The suggestion was heartily agreed to by Sir John, and the Cabinet was unanimously in favour of the plan proposed. The Cabinet adjourned immediately after the decision was made. The members thereof had good reason to call it a day. The Rubicon had been crossed and the country was on the march to a new destiny. There were to be many obstacles encountered before the objective would be reached. It was a mighty venture of faith, but men of thought and men of action would clear the way. Meanwhile the contractors on the portions under construction carried on, but the Government was looking eagerly to the financial magnates of the Old Land to form a company to carry out its policy. Yet, despite a visit of Sir John, Sir Charles and the Hon. John Henry Pope to London, there was no rush on the part of British financiers to build a railway across a vast, thinly populated continent. And when it looked as if there was going to be a disappointing set-back, there arose a small group of men on our own continent who were destined to lead in making the projected transcontinental what Lord Shaughnessy, a few hours before his death, called so finely, in a conversation with President Beatty, “a great Canadian property and a great Canadian enterprise.” We shall, in the next chapter, meet the men who came to the rescue. CHAPTER VI A Great Adventure “Playing safe” is a better programme than reckless foolhardiness, but it is a poor programme as compared with the spirit of adventure. Without adventure, based upon faith, humanity’s horizon would never have widened out and new continents and new avenues for the expenditure of human energy in great enterprises for the good of mankind would never have been discovered. Satisfaction with present attainment means stagnation, and it is better to reach out after the apparently unattainable than to allow our God-given energies to suffer atrophy through disuse. In our present study of the building of a great railway across Canada, traversing vast unpeopled plains, and boring its way through what some had declared to be impassable mountain barriers, it is a very interesting thing to find the enterprise somewhat closely linked up with a certain other organization that had been chartered in 1670, under the title of “The Governor and Company of Adventurers of England trading into Hudson Bay.” The big word in that title is the word “adventurers,” and it applies both to the men who hazarded their capital and to the men who fared forth from the Old Country into the unknown spaces of the new continent on this side of the sea. This Hudson’s Bay Company not only attracted attention to the new world that had still to be conquered, but its able and resourceful employees in the North-West became distinct elements in the progress of the country.