It was not a sinecure to keep pace with the multitudinous demands for equipment in men, material and methods which arose out of the addition of an average of nine furlongs of railway per day to the system, for the first eighteen years; and of a total of 1,958 miles in 1915. Between six and seven hundred towns and shipping points are on the map as the direct result of that record, with every phase of which I was closely associated. We had good fortune in assembling an able, loyal and economical staff. Errors were made, of course--who makes no mistakes never makes anything. But if the story of the rise and fall of the Canadian Northern is ever written by some man who can by no possibility be called an interested partisan, his finding, on the unquestionable facts, can only be that the creators of the enterprise deserved more of their country than it is now possible for both of them to receive. CHAPTER XV. _Speaking some truth about the difficulty of operating a railway for the nation._ On this continent there surely never was such a weird phantasmagoria of railroad changes as occurred during and immediately following the war. Canada led the Western Hemisphere into the fight that was to save freedom, and was to magnify Canning’s saying about the New World redressing the balance of the Old. The cost of the war in economic disturbance, during its progress, and since the delusive peace, was as little foreseen as its immediate cost in blood and treasure. What Armageddon did to North American railways is not yet appreciated by the millions who use them. As the war worsened, the Canadian railway situation worsened with it. The penalties of overbuilding were felt on every side. There was extraordinary development of war industries; but the cessation of immigration, the attendant drag upon agriculture and commerce; and the curtailment of ordinary measures of maintenance and betterment made it inevitable that very heavy expenditures must be faced as soon as peace returned. The war brought a grievous end to the Canadian Northern as a Mackenzie and Mann enterprise. It also demonstrated beyond a peradventure the hopelessness, from the beginning, of the Grand Trunk’s fathering of the Grand Trunk Pacific, by throwing that western system into the hands of the Government, under a receivership.