We are getting away from that quality of public service, though it isn’t always easy to make progress along a straight and thorny path--and it is harder to do it in some parts of Canada than in others. With a country so vast, and a population so diverse, it is impossible that the sectional benefit will always be subordinated to the advantage of the whole. The railway builder, as well as the Government, has to recognize, and at times, to capitulate to something which he does not want in order to be able to get something he really needs. The building of the transcontinental Canadian Northern, as a privately directed enterprise had its share of these difficulties. So did the undertaking of a transcontinental system by the Canadian Government shortly after the Canadian Northern entered Eastern Canada as the second stage of its evolution from a prairie carrier to a nationwide system. There was a great difference between the methods followed by the Canadian Northern and the Grand Trunk Pacific transcontinentals. Fundamentally, the Canadian Northern was a wheat-country road, designed to cover the most productive regions, and to be assured of the essential business which would carry, later, the more costly construction in the more sparsely populated, less productive territory. The other line was an across-continent project from the beginning, without any initial development of traffic whatever on the prairies. Its cost across the northern wilderness to the Western plains was evidently only guessed before the scheme was submitted to Parliament--at least the public never saw the detailed reports of engineers who had gone over the ground and estimated the cost per mile. The expenditure on original construction was out of all proportion to the earnings, because the road was built on the scale of a trunk main line, when it could only expect to secure revenue from a pioneering service. There is great disappointment in old Quebec, to this day, because the National Transcontinental is not bringing to the ancient port the business that was predicted for it. It is true that the railway has opened up country in northern Quebec, through the energy and skill of the French-Canadian pioneer to whom the axe is as much the implement of agriculture as the plough. But the Western wheat is not coming to the St. Lawrence by way of La Tuque; and the good people of the city think it ought to be pouring in. The conditions are impossible for such a consummation and bliss. Wheat moves from the prairies down to the seaboard in accordance with commercial laws of gravitation which express themselves in the relative terms at which cargoes can be shipped from the busiest ports in America, to the biggest ports in Europe. Merely because a railway has been built across Northern Quebec to Quebec harbour, which is closed half the year, the law of commercial gravitation will not be reversed.