the forerunners of the mighty engines which now thunder through the echoing mountain passes, along which these heroes of the transit and the chain, long years ago, pursued their painful and precarious way. The Macdonald Government came back into power in 1878, as we have seen, on the wave of the National Policy movement. But, for two years, they worked on the lines of their predecessors and linked up some of the disconnected portions of the road which Mr. Mackenzie had constructed in various localities, mainly between the Lakes and the Red River. Then Sir Charles Tupper, that militant and aggressive Minister of Railways, took the bold plunge and let to Andrew Onderdonk, a young American railroader of San Francisco, contracts to build portions of the Canadian Pacific through “the sea of mountains” in British Columbia. Canada was young at the railway business, as indicated by the fact that it was an American who got the contract to build the first parts of the mountain road. Later on, as the construction of the road from ocean to ocean began to get under way, Canadians developed by the score into great practical railway builders. Young men who had begun by chopping in the bush grew into contractors for getting out ties for the track-layers, and finally themselves took contracts for actual building of the railway over rock and boulders, through mountain vastnesses and quaking bogs until the steel reached tide water. It was in itself an act of splendid audacity for a people of less than four millions in number to start on the task of throwing a railway across an immense and almost uninhabited continent to the shores of the Western sea. And this daring on the part of the young Dominion was backed gallantly and effectively by scores of native-born Canadians who, with genuine Canadian initiative, learned a new trade and followed it with tremendous energy and skill.