the questions involved, the shrewd common sense and the recognized impartiality of the first chairman of the board, Hon. A. G. Blair, formerly minister of railways and canals in the Dominion cabinet. Under his control the board was instrumental in settling, by a policy of conciliation and mutual concession, and with reasonable satisfaction to all parties, a multitude of disputes which had been sources of bitterness and irritation in the districts affected. Mr. Blair's resignation, shortly before the last Canadian elections, was felt at the time to be an irreparable loss, as his was by all odds the master mind of the commission. Fortunately the government has secured, in Mr. Justice Killam, of the Supreme Court of Canada, a successor who possesses much of Mr. Blair's shrewdness and tact, as well as the alert mind and legal knowledge of an eminent jurist.
The third of this remarkable triumvirate of transportation commissions is charged with the location and construction of the eastern half of the new Transcontinental railway.
There are to-day in Canada some 170 railways, twenty-five of which are amalgamated in the grand Trunk system and thirty in the Canadian Pacific. The rest, with the exception of the Intercolonial and the Canadian Northern, are comparatively short, local roads. The total railway mileage of the country is now about twenty thousand, of which the Canadian Pacific accounts for nearly one half, and the Grand Trunk, some 3,200 miles. Of the existing roads, the Canadian Northern is growing with the greatest rapidity. It is expected that by the coming autumn the rails will be laid as far as Edmonton—making a second through line from Fort William almost to the foothills of the Rockies. But the men who are behind the Canadian Northern are by no means satisfied with this program. They look forward to a much wider development for their road, and confidently expect to make it the third Canadian transcontinental. At present the main line extends from Fort William to the neighborhood of Battleford. Then in the east the Canadian Northern interests control the Great Northern, from the city of Quebec to Hawkesbury, on the lower Ottawa; and they are now applying to parliament for authority to construct the intervening link between Hawkesbury and Fort William, viâ Ottawa and north of the Great Lakes. When this link is completed, and the western end of the railway carried to Edmonton and the Rockies, and thence to the Pacific coast, the Canadian Northern will have a through line from Quebec to the Pacific.
With the completion of the Grank Trunk Pacific, and the Canadian Northern, Canada will have three distinct transcontinental railways, and eventually these will in all probability be increased by one and perhaps two others. One at least of these will run through the
