The railways linking Canada together have, indeed, cost the people and the Dominion and the provincial governments millions of money; and in early days, many municipalities, for the sake of having railways, seriously embarrassed themselves with debt. But the need seemed great. Lord Durham advised the building of the “Intercolonial Railway”—the line owned and operated by the Dominion government—to knit together the Maritime Provinces with the Canadas; but the difficulties and delays over this railway were endless, and it was not completed till 1876. For many years it was operated at a loss, but it has developed the country through which it passes and has greatly increased the trade between the several eastern provinces. Before the era of railways, dwellers in New Brunswick who wished to go to Quebec used not infrequently to go on foot through the intervening wilderness in the winter time. So the first Lieutenant-Governor of New Brunswick once tramped through the snowy woods to visit his brother the Governor-General, Lord Dorchester; and so in 1813, when the war with the United States was raging, some companies of New Brunswick troops marched on snowshoes to the aid of their hard-pressed brethren in Canada. Much later, if a traveller wished to go from Nova Scotia to Toronto, it was the easiest way to take ship to Boston, and go thence through the “States” by rail to “Canada”—as the Nova Scotians continued to call the provinces touching on the St. Lawrence for long after the name was extended to the whole Dominion. This journey to “Canada” was quite an adventure to an untravelled person who had been born and brought up almost within sound of the sea. But the long-delayed construction of the “Intercolonial” gradually changed that condition of affairs. The Grand Trunk is the pioneer of the several great company-owned railway systems, having absorbed many of the smaller railways begun in the fifties. For years it was not a profitable undertaking to its shareholders; but now its lines make a regular network in the older portions of Canada; and the Grand Trunk Pacific is being rapidly pushed to completion north of its older competitor in the West, the Canadian Pacific Railway. It is expected that when this “National Transcontinental Line” is finished it will shorten the trip round the globe by a week.