the Great Lakes. There was little national spirit, little
diversity of commercial enterprise. Hundreds of thousands of our
best-born had been drawn by the greater attraction of United States
cities and farms, until one-fourth of the whole Canadian people were
living in the Republic.

It was the opening up of the West that changed the whole face of
Canadian life, that gave a basis for industrial expansion, that
quickened national sentiment and created business optimism. And it was
the building of the Canadian Pacific that opened up the West and bound
it fast to the distant East. Certainly not least among the makers of
Canada were the men who undertook that doubtful enterprise and carried
it through every obstacle to success; and not least {168} among the
generations whose toil and faith have made possible the nation of
to-day were the four millions of the Canada of the eighties who flung a
great railway across the vast unpeopled spaces of a continent to the
far Pacific.

[1] Stephen, Smith, Hill, and Kennedy each took one share, and Kittson
half a share; and later Angus, after leaving the service of the bank to
go with the railway, took the remaining half-share.

[2] Not all were willing to attribute to courage and luck alone the
full success of this stroke. Some Dutch bondholders, independently of
the committee, asserted that Kennedy had not played fair, and Farley,
the receiver of the road, sued Hill for a share of the profits which he
alleged had been promised for his collusion. In repeated trials Farley
was unable to produce evidence satisfactory to the courts, which held
that in any case his claim must be rejected because 'based on inherent
turpitude.'

[3] 'Most men who have really lived have had, in some shape, their
great adventure. This railway is mine' (James J. Hill, in Valedictory
to the Shareholders of the Great Northern, July 1, 1912).

[4] It was from their St Paul investment that the leading men in the
group secured the basis and the bulk of their great fortunes; the
Canadian Pacific added little to their coffers.

[5] Including the Yale-Port Moody section, not yet formally under
contract.

[6] Giving evidence before the Senate Committee on Interstate Commerce
in New York in 1889, President Van Horne stated that the company was
obliged to abandon part of the surveys on which the government had
spent millions, and make new ones; that the government sections were
unwisely located, especi