XIV. Reciting events, the Great War being chief, which destroyed the Canadian Northern 227 XV. Speaking some truth about the difficulty of operating a railway for the nation 250 XVI. Narrating several occurrences which made huge Canadian National deficits inevitable 269 XVII. Shedding sidelights on unities of Canadian railway management during the War 296 Appendix A 315 Appendix B 332 THE PORTRAITS D. B. Hanna Frontispiece Facing Page Sir Donald Mann 68 Sir William Mackenzie 68 Sir William Van Horne 164 E. W. Beatty 164 A. J. Mitchell 244 R. M. Horne-Payne 244 INTRODUCTION This book is published because readers have said they obtained from the chapters that were written for The Toronto Star Weekly sufficient knowledge about railway conditions in Canada, during forty years, to cause them to ask for the material in permanent form. The third era of Canadian railway expansion, beginning with the unnoticed construction of a hundred and twenty-five miles of line in Manitoba, and issuing in the largest national system in the world, will sometime have its due place in the historical literature of the period. Though this was always apparent, it never seemed that one’s contact with the changes of a quarter of a century would ever reach the public except through the inarticulate narrative that is interned in annual reports and arid statistics. What appears here is due to the ability of my old friend and colleague to take scanty and seemingly disconnected material, and fashion it into a story such as one scarcely supposed to be discoverable. This book could only have been written by an author with an inside experience of railway administration; and an intimate knowledge of Western Canada. Mr. Hawkes was for several years the Superintendent of Publicity for the Canadian Northern Railway System. From the railway point of view, therefore, he was familiar with most phases of what I had to tell. His knowledge of the West is extensive and peculiar. He was going through the mill of homestead farming in the North West Territories before I ever saw Manitoba. His intimacy with pioneer conditions, is repeatedly reflected here, in a manner which it is a pleasure to acknowledge.