The Sun

The Toronto Leader discovers, in the recent letter of Gen. Hazen giving a most unflattering picture of the sterility of a great portion of the region bordering the line of the Northern Pacific Railroad, a key to the secret of the overthrow of the late Macdonald Ministry. According to the Leader, it was Jay Cooke & Co. who were responsible for that great public calamity.

"Driven to desperation," it says, "by the failure of their intrigues with Sir Hugh Allan, owing to the patriotic course followed by Sir John A. Macdonald in excluding the Americans altogether from having anything to do with the Canadian Pacific, it became evident that this Northern Pacific Railway scheme must collapse. Messrs. Jay Cooke & Co., knowing the actual state of the case, had sense enough to believe that if they could only get hold of the $30,000,000 voted by the Canadian Parliament, and the 50,000,000 acres of land along the Canadian Pacific Railway route they would be in a position to float off their bonds, and at the same time to hold out inducements of a substantial nature for the settlement of their own barren desert. Major Hazen has dispelled the beautiful shadings given to the pictures of these western wilds by Jay Cooke & Co." In his letter just printed, and hence, somehow, the defeat of the Canadian Government last fall.

Having thus conclusively shown that it was Jay Cooke & Co. who brought the Macdonald Ministry to grief the Leader proceeds to demonstrate that the proposed route of the Canadian Pacific Railway, being much further north than that of the Northern Pacific, has a more genial climate, more fertile lands, and no serious natural obstacles in its way. In many parts of the country, the Leader tells us, the winters are as mild as they are in Quebec.