The Railway Conquest of the World

THOUGH the task of deciding the path for the railway teems with excitement, adventure and privation, the battle with Nature commences in grim earnest when the constructional engineer arrives on the scene. On paper it seems a simple task to follow the location as indicated by an unbroken row of wooden stakes, but to carry the surveyors' work to completion, and to comply with requirements as to grades and curves, often proves a heartrending undertaking. No matter how formidable any obstruction may appear, it is the work of the builder to beat it down; to overcome it by some means or other with the minimum of expense. He must be baulked by nothing.

Such a task demands a man of illimitable resource and infinite ingenuity, conversant with every phase of civil engineering. At the same time he must possess the happy faculty of being able to organize great armies of men of all nationalities, and in such a manner that lie can get the utmost out of them. This is a searching difficulty. The camp of today upon a large railway undertaking is a heterogeneous mass of humanity; the confusion of tongues at the Tower of Babel could not have been more embarrassing. I have lived among the camps of Canada and the United States, and among a hundred men it has been no uncommon circumstance to find representatives of a dozen different tongues. The control of such men is rendered all the more complex for the reason that in the majority of cases they have little or no knowledge of any language but their own. It is not until they have been in one another's company for several weeks that inter-conversation