The common denominator of the whole range and multitude of activities set in motion by the pioneer railway is the Government, the expenses of which, avowedly for the general advantage of Canada, are roughly divisible into two sections--as the expenses of a great bank are. There are the expenses of established business which yields dividends, and those which are chargeable to promotion, expansion, pioneering--which will presently become profit-making. The Government furnishes various administrative services to newly-opened country which do not produce an immediately balancing revenue. No criticism can be offered against this general policy. Banks carry on branches in sparsely populated localities, for similar reasons. They support their children for a while because presently the children will support them. Railways are expected to furnish services which cost more than they bring. The Canadian National is carrying a larger proportion of these than ought to have been assumed, under a properly controlled programme of original construction. But that does not alter the fact that the pioneering service is being given, under the orders of a Board of Commissioners which, broadly speaking, treats the youthful branch as if it were the matured trunk. The point I wish to suggest is that, to obtain a fair perspective of the Canadian National Railways, as they were between 1918 and 1922, these aspects of a thirty-five per cent. of mileage taken over after the Great War began, should be taken into account; especially in relation to the heavy expenditures necessitated by a continuation of extremely adverse conditions. Look at one of the financial aspects of these tremendous, but typical necessities for tremendous expenditure. The well-conducted railway, as already said, expects to replace its trestles out of revenue; and to carry its maintenance from the same source. On the Intercolonial it had never been expected that revenue would care for all these charges. The capital account was continually increased, the money being supplied by Parliament from taxes, and not carried as an annual recurring liability, such as the bonded indebtedness of a railway which must live by commercial processes alone. The Intercolonial was always true to this form before 1919. If the National Railways were to be managed as a business, and not as a makeshift, the Board felt that there should not only be a thorough rehabilitation of the property, but that all possible costs should be charged to revenue so that there could be no mistake about the strictly businesslike character of the whole administration. That meant requests for vast sums of money, and the charging of them against revenue, which in turn meant the declaration of huge and, to the short-sighted, terrifying deficits.