local time has been remedied
by the adoption of a zone system, in consequence largely of the
persistent advocacy of Sir Sandford Fleming. Thus the increase in
mileage by no means represents the increase in service rendered: every
year the engines grow more powerful, the cars larger and the trains
longer, and the freight service more speedy and trustworthy. True, the
service is still far from perfect, and when a heavy snowstorm paralyses
traffic, or the diversion to new competitive building of money which
should have gone into equipment brings about congestion, {246} vigorous
denunciation follows these brief reversions to the traffic conditions
of the good old days.

There is no work that man has wrought that would give nobler and more
enduring title to fame than the great cathedrals which mediaeval Europe
bequeathed to the world. Yet no man's name is linked with theirs.
They were the work of generations, of an epoch, the expression of the
genius and the labour and the worship of uncounted thousands. There is
a whole world of difference between the mediaeval cathedral and the
modern railway, but this they have in common, that they are the work
not of a few hands but of many, not a sudden creation, but the product
of labours continued year after year. Leaders were indispensable; we
cannot forget the men who planned and the men who carried through and
the men who organized the working of the great railway systems. Keefer
and Fleming, Poor and Waddington, Galt and Hincks and Howe, Macdonald
and Laurier, Mount Stephen and Strathcona, Van Horne and Hays,
Shaughnessy and Mackenzie, these and many more, though often bearing
feet of clay, we shall honour as builders of a mighty heritage.

{247}

But behind these loom up forgotten myriads who also were indispensable.
The surveyor, often an explorer as well, striking out into the
wilderness, braving sheer precipice and arctic blizzard in search of
mountain pass or lower grade; the man with the pick and shovel, a
mighty and ever-shifting army--English navvy, Irish canaller, Chinese
coolie, Swede or Italian or Ruthenian--housed in noisome bunkhouses,
often fleeced by employment agent or plundering sub-contractor, facing
sudden death by reckless familiarity with dynamite or slower death by
typhoid and dysentery; the men who carried on the humdrum work of every
day, track-mending, ticket-punching, engine-stoking; the patient,
unmurmuring payer of taxes for endless bonuses--