After exhaustive surveys had been made and the construction of the Canadian Pacific had been well advanced and some six or eight hundred miles of the heaviest sections built, political exigencies arose, and in 1880 he resigned. In that year he was elected Chancellor of Queen’s University, and in 1882, while on a visit to Scotland, was presented with the freedom of Kircaldy Burghs, and in 1884 received the honorary degree of LL.D., from St. Andrew’s University.
In 1881 he went as a delegate from the Canadian Institute and the American Meteorological Society to the International Geographical Congress at Venice, and in 1884 he was appointed a delegate of Great Britain to represent the Dominion of Canada at the International Prime Meridian Conference at Washington, where he had the pleasure of finding his views which he had been pressing on the public for years with regard to Cosmic time and a prime meridian for all nations, accepted by the representatives of the civilized world.
As early as 1879 Sir Sandford submitted to the Canadian Government a scheme for spanning the Pacific Ocean by electric cables which would, in connection with existing land and cable wires, complete the electric girdle of the globe, and bring Great Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand in unbroken electric touch with each other without passing over foreign territory. The proposition was given due consideration and the subject was laid before successive parliaments, but, while much interest had been awakened, nothing practical was accomplished, owing to the many obstacles in the way, and the matter was, for a time, held in abeyance. Meanwhile its energetic projector did not despair. Year after year he took every favorable opportunity to bring it before the public men of Great Britain and the Colonies, travelling thousands of miles to attend Conferences at London, Brisbane, Ottawa and elsewhere, wherever the subject was under review. At length the reasons and arguments adduced on all these occasions in support of this scheme were found to be convincing, and its feasibility so apparent that it was finally accepted and practically applied.
On the 31st day of December, 1900, the Imperial and five Colonial governments joined in an interstate partnership to carry out the work so long and ably advocated by its originator and promoter. Exactly twenty-two months after the agreement, 8,272 miles of cable had been manufactured and safely embedded in the vast depths of the Pacific, nearly a third of the earth’s circumference, on the 31st day of October, 1902, electric communication was successfully established between Canada, New Zealand, Fiji and Australia, and has been uninterruptedly maintained ever since. The success of this great telegraph enterprise, the most stupendous ever taken, was a fitting prelude to the dawn of the new century and a splendid triumph to the genius and foresight of Sir Sandford Fleming.
During nearly a quarter of a century he had given his time and talents, as well as his private means, to accomplish the end he had in view, and it must have been peculiarly gratifying to him that his labors all these years had not been in vain. His patriotic and self-sacrificing efforts should receive some suitable public acknowledgment in some substantial form.
In 1877 he was made a Companion of St. Michael and St. George, and in 1897 he was promoted to be a commander of the same distinguished order on the occasion of the sixtieth year of Her Majesty’s reign.
“Peace hath her victories,
No less renowned than war.”
FRED. N. GISBORNE.