Sometimes he was in the public service, officially. He was always in the public service, temperamentally. For a generation he was the annually-elected secretary of the Winnipeg Grain Exchange, and saw it grow from almost nothing to the biggest wheat mart in the world. He kept the Board of Trade straight while it was located in the City Hall, which was built in sure and certain hope that the boom would become a normalcy, and which still houses the civic administration. Western literature has had in him a faithful practitioner, and Masonry a pillar, even to the thirty-third degree. During more recent years he developed a strain of feeling of which Ontario folk may take notice. He came to believe that the average Ontario man going West carries a disposition similar to that of the thoughtless Englishman, who said of Canadians generally, “We howns ’em.” It is a curious and somewhat delusive phenomenon in community life that men seem vaster in a large city than they do in a little town. Somehow, a Winnipeg leader is supposed to be a bigger man in that city of over two hundred thousand than the same man was when the population was about as big as Brantford’s is to-day. That could not really be. Lord Strathcona, among the exaltation of Imperial London, was not truly greater than Donald Smith was, buying pelts and wheat at Fort Garry, keeping Riel quiet, and, later, parleying with bishops over the school question. Heavy railroad building, during the periodic flow of capital from a rich and loaning country, is an easier task than starting a small railway in a small community with very small resources. In this connection one thinks of a man who had an extraordinarily vivid career during the strenuous decades of his Western life. I mean Hugh Sutherland, who in 1874, was sent to Winnipeg as a superintendent of the Dominion Public Works Department. He built the quarters for Governor Laird, and the mounted police barracks at Battleford, when the capital of the North West Territories was moved from Fort Pelly, near the headwaters of the Assiniboine, north of Kamsack, the first Canadian Northern divisional point west of Dauphin. Charlie Bell watched Hugh Sutherland’s midwinter arrival at Fort Garry with his dogs, and always describes him as the handsomest man he ever saw.