The Present Management 188 E. W. Beatty, President; Grant Hall, Vice-President; I. G. Ogden, Vice-President of Finance; W. R. McInnes, Vice- President in Charge of Traffic; A. D. Mactier, Vice-President, Eastern Lines; D. C. Coleman, Vice-President, Western Lines; Sir George McLaren Brown, European General Manager. Former Officers 205 The late David McNicoll, Vice-President and General Manager; the late R. B. Angus. Recent Developments 252 The Bassano Dam; the Brooks Aqueduct; Supply Farm at Strathmore, Alberta; Canadian Pacific Docks at Quebec. * * * * * _The Romance of the Canadian_ _Pacific Railway_ * * * * * THE ROMANCE OF THE CANADIAN PACIFIC RAILWAY CHAPTER I Famous Forerunners The fascination for studying the genesis of things that exist seems to be universal. Men have an instinctive and urgent desire to find out how objects that are seen actually originated. Scientists and savages alike, for instance, are still hammering out theories as to the process by which the world was made, though to most of us the most ancient account is adequate. Once I knew an Indian boy on the prairie who was so curious to discover how the figure of a dog appeared at the centre of a large glass “marble” we were playing with, that when I had turned away for a moment, he broke it open with the back of a tomahawk. Similarly, we have known exploring scientists who spent laborious lives in the endeavour to find the sources of a great river. To be indifferent to the beginnings of things which have become part of our lives, betokens either the calamitous absence of a thinking mind or that horrible satisfaction with present possession which ignores the toil and the tears and the sacrifices of past generations. To persons of such vacant or selfish natures all the explorers and the pioneers—the men whose souls yearned beyond the sky-line of their immediate surroundings—are of no particular account. The untrodden ways which daring pathfinders opened up with adventurous feet are of no consequence to the unthinking who settle comfortably on lands pre-empted by the blood-marked footsteps of the trailmakers. It is because we are not of the number who are sodden with crass materialism and seared by the branding iron of greed, that we desire to learn the history of the things which minister to our continued existence and comfort in this great new day, the far-off vision of which made glad the brave seers and workers of earlier times.