The cost of over a million and a half dollars must be shared by the National Railways, the civic government and the street railway. The improvements were held up because the railway executive believed the other parties to them should contribute more to the cost than at first they were willing to undertake. “Let George do it” is not an isolated view of expenditures in which what some people no doubt would like to call the king’s railway is concerned, jointly with other public and semi-public authorities. Situations like that at St. John abound in varying magnitude. They call for an armoury of qualities which any one man might be forgiven for not possessing. They are just a part of the day’s responsibilities which crowd into the private car. They abide with the executive while he is showing guests the aspects of Canada in which they are specially interested. Consider two examples from Canadian Northern ante-public-ownership days. The first excursion that looked like a joy ride to everybody except to the men responsible for completing it, was the visit, in 1898, to Dauphin and Winnipegosis of as many members of the Manitoba Legislature as could go to see the railway that had been built under legislative guarantee. Having none of our own, we had to hire sleeping and dining cars from the Canadian Pacific. The trip occupied two long days with a banquet in Dauphin on the night out. The last considerable excursion attributable to public responsibilities was the Parliamentary journey to the Pacific Coast when the road to Vancouver was prepared for business, in 1915. The ever-ready cynic can say that these excursions are near, but extravagant relatives of the electioneering campaign of which the cheap cigar is a nauseating and corrupting feature. But, looking back through the severe spectacles of the prohibition age, and not forgetting that the prairie air, especially as it approaches the Great Divide, is very prone to sharpen Eastern appetites, I think it is well within the truth to declare that journeys like these have been performed absolutely in the public interest. The most solicitous railway in the world cannot give to a member of Parliament the faculty of imparting to his constituents and to the public generally the highly instructive information which has come to him in his representative capacity. All it can do is to give him the opportunity to acquire knowledge of the development of his country which only travel under informing auspices can bestow. That we did, at various times, and left the event to a providential future.