffic originating between the Great Lakes and the Great Mountains?”

In different terms, the question is: “How do the old Canadian Northern and the old Grand Trunk Pacific compare, twenty years after the Grand Trunk Pacific was launched, as servants of the country, which is the only reason for their existence?”

Every commercial traveller who knows the West, and every superficial observer of the flow of grain to the Lakes’ head, is aware that years and years before the G.T.P. hauled its first car of wheat into Fort William, the Canadian Northern avalanche of grain converged upon Port Arthur from branches which appeared upon the map like the fingers of a hand.

In the year of the first G.T.P. car’s arrival at Fort William the Canadian Northern earned nearly twenty-one million dollars. If the Canadian Northern had remained a prairie road, doing business only between the Lakes and Mountains, it would never have been in Queer Street, but would have more than paid for operating costs, fixed charges and betterment requirements out of revenue, because it was the West’s own product to meet the West’s own needs.

Neither as a prairie road, nor as a prairie-and-mountain road has the Grand Trunk Pacific ever earned its operating expenses. The only section which has shown more earnings than operating expenses, is the line between Winnipeg and Fort William, which was built as the National Transcontinental. That result has only been possible to this piece of line because Canadian Northern traffic is handed to it at Winnipeg, under the co-ordinating arrangements without which for many years to come the Grand Trunk Pacific, which was built at unprecedented expense per mile for a pioneer road, would resemble nothing so much as the seven lean kine of Joseph’s immortal dream. To a large extent the former National Transcontinental is being used as the old Canadian Northern harvesters’ second track between Winnipeg and Lake Superior.

Why, then, did the Canadian Northern fall, and two great builders with it? The obvious but misleading guess is that the prosperous middle was bankrupted by the lean and voracious Montreal-Port Arthur and Edmonton-Vancouver ends. Ambition o’er-leaped itself and met the fate excessive leaping invites. The man who is a better biter than chewer will always choke. The guess and comment are plausible—much more plausible than what I believe is the true explanation of the debacle of Mackenzie and Mann, which was, finally, the war. There were other contributing causes, of course, but the real overwhelmer was Armageddon.

Few men seemed to realize in 1911 and 1912 that the period of swift expansion which had given prosperity to all sorts of businesses in Canada was about to conclude. Hindsight is proverbially better than foresight. It is easy, even for statesmen, to realize now, that there had been too little increase in the basic productions of agriculture, and too much addition to manufacturing and other plants which could only flourish permanently on a constantly expanding fruition of the soil, along with steady development of forest and mining industries.

Sir George Paish, editor of “The Statist”, after a tour of Canada before the war, said that we had furnished ourselves with plants capable of taking care of three times our then production from natural resources. Immigration was flowing too much to cities and towns. Free land was becoming comparatively scarce, and even in the prairie country sixty-five per cent. of the immigration was keeping off the farms. Early in 1912 the Government was warned in its Special Commissioner’s Report on Immigration that the basis of its immigration policy should be changed so as to deflect public money into scientific land settlement.

In the fall of 1912 signs of an approaching constriction of C.N.R. earnings began to appear. The Superior and Mountain sections were under way. The London money market, partly through conditions caused by wars in the Balkans, was not as responsive as before. Dominion and Provincial Government guarantees did not now ensure the immediate sale of securities, at the most favourable prices. In the spring of 1914 application to Parliament for special assistance became imperative.

We had been able to meet all fixed charges out of revenue every year since 1897. Connection of Toronto with Port Arthur around the north of Lake Superior had been made on the first of January. But, with a diminishing immigration and a slackening of employment in the cities, it would take time to win for this part of the system between older and younger Canada, a traffic commensurate with the proportion of the total trade between East and West which the Canadian Northern had created. Even to-day, the old Canadian Northern originates heavy East-and-West business for other railways.

The British Columbia lines, which were being constructed at a speed and an economy that was possible only because of the long experience of engineers like M. H. MacLeod and T. H. White, were bound to cost more than the amounts of any Government guarantees. It had become necessary to finance some construction by short term notes, at a higher interest than guaranteed securities called for. Application was, therefore, made to the Government at Ottawa for guarantees amounting to forty-five million dollars, to enable the road to be finished between Quebec and Vancouver.

Sir William Mackenzie, who always handled financial business at Ottawa, was turned down flat by the Government. But, as Sir Donald Mann says, a refusal never meant any more to him than a spur to persistence in advocating his cause. After much labour in placing the facts where they could be appreciated, the aid was promised. Against considerable opposition, in the late spring the legislation was passed and Sir William went to England to raise the money.

He succeeded in placing a substantial proportion of the securities with a great financial house. A first issue of three and a half million pounds was taken by the public, less than three weeks before the formal declaration of war against Germany. The financial house did not repudiate its bargain, but there was no prospect of raising money in London for Canadian railway construction in August, 1914, or subsequently, during the war. Indeed, the British Government prohibited any issue of any description from any of the Dominions, while hostilities lasted.

It would have been unwise to stop work in Canada because of a war the duration of which was not foreseen. Though we were restricted in pace, construction went on, the money for which was obtained in New York, through more short term notes, with the securities unsold in London as collateral. Guaranteed as the collateral securities were, they could only realize about sixty per cent. of their face value. This and the higher rate of interest, had the effect of considerably raising the cost of capital required for construction.

When, to inaugurate the linking of Quebec and Vancouver by the Canadian Northern, an excursion of Parliamentarians from the St. Lawrence to Burrard Inlet was arranged in the fall of 1915, it was clear that New York must be permanently drawn upon, if the situation, believed to have been finally saved at midsummer, 1914, were not to descend into disaster.

Sir William Mackenzie, at an age when chiefs of the C.P.R. retire on their highly deserved pensions, faced a heavier task than anything that confronted Stephen, Smith, or Van Horne in the C.P.R.’s most trying period. The Canadian Government, with London still an inexhaustible reservoir, was the C.P.R.’s last and safest resort. Mackenzie saw a world war engrossing every energy of the Dominion, and rendering London financially impotent to him. For sheer tenacity, for courage which attacked the most formidable obstacles without a quail; for capacity to bring things to pass, I think Canada has not yet begotten his equal. The marvel is, not that he and Sir Donald Mann could not finish all that they had begun; but that they carried it so nearly to the triumph, hope of which had been like a pillar of cloud to them in the days whereon the multitude applauded, and a pillar of fire in the night of difficulty such as they had endured when the non-Canadian was preferred before them, and when the panic of the fall of 1907 smote North America.

Beginning as an unknown venturer into Lombard street, Sir William Mackenzie had brought to Canada over three hundred million dollars for Canadian Northern Railways, which had made possible an amount of development of all kinds, the subtraction of which from Canada’s economic content to-day would leave the nation poor indeed. But, while this was happening, the star of Canada had been in the ascendant, and it seemed that British money had at last developed an unchangeable westward impetus.

There seem to be investment flows and ebbs in the affairs of men. They are without the regularity in time, but they have the variability in volume of the Bay of Fundy tides. One recalls periods wherein there was either so little opportunity or inclination to proceed with the development of the earth’s natural resources that, as an old London friend said, a man with a hundred thousand pounds to lend could take it down to the City, and not earn enough with it to buy his lunch. There is, no doubt, a psychological explanation of the accession and diminution of fiscal confidence in times of peaceful commerce undisturbed by the threat of war. There is also a partial accountability for the turning of capital into this or that channel of increase. It is the tendency of investment to overplay its hand when the habit has grown of putting faith and cash into a particular species of enterprise.

During the first period of Canadian railway expansion following the Crimean war wheat in Ontario went up to two dollars a bushel. Real estate in towns like Whitby and Ingersoll rose to the fabulous price of $300 per foot frontage—the selling value of land on Jasper Avenue, Edmonton’s greatest thoroughfare, when the Canadian Northern approached from the East, and the capital of the infant Alberta had been set up there. Van Horne’s faith in the empty West was based on the fertility of its soil and the certainty that the United States would soon fill sufficiently to create a demand for more northern lands. But that expectation would be fulfilled—or its fulfilment accelerated—when shrewd men would induce capital to flow into the virgin terrain. The C.P.R. had the tremendous task of pioneering with steel across the Canadian plains. The northern areas of Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta awaited an equal, indeed, a more daring enterprise. Mackenzie and Mann were the all-Canadian instrumentalities for the adventure. They must obtain capital through London.

Representation there was a vital concern, seeing that it was not proposed to hand control of the great enterprise to directors who knew no more of Canada than was known by the English administration of the Grand Trunk. Absent treatment was no part of the creed of the two boldest Canadians of their time. The financial representative was found in a man of extraordinary mentality and financial genius, Mr. R. M. Horne-Payne. His services to Canada are really registered in the creation of vast agricultural regions out of solitude, and in the firm establishing of communities, from quiet hamlets to rushing cities, where the highest amenities of civilization have succeeded the wandering buffalo, and have substituted the sawmill for the towering pine.

The final reliance for Canadian railway expansion was of course, the comparatively small British investor. But, with so many opportunities to place money all over the world, this multitudinous host could not be depended on to produce, at a day or two’s notice all the money that was required to build a thousand miles of track from Pembroke to Port Arthur. Rushes to gold and silver camps have no counterpart in railway building spread over many years. To windward of the small investor, there must, therefore, be anchorages in the deeps of underwriting.

The railway requires, say, fifteen million dollars for a certain range of construction. Experience has shown that the wide advertising of an issue in the British money market usually brings at once subscriptions of from thirty to forty per cent. of the money required. Great financial houses must be found to guarantee purchase of the whole issue; they, in turn, retailing the securities as the demand for them continues. The retired colonel, who takes five hundred pounds’ worth of Government-guaranteed debenture stock on to-day’s advertising, will be ready for more at midsummer, when he gets what he wants from his broker—and that is how issues are absorbed, when they are not all snapped up as soon as they are offered.

The financial representative of the swiftly-growing Canadian Northern required, then, three outstanding qualifications—first, great and sincere faith in Canada’s immediate future; secondly, capacity to impart his confidence to important underwriters; and thirdly, a sound judgment of the temper and capabilities of the investing class whose response is the primary justification of the underwriters’ confidence. Mr. Horne-Payne, in a degree that can only be appreciated by those who have worked with him, has these qualifications—the proof of which was the British investment of over three hundred million dollars in the Canadian Northern, during his representation of it.

One illustration only of his faculty can be given. A friend saw him at his house in Brentwood, Essex, early one autumn. “I have just come in after motoring from Buxton, where I have had a short holiday,” said Horne-Payne. “We passed through Leamington. I think I can get about three hundred and fifty thousand pounds out of the town next winter.” The records show how accurate his forecast was.

The war changed all that. With London closed to him, the indomitable Sir William, who never parted with his nerve, found in New York a combination which was willing to consider seeing the Canadian Northern through, by taking care of the millions of dormant securities that must become active, by paying off the short-term notes; and by furnishing the funds necessary to raise the system to a standard worthy of its Dominion-wide theatre of operation.

While we hung on to the job of making the best of a heart-breaking, never-ending crisis, which even the delusive gains of the war could not mitigate, the New York syndicate invited Mr. E. E. Loomis, now President of the Lehigh Valley Railroad, and Mr. J. W. Platten, President of the United States Mortgage and Trust Company, of New York, to report on the value of the property. These gentlemen, in turn, appointed Messrs. Coverdale and Colpitts, two Canadians of high standing in the engineering profession in the United States, who had been conspicuously engaged in railway and industrial valuations, to examine thoroughly the physical features and contributories of nearly ten thousand miles of Canadian Northern railway.

A year was spent on this investigation. But, while it was going on, the Dominion Government, in view of the perilous condition of the old Grand Trunk, as menaced by its offspring, the G.T.P., and of the utterly hopeless position of the National Transcontinental, which the Grand Trunk had refused to take over, appointed a Royal Commission, consisting of Sir Henry Drayton, chairman of the Dominion Board of Railway Commissioners, President Smith of the New York Central lines, and Mr. William Acworth, an eminent British railway economist, to report on the whole railway situation of Canada. No criticism is due the Government for this action, in view of its commitments to both junior transcontinentals.

Early in 1917 the Coverdale-Colpitts report was printed. It absolutely justified the broad policy on which the Canadian Northern had been built; and there was good reason to expect that the New York syndicate would participate in Canadian Northern responsibilities. But on its heels came the Drayton-Acworth report, recommending nationalization, and the Smith minority report, demurring. No syndicate in the world would have committed itself to heavy financing of a great railway system, under such conditions. The New York people held off. We held on, but with only the scantest chance of coming through the war corporately alive.

In the end the Government assumed control of the Canadian Northern congeries of railways. The alternative was a receivership and reorganization, in which the guaranteed securities would have to be honoured by the Governments concerned; and the unsecured investors would have to take their meagre chance of full salvation. On the whole, perhaps, the best interests of the greatest number were best served by what was done. But if Mackenzie and Mann had been merely bent on self-service they might have come more profitably out of a formal Canadian Northern bankruptcy.

They held almost all the capital stock. Their position would have had what Grand Trunk junior shareholders have since called the nuisance value of a certain ability to hamper any attempt to make a settlement without their concurrence. But the British investors were held to have the dominant claim. The arbitrators’ award of ten million eight hundred thousand dollars to the capital stockholders, limited beforehand by agreement with the Government to a round ten millions, meant no such gain to them. They had pledged their interest, and the money had gone into construction. Certainly they had stood to gain by the success of the great venture. They also stood to lose. They lost, and raised no voice in lamentation.

In no sense do these discussions profess to be a history of the Canadian Northern, or of the two remarkable men whose partnership made the railway. Perhaps I was daily too deeply immersed in meeting the responsibilities which grew out of the superintendency between Gladstone and Dauphin, to be qualified to present the story in its historical perspective. But that immersion at least gave me, in many respects, a unique all-around intimacy with the enterprise itself, and its bearing upon the expanding life of Canada during a most fateful quarter of a century.

Sir William Mackenzie spent much of his time on trans-Atlantic missions. He was also interested in many other undertakings which absorbed their due proportion of his time. Sir Donald Mann, whose capacities are in keeping with the solidity of his physical frame, did a great deal of planning ahead. The problem of access to the Pacific was very much in his mind for twenty years, though he said little about it. The railway policy on which the British Columbia Government appealed to the country in December, 1909, was worked out during Sir Donald’s visit to Victoria in the preceding winter. Negotiations for charters were almost entirely in his hands.

It was not a sinecure to keep pace with the multitudinous demands for equipment in men, material and methods which arose out of the addition of an average of nine furlongs of railway per day to the system, for the first eighteen years; and of a total of 1,958 miles in 1915. Between six and seven hundred towns and shipping points are on the map as the direct result of that record, with every phase of which I was closely associated. We had good fortune in assembling an able, loyal and economical staff. Errors were made, of course—who makes no mistakes never makes anything. But if the story of the rise and fall of the Canadian Northern is ever written by some man who can by no possibility be called an interested partisan, his finding, on the unquestionable facts, can only be that the creators of the enterprise deserved more of their country than it is now possible for both of them to receive.