Twenty-seven years old, Clifford Sifton had come to Winnipeg as member for Brandon after the general election of 1888, which followed the Greenway Government’s accession during the preceding winter. Even if he had had to be pushed into the attorney-generalship, he would have been the logical, indeed, the only, successor of the excessively mercurial Martin. It is not critical of the merits of his colleagues to remark that he was by far the ablest man in the Cabinet. As he was the first member of a Dominion Government who made an outstanding success of immigration--it is not difficult to recognize his hand in the Manitoba administration’s efforts to secure immigration for the Dauphin country, out of which the Canadian Northern was evolved. The retirement of the C.P.R. from Fort Whyte, and the abandonment of its monopolistic privilege, had brought the Northern Pacific into Manitoba, and promised, for a while, to give the province the railway expansion it was believed to need. The Northern Pacific, or its subsidiaries, obtained a charter that allowed it to go almost anywhere. It was understood that it would enter the country west of Lake Manitoba and north of Gladstone, thirty-six miles out from Portage. But the depression culminating in the panic of 1893--which caused six hundred banks in the United States to suspend, and of which a sequel was the march of Coxey’s army of unemployed on Washington from Masillon, Ohio, in April, 1894--threw the Northern Pacific into a receivership; and there was no prospect of it building more lines in Manitoba, even with the Government’s guarantee to pay the interest on its bonds for twenty years. It has always been understood that the inducement of interest guarantees originated within the Government. Some day, the story of its inception may be intimately told. That, as far as I know, was the introduction to Canada of the practice of Governments guaranteeing bonds of railway enterprises, as distinct from cash and land subsidies and the cession of railways already built, but all-but financially derelict, as had happened in the case of the C.P.R. The arrangement with the Northern Pacific had broken down, but it pointed the way of advance to one shrewd man; and the former contractor of the North Western, the Regina and Long Lake, and the Calgary and Edmonton, saw in the situation enough encouragement to take the stalled Lake Manitoba Railway and Canal Company off the Davises’ hands. Mr. Mann went to his bankers for assistance. They told him the job was too big for a lone hand, and counselled that he secure the co-operation of his old associates. It was that advice which brought a new orientation to the relationship between Mackenzie and Mann. There was an idea of asking the Manitoba Government for guarantees of principal and interest up to sixteen thousand dollars a mile; but the bankers preferred that the contractors should obligate themselves.