“Mr. Hays was first, last and all the time a great railway man. But it would be unjust to speak merely of that. He possessed other qualities that impressed me even more than that. He was throughout his life a man of lofty and unbending principle. I personally know that his early ending of his connection with a great railway system, sacrificing a position to which was attached great honor and an immense salary, and his going out of that office, not knowing whither he went, was a wonderful example of the triumph of principle over what appeared to be personal interests. It stands as a proof of Mr. Hays’ unwillingness to be the tool of a designing genius no matter what that might seem to offer him in the way of personal remuneration. And in the great positions he held it was his constant endeavor to be just to all. It was his endeavor by day and his prayer by night to always carry an even balance between the employes of his company and those who had invested their living in it with even justice to both. Knowledge of this permeated the whole system, and brought a realization amongst the men that the main endeavor of the leader was not to get out of the employes as much as possible and give them in return as little as possible, but that they were really working with, not for, their president, in the interests of all. “And he was a public-spirited man in many other spheres. That he was a generous friend of education is proven in that he was a governor of McGill University; that he was a benefactor to suffering humanity is shown by the hospitals of which he was a governor. But far more than these public positions were innumerable cases in which he proved himself a generous but unostentatious friend to the needy. And may I for a moment draw aside the sacred veil, and speak of his home life. As a father, husband, brother, comrade, to all in his household he was ever the genial, pure, high-minded Christian gentleman--the idol of his home, as he deserved to be. His religious influence was unmistakable and caused him inevitably to work for the right. I am confident that his deep religious sense of duty was at the bottom of much that we admire in his career--he was utterly honest, not because he believed it to be the best business policy, but because he had faith in the right; he was filled with genial optimism, not from blindness to the facts, but because he knew them. “That such lives should be allowed to be interrupted by such disasters as that we now mourn is a problem which cannot be satisfactorily answered. It may be said that no man’s place is impossible to be filled. But Methodism has never found another John Wesley, and the Grand Trunk will look and wait for long before it finds another Charles Melville Hays.” DOUGALL CUSHING.