Considering the magnitude of this undertaking and the fact that the railway extended through extremely diversified country from level plain to tumbled lofty mountains, construction at the rate of some five hundred miles per annum was a magnificent achievement. For the greater part of the distance it traversed country where the white man was not in occupation, and where several years were certain to pass before it yielded any economic value capable of producing traffic to the railway. The enterprise was jeopardised seriously by the financial panic in the United States, and the Northern Pacific railway crisis, which misfortunes did not augur well for the success of another trans-continental railway. When it was finished, the inquiry as to why it had been built through an absolute wilderness from end to end was raised on all sides. The present day supplies the answer to that criticism to a complete degree. From the day of its completion the Dominion went forward with a rush, and it cannot be denied that the province of British Columbia played an important part in the development of the country when it insisted, as a return for its entrance into the federation of the provinces, that a railway should be built across the continent to link the east with the west within ten years. CHAPTER XIX A RAILWAY OVER THE SEA The Florida express was speeding southwards over the railway which skirts the coast of Florida for mile after mile. Among the passengers was Mr. Henry Flagler, one of America’s captains of industry and finance. He was gazing out idly to sea. On the horizon were streams of vessels steaming northwards and southwards in two long flung-out lines. They were units in the great coastal service of steamships which ply incessantly up and down this long stretch of coast between New York, the West Indies and the ports dotted along the shore line of the Gulf of Mexico. At that time the island of Cuba was undergoing a wonderful change. Its vast resources were being exploited by men of initiative and energy from the two sides of the Atlantic, and the steamship traffic between the island and the mainland was advancing by leaps and bounds. The financier was cogitating deeply. His thoughts had strayed to the subject of this development, and the fresh impetus it would receive when the Isthmus of Panama was at last pierced and vessels could float through the neck of the continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific. He was the controlling force of the railway over which he was then travelling, and he was weighing the question as to whether new sources of revenue could not be tapped for this system. The southernmost point reached by the Florida East Coast railway was Miami, and though it was a rising town, he saw that its future was limited, because it formed, as it were, a dead-end to the line.