to complete the road from ocean to ocean, the Canadian Pacific would be in operation across the continent in little more than half that time. When one considers that the part of the road built up to the end of 1882, being across the plains, was the easiest section, and that the Laurentian rock wilderness around Lake Superior, as well as the ramparts of the vast mountains, had still to be attacked, the fearless optimism of the Directors and their whirlwind railway builder was amazing. But the work that had been accomplished showed the Government and the people of Canada that things of an unprecedented kind in railway annals were being done in their new country. And it also created in the hearts of people from sea to sea such a feeling of nationhood that they began to realize the illimitable possibilities of Canada. To such an extent was this true that when, later, a day came in which the Company needed the reinforcement of Government backing to carry through the project in the face of unexpected and gigantic obstacles, that temporary backing was finally given with the general approval of all but a few chronic opponents of the road. No thinking person now ever affirms that the Government was wrong in the emergent action taken at a crisis time in the history of Canada. When the spring of 1883 opened Van Horne was facing the problem of building on the rocky North Shore, finishing the prairie section and then storming the bastions of the mountains which seemed to frown defiance against the invader of their sublime precincts. The North Shore came first of the new sections, as the prairie region could be left to the ordinary routine now that it had gone so far towards the foothills, and would proceed as a matter of course on into the mountains. It was not comforting in that anxious hour to the Directors of the Canadian Pacific and to Van Horne, who had declined to accept any alternative to the North Shore line, to find that, to head off help from financial men, both they and the people who would back them in their big undertaking were held up to ridicule by a Grand Trunk pamphlet issued in London, the money centre of the world. The famous pamphlet practically stated that to build, under the contract, a railway across the North Shore of Lake Superior, was a piece of madness, and hence that men of finance who backed it should be looked after by their friends. It was not comforting reading for the Canadian Pacific men at that particular juncture, but it was a good answer later on to those politicians and agitators who talked as if the Canadian Pacific had despoiled the Dominion in order to build their transcontinental road. The Grand Trunk pamphlet said that the country north of the Lake was a perfect blank even on the maps of Canada. All that is known of the region, it said, is that, “It would be impossible to construct this one section for the whole cash subsidy provided by the Canadian Government for the entire scheme.” Thus out of