In its early days the C.P.R. had to face powerful enemies, great difficulties, and the burden of anxiety that is inevitable where heavy capital outlay has to precede opportunity of remunerative revenue. Its critics said the line could never pay. Its promoters were supported only by their faith—their faith in a population that had not yet arrived. Nowadays it is difficult to realise that in 1885 men had still to be convinced of the fertility of the western prairie. For centuries it had yielded the world nothing but the furry coats of the animals roaming its unpopulated wilds. Even amid the strenuous work of constructing the line at high pressure—with gangs of engineers, navvies and station-builders forming a great graded army of men, accompanied by thousands of horses, which pressed forward in orderly sequence from section to section, each camp of toilers working in an organised relation to the base of supplies following them across the country—even at that initial stage of its vast enterprise did the C.P.R. begin studying the interests of the future settlers. Special agricultural gangs were put on the construction trains, and at intervals of about twenty miles they alighted and ploughed a few acres, which were afterwards seeded, with the result that, though the cultivation was of the roughest, and no measures were taken to keep marauding animals at bay, such heavy and excellent crops were produced that the high potentialities of soil and climate were triumphantly advertised. Thus early did the C.P.R. “show the way” and identify itself with the practical interests of settlers in the West. It had land to sell them, it was providing them with lines of communication, with means of transport. It followed that the new population would be largely dependent upon the railway. But the railway would be wholly dependent upon the new population. Its fortunes were contingent upon this one factor—whether people should come and prosper and be satisfied. That factor controlled the C.P.R.’s policy and established its principles. For its rescue from the sea of financial indebtedness could alone be effected by the settler. To the extent of that indebtedness I have already given some clues. Let me give a few more.