But the railway remains a monument to a demand that was based more on the ambitions of a section of Canada than on the true railway factors of a situation that became more political than economic. The cost of construction finally worked out at a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a mile--twice as much as the Canadian Northern spent to build through the mountains from the Yellowhead to Vancouver, with very much more steel bridge work, and very much less wooden trestle than went into the railway between Quebec and Transcona. What the $150,000 per mile meant, in addition to the purely colonization aspects of the road, can be partially judged from a glance at the map. The National Transcontinental entered a wilderness north of New York, and didn’t leave the wilderness until it was north of Omaha, in Nebraska. In that wilderness, at that time there was not an existing community of twenty white people. Of course, the times were surcharged with the will to build. The Canadian people, seeing immigration pouring in at a rate of about a thousand people a day, wanted railways and more railways; and demanded them from wherever they seemed likely to come. To one phase of this extraordinary impulse of the first few years of this century, I think attention has been insufficiently directed. The immense project which was to do for the Laurier fame what the C.P.R. did for the immortality of Sir John Macdonald was put through Parliament in 1904, and a general election endorsed it. Construction began in 1905, with financial and other prestige behind it, such as no other Canadian venture had. The Grand Trunk Pacific was widely held to have relegated to a negligible situation the railway development that depended on the continuing initiative of two men. But when finally, in the midst of a world war, both enterprises perforce had to come under Government direction, and, as an immediate consequence, the receivership of the G.T.P. had brought the old Grand Trunk into the same control, and all the men who were principally concerned in the activities of the whole period had stepped out, the mileage of the Canadian Northern railways exceeded the combined mileage of the National Transcontinental, the Grand Trunk Pacific and the Grand Trunk in Canada. It is also apparent that if the National Transcontinental and the Grand Trunk Pacific ever justify the capital cost, it will be because of their union with the prairie lines of the Canadian Northern. I shall recur to this subject, with which is associated the further matter of record--that, even at the time when the Government of Canada so dramatically and mightily entered the Western railway field, it was on the Canadian Northern that popular demand after demand was made for transportation, as the salvation of settlement.