INTERESTING DEVELOPMENTS.
During the past week, therefore, the City has been par- ticularly glad to note one or two developments showing that our leading bankers here are coming into closer touch with Canada. The Canadian Pacific Railway, which hitherto has had only one London representative on its Board, has now elected two in the place of the late Sir Thomas Skinner, one of them being the Right Hon. Reginald McKenna, the Chairman of the Midland Bank, and the other being Mr. E. R. Peacock, a Managing Director of Baring Brothers and Co., Limited. Two more thoroughly representative men of banking and finance in this country it would have been impossible to select, and both the election and the acceptance of the appointments have created a most favourable impression. Moreover, this im- pression has been strengthened by the still later intimation that not only the two gentlemen already referred to, but Sir George May, of the Prudential Assurance Co., and Mr. D. W. Berdoe-Wilkinson, of Messrs. Mullens, Marshall, Steer, Law- ford and Co., have, at the joint request of the Canadian National Railways and the Grand Trunk Pacific Bondholders' Committee, agreed to act as an independent Advisory Com- mittee with a view to assisting both parties in the course of the forthcoming negotiations towards finding the basis for an amicable settlement. There have been certain points of dis- agreement arising out of the recent acquisition by the Cana- dian Government of the Grand Trunk Railway which have undoubtedly called for a clearing up and an adjustment on lines calculated by both sides to be entirely equitable. Such disputes almost invariably arise when there is Government absorption of some big industrial concern, and when, as now, the matter is concerned with acquisition not by local interests but by an overseas Government, it becomes the more necessary that the arrangement should be one in which neither party feels aggrieved by the transaction.
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