But while we thus pay him personal tribute, we find that, whether as a result of the dissolution of the Allan Company, or pressure of lean years, or the lack of enthusiasm amongst his following in the House, Mackenzie, despite his good intentions, made little progress with the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway during his five years in office. It was not easy for Mackenzie and his supporters, after attacking the general extravagance of Sir John Macdonald’s plan for a transcontinental, to accommodate themselves to carrying out the scheme of a railway from ocean to ocean. Edward Blake, Mackenzie’s great lieutenant, had openly said more than once that the rounding out of Confederation by pledging a railway to British Columbia within a fixed term was too costly. The population of the West Coast Province was only some ten thousand or so of white people, he said, and this country was “a sea of mountains.” One of the chief newspapers of Mr. Mackenzie’s party said that the Canadian Pacific “would not pay for axle grease” over certain sections. Mr. Blake, it is true, in 1891 visited the West Coast over the completed railway, and made a brilliantly humorous and eloquent apology for his mistaken conception of the country. But that was too late to help Mackenzie with his problem, and the fact that Mr. Blake and some others of his party actually voted in the House against Mackenzie’s proposal regarding the Esquimault railway on Vancouver Island did not help the heavily burdened Premier. But one must allow that it is much easier to be optimistic about British Columbia now than it was at that time. Very few people then dreamed of the development that could and would take place in the Province which Mr. Blake, speaking for thousands in the East, called “a sea of mountains.” It looked like that in those days before the world knew that British Columbia had not only mines and forests and fish, but that vast areas would be opened up along the rivers and in the mountain valleys which would prove immensely adapted to agriculture, fruit-growing and dairying. Therefore let us be kind to the men who were sceptical about the whole railway undertaking. We are quoting their scepticism here only to show the problem that Premier Mackenzie had to face when he came into power in 1873. Under all the circumstances he did the best he could at the time—that is, the best that could be done by any man who lacked the full-hearted support of some of his own friends, and who felt that to meet the demands of the naturally impatient and almost resentful British Columbia, was practically impossible in the lean years that seemed imminent and beyond his power to control.