until the lean days of the early nineties were
over.

During this decade of extraordinary activity the Grand Trunk had been
neither content nor passive. Offended by the incursions into its best
paying territory, it fought its younger rival in parliament and on the
stock exchange, {179} but with no lasting success in either quarter.
It was more successful in its own constructive policy of expansion. In
1879 it had made a good bargain by selling to the Intercolonial the
branch from Levis to Riviere du Loup, which did not earn operating
expenses, and by expending the proceeds in buying an extension to
Chicago, which enabled it at last to secure the through traffic from
the West for which it had been in large part originally designed. Its
great coup came, however, in 1882, when the onward march of the
Canadian Pacific and the bitter experience of fruitless rate wars led
it to purchase its old rival, the Great Western, with its Michigan
extensions. The construction of the St Clair tunnel between Port Huron
and Sarnia, completed in 1890, marked another forward step in its
western territory. Meanwhile it had acquired, in 1884, the Midland
Railway, itself a recent amalgamation of the Midland, running from Port
Hope to Midland, with the Toronto and Nipissing, the Grand Junction,
from Belleville to Peterborough, and the Whitby and Port Perry,
effected by two enterprising financiers, George A. Cox and Robert
Jaffray. Four years later it absorbed the Northern and Northwestern
roads, which had acquired {180} jointly a branch from Gravenhurst to
North Bay, so that here at least the older road checkmated its rival,
securing the very paying link between Toronto and the western lines of
the Canadian Pacific.

[1] One such company, the Caraquet, which was given $400,000 in
subsidies, declared, in floating $500,000 in bonds in England, that the
capacity of the road was taxed to its utmost, and that an immense
traffic was in sight. At that time its entire rolling-stock consisted
of two locomotives, one passenger car, two box and fifteen flat cars,
and a snow-plough.

[2] The earliest intercolonial project, a railroad from St Andrews
north, was brought to completion in 1889 when a short road, the
Temiscouata, was built, linking the Intercolonial at Riviere du Loup
with the New Brunswick Railway at Edmundston.

[Illustration: Railways of Canada, 1896]

{181}

CHAPTER X

THE CANADIAN NORTHERN

The Opportuni