In the end the Government assumed control of the Canadian Northern congeries of railways. The alternative was a receivership and reorganization, in which the guaranteed securities would have to be honoured by the Governments concerned; and the unsecured investors would have to take their meagre chance of full salvation. On the whole, perhaps, the best interests of the greatest number were best served by what was done. But if Mackenzie and Mann had been merely bent on self-service they might have come more profitably out of a formal Canadian Northern bankruptcy. They held almost all the capital stock. Their position would have had what Grand Trunk junior shareholders have since called the nuisance value of a certain ability to hamper any attempt to make a settlement without their concurrence. But the British investors were held to have the dominant claim. The arbitrators’ award of ten million eight hundred thousand dollars to the capital stockholders, limited beforehand by agreement with the Government to a round ten millions, meant no such gain to them. They had pledged their interest, and the money had gone into construction. Certainly they had stood to gain by the success of the great venture. They also stood to lose. They lost, and raised no voice in lamentation. In no sense do these discussions profess to be a history of the Canadian Northern, or of the two remarkable men whose partnership made the railway. Perhaps I was daily too deeply immersed in meeting the responsibilities which grew out of the superintendency between Gladstone and Dauphin, to be qualified to present the story in its historical perspective. But that immersion at least gave me, in many respects, a unique all-around intimacy with the enterprise itself, and its bearing upon the expanding life of Canada during a most fateful quarter of a century. Sir William Mackenzie spent much of his time on trans-Atlantic missions. He was also interested in many other undertakings which absorbed their due proportion of his time. Sir Donald Mann, whose capacities are in keeping with the solidity of his physical frame, did a great deal of planning ahead. The problem of access to the Pacific was very much in his mind for twenty years, though he said little about it. The railway policy on which the British Columbia Government appealed to the country in December, 1909, was worked out during Sir Donald’s visit to Victoria in the preceding winter. Negotiations for charters were almost entirely in his hands.