In the early years, thanks to general prosperity and to the strategic location and careful management of the system, ends always met, and a little over, and funds were always forthcoming for fresh expansion. But early in 1914 a crisis arrived in the company's affairs. The mountain section particularly, what with the higher cost of labour and the unexpected engineering difficulties, was calling for tens of millions more; the stringency in the world's money markets, following the Balkan Wars, made investors chary of even gilt-edged offerings. There were many {194} millions of subsidies and guarantees still to come from the state, but they would come only as the road was completed, and meantime construction had to be financed. The partner-owners could not provide the ready cash needed for completing the gigantic task. The bondholders had no inducement to do so unless further guaranteed by the state. The western provinces were at last becoming frightened of the load they had already assumed. There was only one resource, the Dominion government. True, it had only in 1913 made a gift of $15,000,000 on solemn assurances that not a cent more would be needed. But, it was urged, the emergency was real. The road could not be left hanging half finished, after all the millions already spent. Canada's credit must be protected, and so the government, after a lively struggle, put through a positively last guarantee of forty-five millions. In return it was given forty out of the hundred millions stock to which the capital was reduced, and took the right to appoint one government director. Whether this step meant that the government was now going to share the control and the profits of the company, or whether it meant that it was henceforth to be saddled with the {195} responsibility for any deficits, was a point much in dispute. Later, the outbreak of war in Europe delayed, but did not altogether halt, the floating of the loan and the completion of the remaining links. Meanwhile, the many subsidiary enterprises, which the example of the Canadian Pacific has caused us to think appropriate to the transcontinental railway, had been undertaken by its youngest rival. Fast steamers between Montreal and Bristol, grain elevators, hotels, express and telegraph companies, all brought grist to the mill. Hardly to be distinguished were the allied interests of the partner-owners--iron-mines in the Lake Superior district, coal-mines in Alberta and Vancouver Island, whaling and halibut fisheries on the Pacific, and lumber-mills on the British Columbia coast--all bearing some relation to the development of the railway system. [Illustration: Canadian Northern Railway, 1914] In 1896, a railway a hundred miles long, beginning and ending nowhere, operated by thirteen men and a boy! In 1914, a great transcontinental system practically completed, over ten thousand miles in length, and covering seven of Canada's nine provinces! The impossible had been achieved.