But Mackenzie began on the problem and we find him, in 1874, in an election address to his own constituents in Lambton, Ontario, unfolding his plan. Briefly, the transportation system was to be a sort of amphibious animal. Mackenzie, realizing that traffic by water is the cheapest type of transportation, thought he saw a possibility of securing a transcontinental, without undue cost, by utilizing “the magnificent water stretches” across Canada, linking them together by rail as funds would be available. In this way he claimed that railway construction would be gradual enough to avoid excessive financial expenditure, and that the country would be gradually settled. Settlement would keep abreast with railway construction and thus the possibility of having the railway going ahead of the settlement across an uninhabited, and therefore unproductive, country would be eliminated. Mr. Mackenzie was perfectly sincere in this, as he was in everything. The plan was not without merit under the circumstances, but it had defects which arose out of a lack of knowledge of the Western country generally, and particularly of the attitude of the people of British Columbia. It also ignored the strange, but characteristic, impulses of human nature in regard to migration. Every now and then in history some section of humanity strikes its tents and goes on the march, railway or no railway. Especially does the Star of the Empire draw people westward. Before there was a railway in the West at all, many of my own kith and kin loaded their few belongings on ox-carts and took their way five hundred miles north-westward to Prince Albert, on the North Saskatchewan. And so also will some people go on in advance of the railway, despite all advice to the contrary. For years I heard it said by some that had the Canadian Pacific not been built so rapidly, settlement would have been more compact along the line. But this theory is contradicted by the actual fact, as we saw it, that when the trains were only running to Brandon, west of Winnipeg, settlers were leaving the train there and trekking on westward with prairie schooners. Great numbers may not thus go forward in any particular case, but since a country grows by the enterprise of the adventurous, it becomes the duty of such a country to follow with utilities, the people who thus widen the horizon of the land. Moreover, Mackenzie’s well-intentioned policy of using the water stretches would have made transportation too slow and too expensive for shippers, owing to the constant need for transfers, with necessary delays and damages. And, most important of all, that policy indicated too tardy a construction of the transcontinental to satisfy British Columbia, which had entered confederation on the distinct understanding that a railway would be built to the Pacific within reasonable time.