84 Timehri. 



colony and of providing for vested interests. I think such a course would 

 greatly improve the position of the profession as a whole. I hope to be 

 able to call a meeting of the profession before long to consider this and 

 other matters affecting their interests as a body. Its members have 

 the fullest right to be consulted on the practical effects of any such 

 proposal. The position was set out in 1897 by Their Honours Judge 

 Atkinson and Judge Sheriff, when the present Legal Practitioners 

 Ordinance was before the Court of Policj 7 . 



' ; In the early days there was indeed a time when all the practitioners 

 were practitioners at large without distinction and the change was 

 probably made at the instance of or in the interest of the barristers who 

 came to the colony. We are not at all sure that it would not be well 

 now to abolish the distinction. It would be a boon to parties who are 

 poor and who are now compelled in certain cases to employ a Solicitor 

 and retain a Barrister as well. 



Be that as it may the Barrister here is in reality a general Prac- 

 titioner and not a Barrister in the English sense at all or at any rate in 

 anything more than his exclusive right to appear in the higher Courts."' 



Railways Labour amd Colonization. 



Schemes remunerative at the outset or the methods to be adopted to 

 influence the introduction of capital cannot be dissociated from the 

 railway problem, the labour question and projects of colonization, 

 irrigation and drainage. I will first refer you to the remarks of our 

 learned ( Jhief Justice, Sir T. C Rayner, on June 9th, at a luncheon given 

 in his honour at the St. Lawrence Hall, Montreal, under the auspices of 

 the Canadian West India League at the Canadian Club. Sir Crossley 

 propounds the railwa} T conundrum as follows : — 



If we are to go ahead, it is generally conceded we must have a 

 railway to the interior. We have any number of rivers, but unfortu- 

 nately there is great difficulty in navigating them because of cataracts 

 and falls. Many of our leading men claim we should have a railway right 

 through the country to Brazil. Certainly if we had that, we should tap 

 a country of the most fertile description. 



Just to give one instance of what this might mean to us. In our 

 back country we have thousands and thousands of miles of rolling 

 savannah lands, precisely similar to that on which the great cattle herds 

 of the world are raised and fed. We have cattle being raised there now, 

 but owing to the absence of railway communication, which necessitates 

 their having to be taken over the Brazilian frontiers to Manaos to find a 

 market, it is generally agreed that the present numbers bear absolutely 

 no comparison to those that our lands enable us to raise. 



To you gentlemen here — fellow Britishers I would rather say 

 (applause)— possessed as you happily are of an exchequer that is literally 

 swimming over with money — yes, even surplus money, the problem of 



