These thoughts come to me now just as I am riding westward on the public observation car of a Canadian Pacific Railway train, through the great mountains that are piled up on the sunset verge of the Dominion of Canada. The traditional weariness of travel is practically banished by these wheeled palaces, which that living, breathing, throbbing locomotive, under the skilful direction of her driver, draws through passes and tunnels and glorious river canyons down to the Western sea. And I thought of how, in times gone by, that Western Sea had been in the dreams of gallant men who hoped to reach its shores some day. I recalled how noble sea-rovers, like Henry Hudson and Sir John Franklin, had thrown away their lives in the attempt to find a North-west Passage by water across the North American continent, from the Atlantic. And I remembered, too, how Alexander MacKenzie, the fur-trader, starting by trail from near the old Peace River Crossing, had gone over the mountains on foot, and how he wrote on a rock by the Pacific the amazing inscription, “Alexander MacKenzie, from Canada, by land, July 22nd, 1793.” We call that inscription amazing because behind it and flashing through it is the story of an invincible will in heroic action and the record of physical daring unsurpassed in the palmiest days of the athletes and gladiators in Greece and Rome. Thus did Alexander MacKenzie blaze the trail across the mountains. If the North-west Passage by water had proved a myth, MacKenzie demonstrated the reality of a passage by land which, in the years afterwards, others would follow. Strange, too, it was that in the same year, 1793, Captain George Vancouver, an English sea-rover, dropped the anchor of his wooden, white-winged vessel in the great harbour where there is now a queenly city bearing his name, on the West Coast of Canada. Little did these adventurous pathfinders who discovered mountain passes and ocean lanes think that, before a century had passed, a group of men with vision and courage would follow the inspiring example of the explorers by land and sea, and achieve not only the crossing of a continent, but the girdling of the earth in a magnificent transportation system. Yet despite the gloomy prophecies of failure uttered by sceptics who declared that the thing could not be done, the Canadian Pacific Railway has driven its iron horses through the mountains to stand by the Western Sea. And from the land terminals, East and West, this unique organization has set its vessels on the tides of all the oceans of the world, as well as upon the gentler waters of our inland seas.