It will be recalled that neither Sir John Macdonald nor Sir Charles Tupper, his fighting Railway Minister, approved of this American link in the road, and that in England they had broken with Sir Henry Tyler, of the Grand Trunk, on that particular point. And when Van Horne went east to meet the Directors in 1882, he made short work of the plan which both Stephen and Hill had cherished. He felt that to give Hill’s road the haulage of through Canadian traffic over a section of his track would make the Canadian Pacific a sort of subsidiary of his line, and such a situation was abhorrent both to Van Horne’s railroad instincts and to his estimate of his ability to run his own road. In a proper sense of the word Van Horne was always egoist enough to assert his own dignity when occasion required. In fact he would let no man rob him of the opportunity of boasting on any occasion when it seemed legitimate and necessary. Hence, when he met the Canadian Pacific Directors, at that first meeting, he drew for them a verbal picture of what the traffic on an all-Canadian route from ocean to ocean was to be in the future, and by the time he was through his visualizing, the President and the other Directors let this new General Manager have his will. Van Horne was no half-way man, and when he started out to build the Canadian Pacific Railway he was going to put emphasis on the word and idea of Canadian. The day was to come when, despite some partisan and political mud-throwing, all true Canadians would acknowledge that the big railroader was right. Of course, this action of Van Horne and the Directors was, as already intimated, the last straw for Hill. He was too keen and clear-headed a man not to understand that he and Van Horne, with their big projects more or less competitive, could not work together to advantage. So he withdrew with some emphasis, but we are not to forget that he made railroaders of Stephen, Smith and Angus, and that through his recommendation, Van Horne came to Canada. The Canadian boy, James J. Hill, who had left his home in Rockwood, Ontario, to seek his fortune in the States, and become a maker of its North-West, also did, for various reasons and motives, a good day’s work for his native land.