When financial clouds lowered over this line, in the era of the St. Paul and Pacific, the mortgages upon the property were foreclosed, and the entire property passed into the hands of a remarkable syndicate, in whose control it became the St. Paul, Minneapolis and Manitoba, and under their powerful sway, its destinies were wholly changed. The syndicate making the purchase were James J. Hill, George Stephen (now Lord Mount-Stephen), Donald A. Smith (now Sir Donald A. Smith, Lord Strathcona and Mount Royal), and Norman W. Kittson.

On the 10th day of July, 1856, there came to this territory from out of the woods of Canada, a young, unknown, blackeyed and black-haired lad, seeking fortune beneath Minnesota's propitious skies. That young man has had a greater influence upon the history of transportation in this state than any other person. His name is James J. Hill. He has witnessed and promoted the extraordinary development from the old system of transportation, in the era of Kittson, or of Blakeley, to the most modern railway. He has been boldly aggressive, continuously pounding away at the one purpose of achieving great results in the ever expanding problem of better transportation. During the five years when I was railway commissioner of the state, from 1882 to 1887, he practically rebuilt all the old lines of the Great Northern system in Minnesota. He improved the curves and established new gradients. The wooden trestles became roadways of earth and stone, and the old bridges steel. He made a standard system, where he found a temporary one. He found iron rails, and changed them to steel. The lines and spurs of his system penetrate every great grain district of our state. Cast your eyes upon our railway map, and see how its lines cross and recross, how they ramify and spur into every part of the territory they seek to serve. Four times within a hundred miles, distinct lines of this system cross the international boundary to the Canadian side, and they have thrown their bands of steel all over the Dakotas. They have brought many thousands of immigrants, and have added new counties to this state, new towns and cities, new wealth. Mr. Hill found freight rates about three cents per ton per mile, and he has re

duced them to about one cent. His system has been essentially a Minnesota system. It has entered vitally into the building of our great commonwealth. With increasing prosperity, and without land grants or government subsidies, he has extended this railway to the waters of Puget sound, opening an imperial highway across the continent in fulfillment of the prophecy of its earlier names.

His energy has wrought out one of the most instructive stories of human achievement. Hostile criticism falls harmless before such a career of unvarying success. Mr. Hill has fought his way into the anointed family of great men, and there is where history will leave him. This railway system, of which he has been the head, has achieved for us the most wonderful results, having created an empire by the services it has rendered, which will be an enduring monument of what a single system of transportation can do, when loyally and energetically directed to the welfare of the state.

It would be pleasant to linger and recount what other great railway systems have done for the state, such as the Chicago and Northwestern, the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul, and others, but time will not admit.

We have twenty-four distinct railway systems within our state, aggregating 6,086 miles, not including sidetracks and yard facilities. Thirty-six years ago we did not possess one mile. Minnesota has about one mile of railway to every 13 square miles of teritory; Iowa, one to every 10; Wisconsin, one to 17; Kansas, one to 23. If we consider population as well as territory, we are about as well served as Massachusetts, or any of the older states. Such means of transportation and communication were never before the good fortune of any people. The elements inciting railway construction are still at work. Railways beget railways, and the end is not yet.

The twenty-four systems moved, within our state, in 1896, no less than 62,000,000 tons of freight, and carried over 31,000,000 passengers. We are actually startled at such figures, but they are official facts. The power of some of the companies is severely taxed to handle the traffic. The volume of railroad business is a good barometer of trade, and official

tables show that ours is constantly on the increase. With these facts before us, we can see that the days of Red river carts, stage coaches, and prairie schooners, are past. And even our rivers, as a squeezed orange, are quite thrown aside. As if by magic, our state has been tranformed into a checkerboard of steel bars, bringing modern transportation to the very doors of our people.

The colossal character of the grain movements in Minnesota are so stupendous that few persons have an adequate knowledge of their extent. I give you figures never before summarized for the public. The number of bushels of grain moved on Minnesota lines during the year 1897 was 185,704,130, being 255,540 carloads. The average cost per ton per mile, to move the same, was 14 cents. The average freight on wheat and corn from Duluth to Buffalo, in 1897, was 1.9 cents per bushel; in 1886, it was 5.2 cents; and in 1872, 12 cents. The average cost for freight, insurance, elevator charges, commission, and all other incidental charges on wheat from Duluth to London, in 1897, was 13 cents. You could not procure the carriage of a single bushel of wheat from the capitol to the union depot, in this city, for less than 25 cents! Nothing has more specifically and materially affected our transportation problem than the constant and extraordinary reduction of tariff rates. No other necessity of human life has been more regularly and certainly cheapened to the people than the transporting of their persons and property. It is not only betterments and cheaper material that cheapen transportation, but the ever swelling volume of trade. It is the only thing known to me of which it can be said that, the more you feed it, the less it gets.

We have come through experience, and a system of evolution, to a better understanding of the laws which govern transportation. Governmental regulations should be few and simple, and strictly in accord with commercial and natural conditions. Every rate that is made to-day is made by influences beyond the control of the carrier. You cannot put railroads in straight jackets. Within reasonable restrictions, they should be left free, like other business, to the operations of competition.

SUMMARY REVIEW.

Thus have I attempted to present to you the more salient features of the rise and growth of our varied systems of transportation, that mighty factor of our civilization. We have ascended the stream of time to the tumuli of the unknown dead. We have carried copper with them, in nameless boats, through lakelet and river. We have paddled in the birch canoe of the historic Indian. We have seen strange fleets of early craft, loaded with pelts, stealing beneath the beetling rocks of our great lake, at the very twilight dawn of our story. We have stood with Le Sueur, on the deck of his felucca, as he ascended our rivers two centuries ago. We have beheld the lordly fur companies as they strode upon the scene, carrying their transportation to the far off Great Slave lake, a region so distant that we ourselves have not yet dared to invade it. We have been with the scholarly Schoolcraft, in 1820, as he proudly waved his hand to the advent of his country's flag and vessels when they first made entry to the waters of the "unsalted sea." We have stood, with the early immigrants, on the decks of the first steamboats which ascended our streams. We have been with Kittson and heard the screeching of the greaseless wheels of a wonderful commerce that arose in the far North. We have travelled by dog sledges amid the solitude of snows. We have welcomed, with Edmund Rice, the scepter of a new king in that wonderful horse whose sinews are steel, and whose breath is steam, and have listened to the far echoes of his shrill whistle over our prairies, as it proclaimed the death of the old carriers and the birth of the new. We have beheld our railways rivet their bracelets of steel all over the bosom of our commonwealth, till every hamlet is served with highways better than Rome under the empire of the Cæsars ever dreamed of possessing. But, not content with granting superb facilities within our own limits, we have seen our aggressive men of affairs pick up the ends of the steel ribbons, pass beyond the barriers of the state, and carry them across a continent to the waters of the Pacific.

We are pleased to remember, this day, that this admirable system of transportation rests upon a base of inexhaustible

resources.

We offer no Klondike, with specious gates of gold, amid pillars of ice, but that which is a thousand times better for morality and stability. Our resources challenge all that is good in the genius and energy of our sons. Over every square mile of our commonwealth, nature has spread her prodigal garniture with a princely hand. Ceres pours over us her wealth from the horn of plenty. But turn our soil and plant, and God's sun will kiss it into wealth. Only the voluntarily idle can be disinherited in Minnesota.

Possessing all these enriching conditions, even with but a respectable government and only a moderate race of statesmen, our splendid body of business men will still carry our state forward to a superb destiny. When we consider that the greater and better part of all this has been wrought during the span of a single human life, we behold a miracle of performance, in which most of you were the living actors. Never again will life present the same magnificent drama of events as the panorama you have witnessed.

In surveying it all, I feel that, as the wise men of the East followed that star which came and stood over the place where the infant Savior was born, so we, impelled by some good Providence, followed the Star of the North, till it stood above a virgin empire of undeveloped wealth, which was for us, and for our children, the promised land.