In another great enterprise of national importance Hincks was more successful. The forties of the nineteenth century saw the first great era of railway building. This novel method of transportation was perceived to have immense undeveloped possibilities. In Britain, where steam traction was invented, companies were formed by the score and lines were projected in every direction. It was a time of wild speculation, in which emerged for the first time the new type of company promoter. From England the rage for railways spread to the Continent and to America. While Hincks was working at the problem in Canada, Howe was working at it in Nova Scotia. To link the East with the West, Montreal with Toronto, Montreal with the Atlantic seaboard, Montreal with the Lake Champlain waterways to the southward, was the general design of the first Canadian railways. It was in this period that the first {112} sections were built of those Canadian lines which, in half a century, have grown into immense systems radiating across the continent. Hincks's idea was to aid private enterprise by government guarantees of the interest on half the cost of construction. Canada is now laced with iron roads from ocean to ocean. The man who laid the foundation of these immense systems in the day of small beginnings should never be forgotten. So the busy session went on, until a measure was introduced which aroused a storm of opposition, threatened a renewal of civil war, and tested the principle of responsible government almost to the breaking strain. This was the Act of Indemnification, a part of the bitter aftermath of the rebellion twelve years before.