Mr. Lash was a great general counsel. He had no Canadian superior, perhaps no equal, in drafting legal documents. So exquisite was his appreciation of word values that, though others might embody an intention in a series of paragraphs apparently beyond criticism, his mastery of precision and shade was such that he could clothe it in language which had the exactitude of a multiplication table and the clarity of a mirror. His knowledge of the law--especially company law--was wide and profound, as became Edward Blake’s Deputy Minister of Justice in the eighteen-seventies. To rare professional acumen was allied a high individual sense of honour, and a capacity for finance which very fittingly made him vice-president of the Canadian Bank of Commerce. When the Canadian Northern legal work became altogether beyond the physical capacity of one general counsel, in 1904, there was brought to Toronto from the Department of Railways and Canals at Ottawa, as general solicitor, Mr. Gerard N. Ruel, now vice-president and general counsel of the Canadian National Railways. To work with Mr. Ruel is to enjoy an uncommon experience. Everything that is meant by the phrase “counsel learned in the law” applies to him, as it does to many another practitioner of the baffling science. But no gentleman of the robe of my acquaintance is Mr. Ruel’s peer in an uncanny capacity for absorbing multitudes of facts about territory he has never seen, and in a weird facility as a reader of blue prints. He absorbs topography from maps and plans as a sponge absorbs water. A blue print upside down is instantly as plain to him as it is to other skilled observers who have carefully studied it right side up. For several years Mr. Lash and Mr. Ruel had rooms near to the President and Vice-president. About 1908 they required more space and had to move to the corner of Toronto and Court Streets, where, indeed, several departments were located. They occupied about half a floor, and gradually encroached on the space of smaller departments which had to find lodgment elsewhere. Few people have any idea of the magnitude and complication of the legal business of a railway, even when it has settled down into a staid, unexpanding enterprise, from the territorial side of things. But where, almost in a night, an enterprise develops the faculties of a steel magnet operated by an electric crane, and draws all sorts of material to it, lawyers become a very hard-worked section of the organization. A farmer whose land is required for right of way--everybody, in fact, to whom the railway stands in the attitude of a purchaser of an indispensable commodity, at once gets into big business. The moral and intellectual damages involved in cutting a corner off a ten-acre field are simply incalculable; and only a well-fortified legal mind can begin to reduce them to humane proportions.