It has already been suggested that the Canadian Northern was not conceived as a transcontinental railway, with the beginning of the Lake Manitoba Railway and Canal Company’s line between Gladstone and Dauphin. The scheme, as a scheme, growed, with Topsy-like inevitability. Before it could finally prosper it was perforce surrendered to its chief guarantors by its authors. It is not necessary to wait for Time’s final justification, in dollars and cents, before the nation understands its essential magnificence--and also the extent to which another sort of ambition in the political and railway worlds contributed to its temporary bafflement. To judge it broadly, and surely, the first requisite is an appreciation of the prairie factor in any Canadian transcontinental railway. The reports and maps of forty-five years ago show the C.P.R. main line originally projected across territory, every mile of which, between the Red River and the ascent to the Yellowhead Pass was first given a railway by Mackenzie and Mann. In less than twenty years the Canadian Northern, developed from a pioneer piece of track, operated, in all departments, by a force of fourteen, into a system which, during the war, was running trains into centres of one thousand population and over, representing ninety-seven per cent. of the populations of Manitoba and Saskatchewan and ninety per cent. of the population of Alberta. In 1915-16, the traffic year of the most prolific crop the West had ever grown, the Canadian Northern hauled 132,000,000 bushels of grain to Port Arthur from the prairies. We were then in the pinch of the constriction which finally brought about national ownership; and insufficiency of equipment caused us to lose a good deal of our share of the grain traffic. Even so, although the C.P.R. had every advantage, including its double track all the way between Winnipeg and Fort William, and nearly all the way from Winnipeg to Moose Jaw, we hauled 31.1 per cent. of the total, against the C.P.R.’s 56.3 per cent., and 12.6 per cent. of all other lines. Deferring allusion to the controversial question of the wisdom of projecting two new transcontinental railways in the first decade of this century, it is worth while glancing at the Canadian Northern’s relation to the growth of the nation’s business as affected by the construction of the sections north of the Great Lakes, and across the mountains to Vancouver.