I fear that it is impossible to acquit Mr. Smith of at times making statements disingenuous in themselves and especially misleading to the English reader. Perhaps the peculiar animosity with which he has always regarded those Canadian Railways whose construction has falsified his prophecy that the Dominion could not be welded together, explains, if it does not excuse, a special recklessness of statement when he describes them to English people. Mr. Smith speaks of the Intercolonial Railway as 'spanning the vast and irreclaimable wilderness which separates Halifax from Quebec.' Again he says: 'The maritime Provinces are divided from Old Canada by the wilderness of many hundred miles, through which the Intercolonial Railway runs, hardly taking up a passenger or a bale of freight by the way.' Would the ordinary reader outside of Canada believe, after reading this description, that in the course of the 688 miles of rail between Halifax and Quebec the {177} Intercolonial traverses large counties like Cumberland and Westmorland, among the most fertile and productive in Canada; that though running through forest country in the immediate rear of the settled coast line it is closely connected by a score of short branches with the coal areas and all the thickly populated districts along the Bay of Fundy and the Gulf of St. Lawrence, that for 100 miles it follows the still more populous shores of the River St. Lawrence, and that the comparatively short distance, scarcely more than 100 miles, between the settlements at the head of Bay Chaleur and those of the St. Lawrence is alone responsible for the epithets 'vast and irreclaimable' which Mr. Smith applies to the whole length of the road? Would the reader believe that it is a railway which carries about a million passengers and more than a million tons of freight every year? That it has conferred the enormous advantage of swift communication with the outside world on some hundreds of thousands of people to whom its construction was an object of eager desire for years before it was accomplished? It is true that, worked as a State Railway for the good of the communities through which it passes, for the avowed purpose of uniting the provinces more closely, kept at a high state of efficiency, and under some unusual expense for clearing away snow in winter, a loss is at present annually incurred, but it is doubtful if any public expenditure made in the Dominion confers so great an advantage on so many people, while subserving great national purposes. {178} Not in Canada alone, but in Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, India, Russia and South America, railways, which do not directly pay, are for the public good, or for prospective and indirect advantage, constructed and worked to the content of those who pay for them. In Great Britain state subventions are given to steamship, postal, and cable lines which would not in themselves be at once commercially profitable. For many years a large