Pacific Railway Company between the Great Lakes and the Pacific.  Through the positions of brakemen, freight clerk, yard master, conductor, night station-agent, passenger agent, this man worked on his own passage along Fame’s ladder.  Twenty years of adolescence and preparation, twenty years with the Grand Trunk, a quarter of a century with the Canadian Pacific, this is William Whyte’s record of splendid service.  He has always played the game and he is still in the harness.

[Illustration:  Donald D. Mann, Vice-president of the Canadian Northern Railway]

[Illustration:  William Whyte, Second Vice-president of the Canadian Pacific Railway]

When people enquired of the early Christians, “What do you call your new religion?” they answered, “We call it The Road.”  If religion is the best work of a man made visible, as I think it is, then the Canadian Northern Road may well stand for the religious expression of the men who made it.  It takes more than money, more than dreams, more than ambition, for two men in twelve years to build, own, and personally control five thousand miles of railway.  As Riley says, it takes sweat.  A mile a day for twelve years,—­this is the construction-record of the Canadian Northern.  It sounds like the story of Jonah’s gourd.  In 1896, nothing.  In 1909, a railroad line with earnings of ten million dollars a year west of Port Arthur alone, and twelve thousand people on the regular pay-roll.  Beginning in Manitoba and operating in the three prairie Provinces, the Canadian Northern is primarily a western railway, its remarkable growth being coincident with and closely related to the tide of immigration.

[Illustration:  In the Wheat Fields]

As a case in point, on our way south from Edmonton we pass through the divisional point of Vermilion on the Canadian Northern, which is not to be confounded with our Far North Vermilion-on-the-Peace.  Vermilion exemplifies wonderfully the Go-Fever and the Grow-Fever of the Prairies.  Before it was three months old its citizens had organised a Board of Trade, had given it a Methodist Church, a newspaper, a bank, a public school, three lumber-yards, three hotels, three restaurants, four implement warehouses, two hardware stores, two butcher shops, four real estate offices, a furniture store, a drugstore, a jewellery store, a steam laundry, a flour and feed store, a shoe-shop, a bakery, and a bookshop.  Three barbers had hung out their signs, and so had two doctors, a photographer, a lawyer, a dentist, and an auctioneer.  There were two pool-rooms and a bowling-alley.