42 Timehri. 
will be completed within the present year. The force of optimism, 
courage and the spirit of loyal co-operation and mutual confidence 
between the people of Canada, its Government and the promoters could 
no further go. No spirit of mean suspicion, no jealousy of President Haysas a 
foreigner, no terror lest by any chance the promoting Company should make or 
desire a profit from its work in conferring upon Canada a great national boon 
has so far marred the negotiations. If the Canadian-Pacific has earned the 
title of “‘ Providence, Limited,” President Hays has equally well deserved 
his'name of “The Cecil Rhodes of Canada.” * 
Canadian railway enterprise does not say its final word with the Canadian 
Pacific and the Grand Trunk. The Canadian Northern, under the brilliant 
control of Sir William Mackenzie, is rapidly linking up its system with the 
intention of completing yet a third transcontinental line, opening out vast 
tracts of new territory and emerging on the Pacific at Vancouver in the 
near future. It even stretches southward and controls a large mileage in the 
States. It may be noted that each of the great trio of Canadian lines is 
larger by far than a line from Georgetown to Buenos Aires. 
Tn our ten years of prattle the Trans-Siberian line has also been com- 
pleted and thrown out great extensions, and Rhodes’ mighty project, once the 
dream of a man regarded as a half-crazy visionary, the Cape to Cairo Railway, 
is rapidly nearing completion i in spite of unparalleled difficulties of climate and 
labour supply, for the teeming population of Africa exists, so far as it exists 
at all, only in Nigeria and the West Coast, the balance being mostly a very 
thinly populated country. As for the South American trunk ‘schemes, we will 
leave those for the President’s address to deal with, merely remarking that 
what Mr. Luke Hill seems to have regarded as remote, the establishment of 
ordered government throughout South America, has apparently been realised. 
Lest anyone should think that the difficulties confronting those engaged 
in the work of surveying and constructing the Grand Trunk Pacific were any 
less than those of which we have experience in the exploration of our own 
colony I venture to quote from Mr. Tulbot’s valuable Making of u Great 
Canadian Railway (1912), the local interest of the passages justifying the 
length of the extract :— 
“ Tn order to obtain a faint idea of the prospect that confronted those entrust- 
ed with the reconnaisance, conceive a vast country rolling away in humps, 
towering ridges, and wide-yawning valleys as far asthe eye can see, and with 
the knowledge that the horizon Gan be moved onwards for hundreds of miles, 
without bringing about any welcome break in the outlook. On every hand 
is the interminable forest, a verdant sea, except where here and there jagged 
splashes of black and brown betoken that the fire fiend has heen busily at work. 
* Since writing the foregoing we learn with a shock that Mr. Hays was one of those who 
perished in the foundering of the Zzfanic, We was taken alive into one of the boats after 
the great liner went down but died from the effects of prolonged immersion in the icy water. 
The body was again consigned to the sea but seems to have been since recovered and 
dentified. ‘So passed the strong heroic soul away ” of one who like hundreds of thousands 
in the last ten years had become more Canadian than the Canadians, 
