deficit has been paid on the ordinary English telegraph system; a deficit which even last year amounted to no less than £190,000 sterling. The money has been paid cheerfully, because it gives to the mass of the people the advantages of the sixpenny telegram. Why should all the vials of wrath, ridicule, and, we may now add, misrepresentation, be reserved for the one State Railway of Canada, because the people are willing to pay the deficiency of £50,000 or £100,000 involved in its operation, for the sake of the consolidation which it has given to the Dominion, and the unmeasured benefit which it confers on immense districts and large populations which would otherwise be singularly isolated, socially and commercially, from the rest of Canada and the rest of the world. Once more, speaking in disparagement of the same railway as a military route, Mr. Smith says: 'At the time when the Intercolonial was projected, the two British officers of artillery, whose pamphlet has been already cited, pointed out that the line would be fatally liable to snow blocks. It would be awkward if, at a crisis {179} like that of the Great Mutiny, or that of a Russian invasion in India, the reinforcements were blockaded by snow in the wilderness between Halifax and Quebec.' What can we think of a writer who claims to be fair, and yet parades as authorities two young gentlemen whose haphazard forecast has been belied by twenty years of actual working experience? So far from being 'fatally' liable to snow block, the Intercolonial is operated during the two or three months of deep snow with less risk of delay than is incurred every day of the year by ships passing through the Suez Canal, the other most available route in an Indian Crisis. It has been my own lot to suffer a longer detention on a steamship at Ismailia, a detention accepted by the ship's officers as in the course of ordinary experience, than I can remember having met with in many years' experience of the Intercolonial.