There were several causes operating, midway in the last century, to lead the older Canada of Ontario and Quebec, and also the Maritime areas of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island, to consider the advisability of federating together for the good of the whole. The commercial power of the United States had such a magnetic pull upon some of the provinces that the tie which held these Provinces to Britain was being subjected to some strain. Moreover, the Imperial Government noticed with some anxiety that political prejudices and feeling between the various parts of the British possessions made any concerted plan for military action difficult to accomplish. Accordingly, as it is now known and can now be told, Lord Monck, who was the Governor-General in the “sixties,” quietly used some pressure to keep Confederation before the minds of public men in the various parts of the country. Besides all that, there was very considerable difficulty in carrying on government in the Canada of Ontario and Quebec, owing to racial differences and double leadership, which meant an almost constant danger of legislative deadlock. Moreover, the British possessions from the St. Lawrence to the Pacific were like a dumbbell, big at the ends and weak in the middle, as a Westerner once said. There were the immense areas of older Canada and the still more immense areas west of Lake Superior—but the North Shore of that inland sea was a wilderness of unproductive rock where no link of settlement would seem possible. Hence, as the aforesaid Westerner expressed it, “Canada would break off in the middle unless we linked it up with the steel trail.” There was much truth in that statement in those early days and highly important truth it was. Many, in our day, cannot realize how swiftly inter-travel and inter-trade over the pioneer railway across Canada brought the East and the West together.