The Railway Builders

the pace of business operations, making it possible, and therefore necessary, for the captain of industry or finance of the twentieth century to have under control ten times the press of affairs which occupied his eighteenth-century forerunner. The railway levelled prices and levelled manners. It enabled floods of settlers {12} to sweep into all the waste places of the earth, clamped far-flung nations into unity, and bound country to country.

Nowhere was the part played so momentous as in the vast spaces of the North American continent, and not least in the northern half. The railway found Canada scarcely a geographical expression, and made it a nation.

{13}

CHAPTER II

EARLY TRAVEL IN CANADA

Water Transport--Land Trails--Westward in 1800--Progress 1830--1850: The Day of the Steamboat

British North America before the railway came was a string of scattered provinces. Lake Huron was the western boundary of effective sett