1860. The western half was not begun until August 1867.

To return to the upper provinces. By 1851 the St Lawrence, the Great
Western, and the Northern were under way, and more ambitious schemes
proposed. The Guarantee Act of 1849, which was the first phase of
Hincks's policy, assuring public aid for the second half of any road at
least seventy-five miles in length, was proving inadequate, and the
government was considering an extension of its policy. At this
juncture the golden news arrived of Howe's success in securing the
L7,000,000 loan at bargain rates. All hesitation was removed. No
doubt was felt that the roads would pay, once they were built; the only
difficulty had been to find the money to build them. And now
L7,000,000 was {70} available--L4,000,000 of it for Canada, at probably
3 1/2 per cent. Paper computations soon proved that L4,000,000 would
suffice not only to build Canada's third of the Quebec-Halifax route,
but to build a trunk line from Quebec or Montreal through to Hamilton,
whence the Great Western ran to Windsor on the frontier opposite
Detroit.

At once a struggle began for the control of this fund. The Montreal
merchants who had bought experience in building the St Lawrence and
Atlantic, John Young, Luther Holton, and D. L. Macpherson, with A. T.
Galt of Sherbrooke, were first in the field, and pressed for a charter
to build from Montreal to Kingston, intending later to extend this road
to Toronto. Then the most noted firm of contractors in railway
history, Peto, Brassey, Betts and Jackson (the forms of the firm name
varied), who had built one-third of the railways of Britain, and also
roads in France and Spain and Italy and Prussia and India, were
attracted to this fresh field by Howe's campaign in England. They sent
an agent to Toronto in 1851 to offer to construct all the roads needed,
and to find all the capital required, with partial government
guarantees. Hincks, with whom the decision lay, was {71} eminently an
opportunist. In 1849 he had argued against government ownership; now
he argued for it. Yet he did not close the door against retreat. The
new Act, passed in April 1852, marked the second or Grand Trunk phase
of his gradually shaping policy. Besides providing for the Canadian
share of the Halifax to Quebec road, the Act contemplated three
alternative methods of continuing this Trunk line westward. The
province was to build it if the guaranteed loan could be stretch