Yes, yes, I could see all that; but, still, the virtues of the C.P.R. had not been explained away to my satisfaction. Many transportation and other companies have an interest in serving the public, but they act within the limited sanction of prearranged routine, and their servants are held in leash by red tape. I had never before come across a capitalistic corporation which offered a helping hand to anyone in need of it, dealing with each case on its merits. I had never before encountered a capitalistic corporation which, through its thousand and one agents, acted in all matters with ungrudging and anxious zeal. All along the broad tract of country that it serves, the C.P.R. is a watchful, ministering, unseen, personal force. It is actuated by an almost paternal but wholly unobtrusive sense of responsibility towards the country it has created and the people that country contains. I might fill this chapter with different examples of how interest is shown and assistance rendered. I can even give an example that is of purely personal application to myself. Last autumn it became known to the C.P.R. that I, a visitor from England, was laid up with a temporary indisposition in a hotel at Gleichen, Alberta. The C.P.R. wrote to say it was sorry! You may smile, gentle reader, but such was the pleasant fact; nor am I prepared to deny that the process of convalescence was assisted by the knowledge that, in my short lapse from health, I had the brotherly sympathy of an institution that represented £80,000,000 of capital. Common sense scouts the idea that the C.P.R., in the pains it takes to assist the farmers of the prairies and the fruit-growers of British Columbia, is actuated by a conscious desire for more freight (it already carries 113,000,000 bushels of grain per annum), or for more passengers (of whom its yearly total has grown to 11,000,000—a figure, by the by, which, since it is larger than the population of the Dominion, shows that many Canadians travel frequently). Nay, the country having now entered upon an era of rapid and automatic growth, the prosperity of the C.P.R. is bound to increase, irrespective of what may be called the fraternal side of its activities. What is more, it has been shown to the satisfaction of financial experts that even were the C.P.R. divorced from its railroad, and the revenue derived therefrom, it could continue to pay its 10 per cent. dividend. No; I am convinced that to explain the personal services that the C.P.R. renders to the community, to understand why the C.P.R. is a kind of joint stock Government, we must hark back to the conditions that fixed its traditions.