Excerpt from The Failure of Government Ownership in Canada There is no country whose conditions, physical, economic, and political, are more similar to those of the United States than those of Canada. The Dominion is an adjacent part of the same conti nent. The larger part of it is extremely like the conterminous larger part of the United States. Its natural resources, industries, and products are similar. Both countries are inhabited mainly by descendants of the peoples of Northern Europe, although this point might be pressed too far. With its big French population, Canada has a large representation of the Latin races. But the ancestries of the people of the United States are not all traceable to Northern Europe; and the French in Canada have as much political capacity as our many voters from Southern Europe, not to mention our millions of negroes. The government of the United States is a democratic republic. That of Canada is not a republic in form, but its people are as self-governing and its institutions are as democratic in fact as those of any country. There are considerable economic differences; but these are unimportant in comparison with the points of resemblance. The results of government ownership and management of rail ways in Canada should, therefore, afford the most reliable indica tion available as to what would be the results in the United States. Canada has tried public ownership and her experience has been long and on a large scale. The Dominion has owned the Intercolonial Railway for forty-seven years, and certain of the colonial govern ments owned parts of it before. It has owned the Prince Edward Island Railway for forty-three years, and acquired it from the government of the island. The Intercolonial and Prince Edward Island have I,7 36 miles of line; and the Dominion has recently built and is operating the National Transcontinental Railway which has miles. The Canadian government railways now have, combined, miles of line. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.