Trunk of
$25,000 a year. A year later he was back again in Canada. There was
not room in the {202} Southern Pacific for both Hays and Harriman, then
in financial control, and the Grand Trunk directors seized the
opportunity which the breach afforded. In 1909 the wide recognition of
Mr Hays's great services led to long overdue increase of the authority
of the Canadian officials of the road by his appointment as president,
on the retirement of Sir Charles Rivers-Wilson. Three years later,
with his projects for expansion still incomplete, he met a tragic death
in the sinking of the _Titanic_. Mr Edson J. Chamberlin, who had
increased his reputation for efficiency by his management for four
years of the Grand Trunk Pacific, was chosen as successor in the
presidency.

Fortune favoured the new administration from the start. The tide in
the continent's business affairs turned soon after the new men took the
helm. The long depression ended, prices rose, farmers met mortgage
payments, factory chimneys smoked once more, traffic multiplied.

The first result of the improved conditions was the easing of the
tension in railway relations. There was no longer a life-and-death
necessity for rate-cutting and traffic-stealing. Rate wars between the
trunk lines in the United States came to an end. On the {203} Canadian
side peace was longer in coming. The rush to the Klondike in 1897
started a rate war between the Canadian Pacific and the Grand Trunk,
with its American connections, which lasted nearly a year. In its
course rates were cut in the east as well as in the west, and the
Canadian Pacific sent its west-bound freight from Toronto by Smith's
Falls rather than use any longer the direct line of the Grand Trunk to
North Bay. Peace was patched up, but the Canadian Pacific shortly
afterwards set about building a road of its own from Toronto north to
its main line, thus threatening the Grand Trunk with permanent loss of
western business, and providing it with one incentive toward the great
westward expansion it was soon to undertake.

Along with prudent retrenchments went increasingly aggressive
expansion, both east and west. It was one of the main objects of Mr
Hays's policy to secure a hold on the rich traffic possibilities of New
York and the New England states. Portland, the original New England
terminus of the Grand Trunk, had not become the great commercial centre
it once expected to be. The first further step w