It is not our purpose, in the present writing, to dwell on this great meeting beyond saying that it led to the Confederation of Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick in 1867. Prince Edward Island entered in 1873 and the Western prairie country and British Columbia in 1870 and 1871. The two latter entered with somewhat reluctant feet; Manitoba, retarded by Louis Riel’s stand against the incoming of Canada lest the rights of the natives should be ignored; and British Columbia, unready to come in unless the railway across the continent to the Pacific Coast was guaranteed within a given time. These difficulties were finally overcome, but the details do not belong to this story. Suffice it to say that Confederation being accomplished, the new sense of national unity led to combination in the immense undertaking of a railway from sea to sea. The courageous facing of such an enormous task had no precedent in the business history of the modern world. The big Republic to the South of us has done some amazing things, such as the Panama Canal in recent years, but even that commercially daring country only attempted a transcontinental railway when it had nearly forty millions of people. Canada undertook the task when her population was less than four millions. To the onlooking world the attempt must have appeared like “a forlorn hope”—a sort of a “Charge of the Light Brigade” against batteries bristling with obstacles of a wholly unprecedented kind. But there are always some men who are unafraid, and the dream of seers was to be realized. Once Confederation had been accomplished, a transcontinental railway became a national necessity. This was true not only from the standpoint of politics and trade, but from the standpoint also of law and order in the far-flung country. It will be remembered that Louis Riel started a revolt against the incoming of Canadian authority in 1869, and that he held high carnival in the West till Colonel Garnet Wolseley and his soldiers reached Fort Garry from the East, nearly a year after the Riel outbreak started. All this period was not consumed in travel; but it had taken three months’ steady travel overland, after mobilization in the East, before Wolseley reached the scene of Riel’s revolt. The whole Western country might have been swept by the rebel chief’s revolt in that time, and the necessity of swifter communication between the different parts of Canada became painfully apparent. And so, when British Columbia came into Confederation in 1871, there was an understanding that the railway from the East to the Pacific should begin in two years and be finished in ten. This daring pledge was given by Sir John A. Macdonald and his Government at Ottawa, despite the fact that a distinguished explorer and engineer, Capt. Palliser, sent out by the Imperial Government, had reported after four years on the ground, that on account of the mountains being impassable, a transcontinental railway could not be