" I called the Duke's
special attention to the position and attitude of the Hudson's Bay
authorities. How they were always crying down their territory as unfit
for settlement; repelling all attempts from the other side to open up
the land by roads, and use steamers on such grand rivers as, for
instance, the Assiniboin and the Saskatchewan. He said Sir Frederick
Rogers, the chief permanent official at the Colonial Office, whose
wife's settlement was in Hudson's Bay shares, and who, in consequence,
was expected to be well informed, had expressed to him grave doubts of
the vast territory in question being ever settled, unless in small
spots here and there. The Duke fully recognized, however, the
difficulty I had put my finger upon. I never spent an hour with a man
who more impressed me with his full knowledge of a great imperial
question, and his earnest determination to carry it out successfully
and speedily. The Intercolonial Railway, to connect Halifax on the
Atlantic with the Grand Trunk Railway at Riviere du Loup, 106 miles
below Quebec, he described as "the preliminary necessity." The
completion of an iron-road, onwards to the Pacific, was, "to his mind,
a grand conception." The union of all the provinces and territories
into "one great British America," was the necessary, the logical,
result of completing the Intercolonial Railway and laying broad
foundations for the completion, as a condition of such union, of a
railway to the Pacific.
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