From that time forward Fleming’s quiet, unceasing energy was occupied in promoting a series of good causes. He became a director of the Canadian Pacific Railway, and in 1883 he crossed the continent in its service and assisted in the survey of the present main line through the Kicking Horse Pass. His party had the honour of being the first white men to cross the Rockies from side to side by this route. The story is told by him in Old to New Westminster (1884). After protracted negotiations from 1879 onward, he succeeded in persuading the Canadian, Australian, and Imperial governments to co-operate in laying the Pacific cable, which was completed between Vancouver and Australia in 1902 [see George Johnson, Annals and Aims of the Pacific Cable, 1903]. From 1876 he had taken a prominent part in forcing on the adoption of standard time, which has so greatly simplified travel in British North America and throughout the world. In 1880 he was appointed chancellor of Queen’s University, Kingston, a position to which he was continuously re-elected until his death. Though not a party man he was a devoted imperialist, was prominent in the Imperial Federation League, and in 1891 came forward as an opponent of reciprocity with the United States. He died at Halifax, Nova Scotia, 22 July 1915.
Fleming was tall and handsome, gentle in speech, but absolutely immovable once his mind was made up. Several portraits of him are given in the authorized biography by L. J. Burpee, Sandford Fleming, Empire-Builder (1915), which also contains a bibliography of his numerous reports and other writings. Of these the chief, in addition to those already quoted, are his reports to the Canadian government on the Inter-Colonial Railway and Canadian Pacific Railway, many pamphlets on time reckoning and on the Pacific cable, and a series of small volumes of prayers and short services which grew out of those which he always provided for his engineering parties. In 1855 he married Ann Jean (died 1888), eldest daughter of James Hall, M.P., sheriff of Peterborough County, Ontario. He was survived by four sons and two daughters. During the summer he lived in Halifax, in the winter in Ottawa, though till late in life he travelled constantly. In 1877 he received the C.M.G., and the K.C.M.G. in 1897.
[L. J. Burpee, op. cit.; Canadian newspapers of July 1915; C. F. Hamilton in Montreal Daily Witness, 20 February 1911; personal knowledge.]
FORD, PATRICK (1837-1913), Irish-American journalist and politician, desscribed by Michael Davitt as ‘for a generation the most powerful support on the American continent of the struggle in Ireland’, was born in Galway city 12 April 1837, the son of Edward Ford, by his wife, Anne, née Ford. In 1841, when he was four, Ford’s parents emigrated to the United States. They settled in Boston, and he was educated at the public schools and the Latin School, and afterwards served his apprenticeship in the printing-office of William Lloyd Garrison, of Boston. He began to write for newspapers in 1855, and was editor and publisher of the Boston Sunday Times, which proved unsuccessful, from 1859 to 1860, and of the Charleston (S.C.) Gazette from 1864 to 1866. He served during the Civil War in the 9th Massachusetts regiment of the Northern army. He married in 1863 Miss Odele McDonald.
The real work of Ford’s life began with the founding of the Irish World (1870), a weekly paper published in New York as a means of communication between Irishmen in the United States. It soon became the chief organ of the Irish, and promoted the organization throughout the United States of two thousand five hundred branches of the Irish Land League founded in 1879. Ford’s articles on the Irish land question led to the frequent prohibition of his paper in Ireland by the British government, notably during the chief secretaryship (1880-1882) of Mr. W. E. Forster. In the forty-five years during which he conducted it, the Irish World collected and sent to Ireland a steady stream of subscriptions—amounting it is said to half a million dollars—in support of successive Irish movements. In the early ’eighties, while Forster was carrying out in Ireland a policy of repression, Ford was accused of advocating dynamite and assassination as political weapons, and association with him was one of the charges brought before The Times special commission (1888-1889) against the Irish constitutional leaders, Parnell, Dillon, and Davitt, all of whom on their visits to America had been welcomed by Ford. It was contended by Davitt in defence that Ford was never a member of any secret society.
In later years Ford unreservedly supported the constitutional movement, his object being ‘the establishment of an Irish parliament dealing exclusively with Irish affairs, leaving all other matters to the imperial parliament’. He sup-
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