A few days after the armistice the Board reached Moncton for a Saturday afternoon and Sunday acquaintance with the Intercolonial headquarters. It found the atmosphere as chilly indoors as out, after the President had given to a representative meeting the Board’s assurance of goodwill, and appreciation of the need for the local officers to have large jurisdiction; and had sketched the possibilities of interchange between Eastern and Western officers with a view to broadening the experience of the whole staff. A gentleman of much ability and intense local patriotism presented us with a picture of an Ontario we had never seen before; and generally left the impression that something like a Western pirate was determined to prey on an Eastern victim. Plainly, we were not as welcome as the flowers in May. The archangel Gabriel could not have become popular down by the sea if he had undertaken the job of co-ordinating the services of the railways which the Dominion of Canada now possessed. With all the good will in the world, it can be said that it was too much to expect that excellent men, habituated to party control of a railway, would discern the least beneficence in the revolution which had come upon the ancient institution. There never was anything substantial in the objections to control from Toronto, as compared with the former conditions. Actual conduct of the Intercolonial centred in Moncton, as much as it always did. What really happened was that Toronto was substituted for Ottawa; and a President and Board of Directors succeeded a Minister. The local superintendents’ proposals for the year’s betterments, as passed upon by the general manager, formerly reached Ottawa, and were there approved by the Minister or rejected, in readiness for the estimates to come before Parliament. Now, by the like process, proposals reached Toronto, before being incorporated in Parliamentary estimates. Fundamentally, that was the change. But, there was the difference that existed between the President and the Minister--as to coming into office and going out, they weren’t both subject to the same powers as determined the choice of the section men. It would have been vain to look for the instantaneous disappearance of a temper which, during two generations, had been deeply embedded in the political consciousness of three provinces and of half of a fourth. Sir Robert Morier, who was regarded as the ablest British ambassador of the later Victorian era, used to say it was the business of the statesman to be five per cent. ahead of public opinion. How far Sir Robert Borden’s policy was ahead of public opinion in the maritimes--or rather the opinion of the party stalwarts--one cannot say. But as session succeeded session it became clearer and clearer that, in the East, the administration of the National Railways would be regarded from a very different point of view from that which actuated the West.