The first railway in Canada was the short local line between Laprairie, Quebec Province, opposite Montreal, and St. John, on the Richelieu River, a distance of just under seventeen and a half miles. This railway was incorporated into the system of the Grand Trunk Railway, which received its Charter in 1852 from the Provinces of Upper and Lower Canada. For a long time, however, railway construction hung fire, partly due to the political troubles which came to an end with the reconciliation of the French and English and the creation of the Dominion of Canada by the Act of Confederation. It was the daring enterprise of the Canadian Pacific Company that really inaugurated the development of Canada to which the Dominion owes its present prosperity and its great future. We are not accustomed in the Old Country to talk affectionately about a railway as a friend of the people and the country, but I had not been long in Canada before I found that everybody talks of the “C.P.R.” as if it were a personal friend. As I travelled westward through the Prairie Provinces to Vancouver, farmers, commercial travellers, business men, politicians, everybody kept bringing up what the Canadian Pacific Railway has done for the Dominion. “The C.P.R. has made Canada,” “The C.P.R. is at the back of Canada,” “Canada owes its future to the C.P.R.,” and such expressions are heard all the while with monotonous reiteration. The C.P.R. appears to fulfil the function in Canada discharged by the weather in England of bridging awkward pauses in conversation. It might be imagined that fairy financiers with no sordid thought of dividends devised the scheme and carried through the construction of the C.P.R. out of sheer benevolent desire to do good. But financiers are not built that way. The fathers of the C.P.R. were just men with vision who had a great dream, and they persuaded investors to back the dream with millions of capital in the face of the pessimistic cawings of a grand army of croakers. “The earnings of the C.P.R.,” it was said, “will not pay for the axle-grease that it will use.”