The Quebec and Lake St. John was so essentially a colonization road that everybody took an interest in it and expected to take passes out of it. I am anticipating my story a little; but not spoiling its propriety, by mentioning the opening of a short branch to La Tuque, on the St. Maurice river, where the National Transcontinental crosses that wonderful stream and turns westward. The Canadian Northern had recently acquired control of the road, and I was president of it also. As the branch had been undertaken, and all but completed before our regime, it seemed well for me to be represented at the inauguration by a deputy. A special train went up from Quebec. Cabinet ministers, judges, senators, M.P.P.’s, bankers, merchants were there--every section of the community sent delegates. At La Tuque there was a dinner with speeches in a frigid freight shed, and everybody returned home feeling he had contributed something to a new chapter of the province’s industrial history. The branch hasn’t fulfilled expectations--indeed, it has not been operated for several years, but it had its uses. That inaugural was in 1907. By that time the opening of a branch line in the West had become so much a matter of course that we thought nothing more of a new service as a historical event than we did of issuing a temporary time card until the next revision of the established schedules. Allied with this Quebec form of public recognition of railway expansion were the more distinctly political aspects of the development. For nearly thirty years the Intercolonial had traversed the province on the southern side of the St. Lawrence. Whatever else might not be in politics the Intercolonial most certainly was. The railway was as much a part of every candidate’s hopes and fears as the ballot box itself. It was as close to every member’s duty, if he supported the Government, as the orders of the day. A share of dominion over it was one of the sustaining longings of hope deferred in the heart of every opposition M.P. whose constituency it touched.