Free The Last Spike: The Great Railway, 1881-1885 by Pierre Berton

said he accomplished the feat tolerably well,” the Manitoba Free Press reported guardedly.
    From the end of steel, the party set off across the “limitless, marvellous green meadows” to the foothills of the Rockies in a horse-drawn cavalcade of barouches and Red River carts, accompanied by forty white-helmeted Mounted Policemen. It was an exciting and romantic journey. No British writer could resist the ceremony of a Blackfoot powwow, nor could he fail to be impressed by the unbroken ocean of grass or by Lorne’s own enthusiastic speeches along the way. (“You have a country whose value it would be insanity to question.… It must support a vast population,” he told the Manitoba Club.) The coverage was good, and The Times changed its editorial line and ceased to thunder against Canada.
    But the gibes from other British newspapers and journals continued. The most memorable, titled “The Canadian Dominion Bubble,” was published in Truth on September 1, 1881. The author was Henry Labouchère, a piquant journalist and financial critic whose uncle and namesake had been Colonial Secretary in 1857 when Captain John Palliser made his gloomy report on conditions in the Canadian North West.
    Labouchère said flatly that the floating of a Canadian government bond issue in England and ten million dollars worth of CPR land grant bonds in New York and Montreal that fall was a fraud. New York investors, he declared, would never be such fools “as to put their money into this mad project. I would as soon credit them with a willingness to subscribe hard cash in support of a scheme for the utilization of icebergs.” As for the Canadians, they were “not such idiots as to part with one dollar of theirown if they can borrow their neighbours’. The Canadians spend money and we provide it.”
    “The Canadian Pacific Railway will run, if it is ever finished, through a country frost bound for seven or eight months in the year, and will connect with the eastern part of the Dominion a province which embraces about as forbidding a country as any on the face of the earth.” British Columbia was “a barren, cold, mountain country that is not worth keeping.” It would never have been inhabited at all had it not been for the mining boom: “Ever since that fever died down the place has been going from bad to worse. Fifty railroads would not galvanize it into prosperity.”
    Manitoba was equally formidable: “Men and cattle are frozen to death in numbers that would startle the intending settler if he knew; and those who are not killed outright, are often maimed for life by frostbites.”
    Canada was “one of the most over-rated colonies we have … poor and crushed with debt.” In the end, the editorial said, the country would have to go into liquidation, and when the load got too heavy Ontario would quit and join the United States. As for the railway, it was “never likely to pay a red cent of interest on the money that may be sunk into it.”
    This broadside and others that followed had their effect on the British money market. They were accompanied that fall by the first of the anti- CPR pamphlets, said to have been written by the Grand Trunk’s “paid ink-slingers,” as Stephen called them. One pamphlet, entitled The Canadian Pacific Railway and the Schemes of the Syndicate , by “Diogenes,” warned investors not to risk their money in what was represented as a reckless enterprise. Another, entitled Financial Notes , by “Ishmael,” denied the fertility of the twenty-five million acres of land that the CPR was to receive from the government. Ishmael accused The Times’ s correspondent with the Lorne party of having been bought up by Stephen to pretend that the Great Lone Land was flowing with milk and honey.
    At about the same time the Money Market Review , a respected British financial journal, devoted four issues to a series of articles warning British investors against putting money into CPR bonds. In reply, Alexander