I do not think it is true that as men of affairs grow older they are prone to look back and say there were giants in those days. As a father rejoices in his son’s eminence, so an old railroader is delighted to see executives who are young enough to be his boys conspicuously displaying every mastery of their work. After all, to have any other disposition would indicate that the generation going down the hill had been unable to impart anything worth while to those who are ascending the heights. One’s pride in President Beatty as a man who adorns his profession, and dignifies every phase of Canadian achievement he touches, is the gratification of a competitor as well as the appreciation of a colleague during the strain of war. The Canadian Pacific is a Canadian institution; and I am certain that in its first Canadian-born President it has a chief whom his countrymen will have abundant cause to honour without waiting for his absence to direct attention to the value of his presence. Railway relationships were doubly gratifying during the war, which had its compensations. The question arose of obtaining the maximum efficiency of war service from the Canadian railways, as it had more instantly arisen in Britain, and was fated to appear in the United States. In Britain there was a Governmental amalgamation of railway services, as there was in the United States several years later. Something like the British method was proposed in Canada; but the Government decided to put patriotic efficiency up to the railways themselves. The Railway War Board was the outcome. It was established in co-operation with Dr. Reid, Minister of Railways and Canals, who showed in this, as in the subsequent setting up of the Canadian National Board of Directors, an exemplary superiority to political influences. His letter to me, at the handing over of the Government railways to the directors who were appointed to administer the Canadian Northern, containing the most explicit assertion of the necessity for conducting our business on a purely businesslike basis, was, I have no doubt, all the more readily written, because of the experience already gained, of how the railways could serve the nation and the war with disregard of the ordinary rivalries of competitive business. We who served on the War Board can say that we gave to the nation the maximum of efficiency and economy in our power. We merely did our bit. We never looked for a word of gratitude from Parliament--and proved the wisdom of “Blessed is he who expecteth little.” Curiously, the Government ownership of railways played an absolutely unique part in this phase of railway history. The Intercolonial, in a wonderful, and totally unforeseen way, justified its building as a political railway. One is the more delighted to say this, because of a somewhat different tone that has perforce been discernible in one’s allusions to some aspects of its administration from its earlier to its latter days.