There seem to be investment flows and ebbs in the affairs of men. They are without the regularity in time, but they have the variability in volume of the Bay of Fundy tides. One recalls periods wherein there was either so little opportunity or inclination to proceed with the development of the earth’s natural resources that, as an old London friend said, a man with a hundred thousand pounds to lend could take it down to the City, and not earn enough with it to buy his lunch. There is, no doubt, a psychological explanation of the accession and diminution of fiscal confidence in times of peaceful commerce undisturbed by the threat of war. There is also a partial accountability for the turning of capital into this or that channel of increase. It is the tendency of investment to overplay its hand when the habit has grown of putting faith and cash into a particular species of enterprise. During the first period of Canadian railway expansion following the Crimean war wheat in Ontario went up to two dollars a bushel. Real estate in towns like Whitby and Ingersoll rose to the fabulous price of $300 per foot frontage--the selling value of land on Jasper Avenue, Edmonton’s greatest thoroughfare, when the Canadian Northern approached from the East, and the capital of the infant Alberta had been set up there. Van Horne’s faith in the empty West was based on the fertility of its soil and the certainty that the United States would soon fill sufficiently to create a demand for more northern lands. But that expectation would be fulfilled--or its fulfilment accelerated--when shrewd men would induce capital to flow into the virgin terrain. The C.P.R. had the tremendous task of pioneering with steel across the Canadian plains. The northern areas of Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta awaited an equal, indeed, a more daring enterprise. Mackenzie and Mann were the all-Canadian instrumentalities for the adventure. They must obtain capital through London. Representation there was a vital concern, seeing that it was not proposed to hand control of the great enterprise to directors who knew no more of Canada than was known by the English administration of the Grand Trunk. Absent treatment was no part of the creed of the two boldest Canadians of their time. The financial representative was found in a man of extraordinary mentality and financial genius, Mr. R. M. Horne-Payne. His services to Canada are really registered in the creation of vast agricultural regions out of solitude, and in the firm establishing of communities, from quiet hamlets to rushing cities, where the highest amenities of civilization have succeeded the wandering buffalo, and have substituted the sawmill for the towering pine.