Most railways have come into existence merely to serve a nation’s needs. It was, as we have seen, the higher fate of the C.P.R. first to create the nation whose needs it was to serve. Out of that fact sprang traditions that have moulded the destiny and that conserve the character of one of the most gigantic, most powerful, most prosperous, and most public-spirited corporations in the world. It is sometimes said that a joint stock company has no soul to be saved and no hindquarters to be kicked. Irreverent remarks of that sort do not apply to the C.P.R. Those who have lived or travelled in Canada will not need to be told about that remarkable and unique institution. But the rest of the world are not in a position to know, and certainly could never guess, the rôle filled by that railway in a stirring national drama. To the Bourses of Europe the C.P.R. is only a triumphant corporation that makes a clear annual profit of over £5,000,000, that is constantly and successfully extending its enterprises, and that issues to its proprietors at par new stock that commands a high premium. But those facts merely reveal the C.P.R. in its public character. Its domestic character is the interesting study. The C.P.R. is the servant, friend, partner (and, I had almost written, pal) of the settler in Central and Western Canada. No soul, indeed! Why, of the C.P.R.’s several titles to the world’s esteem, the first place must be given to what I can only call its psychological worth. One of the growing community of prosperous grain-growers in Alberta was telling me the story of his early experiences—how he arrived with his large family on the land, and how he and his sons set to work and built their house. “Yes,” I said, “but where did you and your family live before the house was ready?” “Oh,” he replied, “the C.P.R. very kindly lent us a shack to be going on with.” Another settler, also reviewing his initial efforts, explained that, being a muff at his new work, he failed to make timely arrangements for harvesting his first crop, which consequently was ruined. “Having counted on the grain to see me through,” he added, “I was fairly broke. But the good old C.P.R. came to my rescue. They gave me work near my place and paid me well, and next spring they lent me horses and fitted me out with seed—in fact, they helped a lame dog over the stile.” A third Canadian farmer had bought irrigated land from the C.P.R. on the usual basis of easy annual payments. “But,” he explained, “the minor canals had not been completed in our neighbourhood, and water did not reach my ditches until two months after I got there. Having to run up to Calgary, I called in at the C.P.R. and told them about it. They were most apologetic, and said they were very much to blame, as the land ought not to have been sold as irrigated land until the water was actually there; so, quite of their own accord, they gave me an extra year’s grace before my first payment became due.”