Men at the Wheel.

Civilisation has intensified commercialism, and commercialism has in some ways blunted human nature. Yet in these latter years many commercial posts have become posts of danger and difficulty and even of death; therefore, places of heroism. Great industrial leaders, who formerly had under their hand a well-oiled machine that always went, have found their craft tossed and halted in the depression storm, and have grown old in a night. They have paid the price of failing to prevent something that was beyond their power. The cablegrams suggest such a vein of tragedy behind the death, at 62, of an Indiana (U.S.A.) boy who became an English Knight for railway services in war time, and who, later, as Sir Henry Thornton, took control of the Canadian National Railways. Along with the C.P.R., the C.N.R. struck the world storm, and Sir Henry Thornton, the brilliant success of one war, fell in this later one. He is not the only railway leader whose life has been claimed by the crisis. If once there were laurels for leaders, there is now cypress.

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