224 INTERCOLONIAL SAILS AD. 



press than good taste or even common justice would seem 

 to require. The imperial guarantee enabled Canada to 

 raise the necessary money at perhaps 1 or 2 per cent, 

 less interest than she could have done it herself. At the 

 time the loan was guaranteed to a perfectly solvent and 

 rapidly growing colony, compensation for Fenian raids 

 had been unjustly refused to Canada, and her magnificent 

 fisheries had been thrown open by England to America, 

 as payment from the former to the latter of the Alabama 

 claims. The mother-country in fact gave away Canadian 

 property to America to save its own cash, and then made 

 a great flourish of trumpets about guaranteeing a perfectly 

 safe loan to the child to enable it to carry out the parental 

 project. 



No expense has been spared in the construction of this 

 railroad, which is said by competent authorities to be the 

 very best on the continent of America. 



There seems to be no doubt that this line must always 

 be a source of great expense to Canada. From 200 to 

 300 miles of it can never pay running expenses. To keep 

 it open in winter numerous trains must be run, and at 

 that season the traffic will not probably, for many years at 

 least, pay for the oil. For over 100 miles it runs through 

 as wild and barren a country as there is in the world, and 

 generally speaking through its entire course it carefully 

 avoids all good lands fit for settlement, and, like the moose, 

 pursues its solitary way through the wilderness. 



Had Canada, in connecting Quebec with St. John and 

 Halifax by a railroad within her own boundaries, been 

 actuated only by commercial principles, a line could have 

 been chosen running through fertile lands one-third the 



