The good citizen, who always pays his way, and looks upon everything connected with Government as a deadly allurement to wasteful extravagance, is tempted to assume that a first class recklessness and a third-class efficiency have gone into the Canadian National Railways’ management. A reading of the abridged report made to Mr. Kennedy in 1922, of the Operating and Maintenance Department, which is given in the appendix should help to correct this error. Still, a tendency to persist in it may linger, especially among those who regard our great rival, the C.P.R. as being filled with the excellences which public service is believed conspicuously to lack. Saddened owners and candid friends of the Canadian National Railways may not discover unaided a feature of the war and post-war situation which makes the practice of comparison more interesting and less odious than it usually is. It has to do with what has already been noticed--that thirty-five per cent. of the Canadian National mileage was received from the contractors during the war. Does it ever mean anything to the critical public, I wonder, that Parliament and the Dominion Board of Railway Commissioners recognise no difference between the pioneer railway and its old-established, flourishing senior? The Canadian Northern was not begun until the Canadian Pacific had been operating transcontinental trains for ten years. Its main line was built through practically empty prairie country. But though it was a pioneering system, it had to meet the same conditions as to passenger and freight rates that governed the C.P.R., with the established traffic of the only continuous transcontinental railway in the world. This disparity applies with equal force to the opening up of the northern wildernesses in Quebec and Ontario by the National Transcontinental and the Canadian Northern. The emergence of the National Railways placed upon us a responsibility for creative, pioneering services the magnitude of which has surely not been fully appreciated by Parliament, public or press. So far as one is aware, the value to the country of a pioneer railway has never been worked out on an actuarial basis. Take, say, a territory three hundred miles long by thirty miles wide into which settlement is introduced by a railway. Thirty towns are established in it through which all the newly-created business of the region passes. That business is represented not only by what is visible in the thirty towns and their sustaining farms. It is in the factories of Ontario, the financial, theological and other institutions of the East, and in all the paraphernalia of transportation, from coast to coast, including the car and engine shops, and the divisional towns.