The delegation to London returned to Ottawa in 1880, and the Government signed a contract with George Stephen, Duncan McIntyre, of Montreal; James J. Hill, of St. Paul; John S. Kennedy, of New York, and four outside this continent, Cohen, Renach & Company, of Paris, and Morton, Rose & Company, of London, though in the latter case it was really the New York firm of Morton, Bliss & Company that went into the organization. It is interesting from a psychological standpoint to find that the name of Donald A. Smith, one of the big three, was not in this original contract. Ever since the day when Mr. Smith had cast his vote in the House of Commons, in 1873, against Sir John Macdonald in the matter of the “Pacific Scandal,” as Macdonald’s opponents called it, or the “Pacific Slander,” as Sir Charles Tupper designated the affair, there was, to put it mildly, a coolness between Smith and Sir John. For these two to be in the conferences that would often arise between the Canadian Pacific directors and the Government, would throw a wet blanket on the meetings. Later on these two became punctiliously friendly, and even though Mr. Smith’s name was not visibly in this original Canadian Pacific Railway Company, every one knew (including the keen-minded Sir John) that he was actually in it for all he was worth. The contract terms sound generous enough if we could only keep out of our minds the tremendous extent of the undertaking and the endless risks taken by the new company, in view of the fact that the real cost of the railway from ocean to ocean was almost a haphazard conjecture. Up to the date of the signing of the contract the way through the mountains of British Columbia was unsettled, and the character of the work on the North Shore of Lake Superior was practically unknown. That North Shore problem had frightened Sir Henry Tyler, President of the Grand Trunk, in London, from going into the Canadian Pacific scheme, partly because that eternal wilderness had no prospect of local traffic compared with a line south of the Boundary, but partly also because the interminable miles of rock to be built through looked too formidable to be attacked. Take it all round, the terms of the contract signed in Ottawa may have looked too generous to the man on the street. But only men of courage who visioned the far future would have set their names to a covenant to build thousands of miles of a railway which not only some public men, but some experts also openly declared would “never pay for the axle grease.”