_Indicating several considerations which made Toronto the centre of
a Transcontinental system._
A rather cynical friend used to say his title to respectability was
that he was permitted to live in Toronto. For twenty-one years I
have been enabled to read that title clear. In truth, Toronto is
a goodly city, which doesn’t think of itself more highly than it
ought to think, although it has a contrariwise repute. Occasionally
one is inclined to observe that it might have thought a little more
generously of some who have served it better than has always been
recognized--Sir William Mackenzie and Sir Donald Mann, for examples.
When the movement of Canadian National officials to Montreal began,
early in 1923, there were about twenty-five hundred employees of the
system in Toronto. At say, an average of two dependents, that means
a population of seven thousand five hundred; and with their support
of butchers, and bakers, grocers and tailors, candlestick makers,
and show-ticket takers, say fifteen hundred more. Half of Toronto’s
manufacturing output goes to the West. In the prairie country, at
least, it can fairly be said that one-fourth of the development of
this century has been directly due to the building of the Canadian
Northern. There was no particular reason why a series of railways
west of Port Arthur should have their head office in Toronto--I mean
from the point of view of efficient administration--except that
Mr. Mackenzie lived here, and, as President of the Toronto Railway
Company, had spent much of his business activity with the city as his
personal headquarters.
Mr. Mann lived in Montreal. His partnership, with the late James
Ross, the present Sir Herbert Holt, and Mr. Mackenzie, entailed the
carrying of an office in Montreal. The head office of Mackenzie and
Mann was opened in Toronto in 1899--three years after the railway
to Dauphin, (and to two oceans) was begun. When the Mackenzie-Mann
partnership was incorporated, later, it became possible for the two
principals to become officers of the railway companies, because they
were no longer construction contractors personally--one of those
legal situations upon which, according to temperament, it may be
declared that the law is an ass, or a Solomon.
At that time the Toronto Railway Company’s building at the corner
of King and Church streets was not all required for street railway
purposes; and the railway contractors rented three back rooms on the
top floor, the architectural firm of Pearson and Darling having the
front offices.
Construction was going on in the West, where the accountant, P. C.
Andrews, was on the ground all summer. His winter quarters were
in Toronto, where he produced his balance sheets from the field
records. In 1899, with the move to Toronto, and with work proceeding
rapidly east and west of Winnipeg, a young fellow was brought in to
take charge of the Mackenzie and Mann accounts. He so continued,
with increasing responsibilities during all the strenuous period of
Canadian Northern expansion. For a combination of natural capacity in
accounting, and experience in the finance of modern Canadian railway
construction, I do not think his equal exists. When the Canadian
National name superseded the Canadian Northern, A. J. Mitchell was
appointed vice-president in charge of finance and accounts, and
remained as such until he retired with the president.
After a year the whole top floor of the Toronto Railway Building was
occupied by the railway constructors. To desk room here I came at
the end of 1902, when it was decided that the Canadian Northern head
office must be in Toronto and that somebody familiar with all the
details of the operation of completed lines should carry a general
responsibility. The title of superintendent was changed to that of
third vice-president; and so continued for nearly sixteen years.
In this reference to an office convenience some hyper-critic may
discover solid confirmation of the suspicion which has occasionally
been formed and fanned in sections of the press which often impugn
motives, and seldom examine aspersions. The Canadian Northern, it has
been professed, was created as the milch cow for a couple of railway
contractors, was forced into an excessive flow of nourishment, and
was turned over to the people of Canada after having been drained
into an almost fatal exhaustion. When we come to discuss some
financial aspects of the railway situation in Canada, this matter may
be recurred to. Meantime, it is enough to say that there’s only a
mare’s nest in it.
The Canadian Northern did not long remain with desk accommodation
on a friendly floor. Negotiations were concluding for the purchase
of the building at the corner of King and Toronto streets. Early
in 1903, as renters from the Rice Lewis estate, we began to take
possession--a process that continued without cessation for all but
twenty years. Always somebody was moving. Half the time it was a
shift for a whole department, because another department as well as
itself required more room.
At the beginning, for instance, the legal department--but there was
no legal department of the railway in the generally accepted sense.
There was, of course, a great deal of legal business, much of it
local in scope, and an increasing amount that was fundamental to
the railway’s growth. Such questions as the acquisition of right of
way in the West and the adjustment of damage claims were handled
by our solicitors in Winnipeg. But important matters like the
agreements covering acquisition of charter rights and the physical
assets of existing companies, and the creation of new joint stock
entities--when we came to require an express company of our own, for
example--were dealt with in Toronto, first by Mr. Z. A. Lash alone,
and later by a department of which he was the head.
Mr. Lash was a great general counsel. He had no Canadian superior,
perhaps no equal, in drafting legal documents. So exquisite was his
appreciation of word values that, though others might embody an
intention in a series of paragraphs apparently beyond criticism, his
mastery of precision and shade was such that he could clothe it in
language which had the exactitude of a multiplication table and the
clarity of a mirror. His knowledge of the law--especially company
law--was wide and profound, as became Edward Blake’s Deputy Minister
of Justice in the eighteen-seventies. To rare professional acumen was
allied a high individual sense of honour, and a capacity for finance
which very fittingly made him vice-president of the Canadian Bank of
Commerce.
When the Canadian Northern legal work became altogether beyond the
physical capacity of one general counsel, in 1904, there was brought
to Toronto from the Department of Railways and Canals at Ottawa, as
general solicitor, Mr. Gerard N. Ruel, now vice-president and general
counsel of the Canadian National Railways. To work with Mr. Ruel is
to enjoy an uncommon experience. Everything that is meant by the
phrase “counsel learned in the law” applies to him, as it does to
many another practitioner of the baffling science. But no gentleman
of the robe of my acquaintance is Mr. Ruel’s peer in an uncanny
capacity for absorbing multitudes of facts about territory he has
never seen, and in a weird facility as a reader of blue prints. He
absorbs topography from maps and plans as a sponge absorbs water. A
blue print upside down is instantly as plain to him as it is to other
skilled observers who have carefully studied it right side up.
For several years Mr. Lash and Mr. Ruel had rooms near to the
President and Vice-president. About 1908 they required more space
and had to move to the corner of Toronto and Court Streets, where,
indeed, several departments were located. They occupied about half a
floor, and gradually encroached on the space of smaller departments
which had to find lodgment elsewhere.
Few people have any idea of the magnitude and complication of the
legal business of a railway, even when it has settled down into a
staid, unexpanding enterprise, from the territorial side of things.
But where, almost in a night, an enterprise develops the faculties
of a steel magnet operated by an electric crane, and draws all
sorts of material to it, lawyers become a very hard-worked section
of the organization. A farmer whose land is required for right of
way--everybody, in fact, to whom the railway stands in the attitude
of a purchaser of an indispensable commodity, at once gets into big
business. The moral and intellectual damages involved in cutting
a corner off a ten-acre field are simply incalculable; and only
a well-fortified legal mind can begin to reduce them to humane
proportions.
Possibly the most striking features, from a documentary point of
view, of the earlier, and, indeed, the later, years of the Canadian
Northern domiciliation at Toronto were the acquisition of charters,
and the reception of requests for new railways in every Canadian
province except Prince Edward Island. Perhaps, instead of likening
the expanding process of the Canadian Northern to a magnet attracting
filings, it is better to say that it was very like what movie fans
frequently see when they are about to observe some event which has
recently taken place in a distant part of the world. The feature is
heralded by the appearance of what looks like several sticks thrown
into the air--all, seemingly, without direction or intention, but
presently falling into an ordered announcement which he who sits may
read. That is how the Canadian Northern transcontinental system took
shape. From a series of disconnected and apparently unconnectable
projections of steel, hanging in suspense, a continuous track was
formed, trains ran upon it, and all the organs of a great commerce
began to function.
We have seen how the Davis firm had the charter for the Lake Manitoba
Railway and Canal Company--and did not finance it. The Manitoba South
Eastern was a project that seemed still-born. We connected with Lake
Superior by buying the Port Arthur, Duluth and Western--the Poverty,
Agony, Distress and Want, as you may remember.
Eastern connection with the prairies was effected on the legs of the
Ontario and Rainy River Railway, the original authority for which
was held by Port Arthur men like D. F. Burk and Jim Conmee, the
latter of whom became well known as far east as Toronto through his
membership of the Legislature, and the Conmee Act.
There were two heralds of what was to happen in the eastern section
of Ontario and in the farther West, which the uninformed onlooker
supposed were peculiar phenomena indeed--the disordered offspring
of some misguided promoter with an itch to lay rails which began
Nowhere, and ended in a less important place. Nobody now hears of
the James Bay Railway--I mean the railway of that designation, and
not a railway to James Bay. Not so many years ago, though, flat cars
bearing the name were seen in the Don Valley. Another railway whose
name has gone the way of forgetfulness was the Edmonton, Yukon and
Pacific. Not long since, a facetious writer, having the fact though
not the name of this enterprise in his mind, described it as the
Edmonton, Yukon and Aurora Borealis.
It was customary when railway charters were legislated into existence
to provide that construction must start within two years, or the
charter would lapse. Once construction began, it was comparatively
easy to induce Parliament to prolong the charter’s life, however fine
the thread on which it seemed to hang. Toronto men obtained a charter
for a railway to James Bay, and hoped to build it. Among their assets
was a secretary, W. H. Moore, whose accomplishments included an
assistant editorship of the Monetary Times, a lectureship at Toronto
University, and a call to the Ontario bar. The steel approach to
the Bay lagged in view of the Ontario Government’s undertaking of
the Temiskaming and Northern Ontario Railway, the construction of
which produced the discovery of the Cobalt silver mines. The James
Bay charter was acquired by Mackenzie and Mann. Mr. Moore moved with
it, and in 1904 became secretary of the Canadian Northern, and so
remained till the great change.
To sustain the charter, the James Bay Railway was begun on a
four-mile line from the Grand Trunk, southeast of Parry Sound,
into that town. Parry Sound was off the rails of the old Canada
Atlantic, which ends at Depot Harbour. The four miles of the James
Bay line gave the town its first railway connection with the world.
Regular service was maintained, with the engineer, Jack Findlay,
as practically the general manager, passenger and freight traffic
agent, superintendent of operation, and repairer-in-chief of the
whole system. Jack was a great success; and I have sometimes thought
that, if he had been on administrative duty in his youth, when his
scholastic education could have been somewhat improved, he would have
risen high in the service.
All the time Jack was running the James Bay Railway no problems in
motive power reached the head office. He kept his engine in wonderful
shape, looked after whatever repairs became necessary, and was as
cheerful as Mark Tapley. But there came a day when the Canadian
Northern Ontario swallowed the James Bay, and connected Parry Sound
with Toronto, at James Bay Junction. Then Jack must have a round
house and his faithful engine must be repaired by other hands. From
being an all-round genius he became a trade unionist, in spirit and
in truth. Those who were associated with him when he kept time on a
four-mile system always think of him with grateful joy; and if ever
there is a reunion, on any plane, of the pioneers of the Canadian
National System, Jack must be there, of indefeasible right.
The Edmonton, Yukon and Pacific, was reminiscent of the Klondyke
rush; and a steel record of the seeming diversion of Horace
Greeley’s gospel which appeared at first to be the motive of the
Mackenzie-Mann ventures into railway-owning company. “Go north,”
was the impulse of the Lake Manitoba Railway and Canal venture. “Go
north” was the urge of the Edmonton, Yukon and Pacific. There is
something peculiarly fateful about this pull to the Aurora. From one
of the eminent journalists whom we conveyed through the West, it
produced a fascinating discourse on “To the Pole by Rail”. It has
made Stefansson famous. Through its possession of him it has brought
Wrangel Island into the dreams of an aerial and submarine route that
will shorten travelling between London and Tokio by seven thousand
miles. But operating surpluses haven’t yet been common to farmost
northern railway transportation. The Edmonton, Yukon and Pacific was
like the James Bay--it held territory, and it produced a short line
that gave a great city its first railway station.
The Calgary and Edmonton on which Mackenzie and Mann were
contractors, ended at Strathcona, across the noble valley of the
Saskatchewan from Edmonton, then almost hidden among the poplar
groves of the northern bank. To build a steel bridge across the
valley was a very expensive job. Indeed, at that time to go right
into Edmonton would not add enough to the revenue derivable from
Edmonton to pay interest on the cost. Competition was a dozen years,
and hundreds of miles away.
To hold the E.Y. and P. charter, then, our people built a line eight
miles long, from Strathcona to Edmonton, going down a long ravine,
crossing the river by a team-and-train bridge, which was in large
part a public work, climbing into Edmonton, past the Hudson’s Bay
Company’s Fort and the site of the future Parliament Buildings, and
getting into the straggling town through lands that were very much of
a backyard, but which have developed into property that is now worth
millions of dollars to the Canadian people.
The operating situation here was somewhat similar to what obtained
at Parry Sound. The engineer was Entwistle, of whose connection
with administrative work three things are worthy of note, because
they are not likely to be repeated. Some time after the E.Y. and
P. was superseded by the Canadian Northern’s arrival from the
east, at the end of 1905, Entwistle was made superintendent.
But very soon he asked to be allowed to resume his place at the
throttle--an illustration of the frequent phenomenon of a refusal
of responsibility, which every executive officer of any large
enterprise has observed with considerable disappointment. It is
surprising how many men decline higher jobs with higher pay, entirely
because they are short of faith in their own ability to master
unfamiliar affairs. We shall revert to this timidity towards ambition.
A town was named after Entwistle, on the Canadian Northern, west of
Edmonton. All the coal for his engine on the E.Y. and P. was dug by
the section man from the bank within a few feet of the track on the
Edmonton side of the river.
Somewhere is a chart showing the charters that went into the Canadian
Northern Railways. It looks like an elaborated genealogical tree
of the kings of England, beginning with the Heptarchy. During my
second year in Toronto the purchases were made which afforded those
who could read the signs of the times an indication that a second
Canadian transcontinental railway was taking shape, and that oceanic
strategy had already become a daily factor in the scheme. This was
before the Grand Trunk Pacific project was publicly launched.
Quebec has had its share of railway enterprises which did not pan
out as their promoters expected, but which have played a vital part
in the economic development of the province. The most remarkable of
the local pioneering railways was the Quebec and Lake St. John. It
was built as a colonization road to Lake St. John--the Chapdelaine
country, as it may yet come to be called. The early financial
troubles of this road look romantic through hindsight; but they were
grievous to be borne when they occurred. For instance, there were
times when the train could not leave the station at Quebec until the
general manager had borrowed enough money from the passengers to buy
coal for the locomotive.
The people who promoted this railway also began the Great Northern
of Canada, to connect Quebec with Montreal as its first considerable
achievement. It left the Lake St. John line at Riviere à Pierre,
fifty-seven miles from Quebec, and made for Montreal along the edge
of the Laurentian mountains by way of Grand Mere and Shawinigan,
where vast paper and power developments have since taken place.
The Great Northern came into the market in 1904, along with its right
to enter the east end of Montreal from Joliette, on the charter of
the Chateauguay Northern. The Canadian Northern obtained it, with
terminals at Quebec harbour, including a million-bushel elevator,
since burned to the ground. Of this railway, re-named the Canadian
Northern Quebec, I became president. Alone, it was a lame duck. As a
connecting link it struck a promissory note.
Railroading in Quebec under these conditions was a very different
business from working in the audit department of the Grand Trunk
twenty years before. Then, of course, one was occupied with routine,
which mainly concerned territory west of Montreal. The Canadian
Northern Quebec was Quebec through and through. Railway conduct in
the French province has several interesting distinctions.
Whenever a piece of new line was to be opened the occasion was
utilized for a celebration in which all varieties of public men
participated.
The Quebec and Lake St. John was so essentially a colonization road
that everybody took an interest in it and expected to take passes
out of it. I am anticipating my story a little; but not spoiling its
propriety, by mentioning the opening of a short branch to La Tuque,
on the St. Maurice river, where the National Transcontinental crosses
that wonderful stream and turns westward. The Canadian Northern
had recently acquired control of the road, and I was president of
it also. As the branch had been undertaken, and all but completed
before our regime, it seemed well for me to be represented at the
inauguration by a deputy. A special train went up from Quebec.
Cabinet ministers, judges, senators, M.P.P.’s, bankers, merchants
were there--every section of the community sent delegates. At La
Tuque there was a dinner with speeches in a frigid freight shed, and
everybody returned home feeling he had contributed something to a
new chapter of the province’s industrial history. The branch hasn’t
fulfilled expectations--indeed, it has not been operated for several
years, but it had its uses.
That inaugural was in 1907. By that time the opening of a branch
line in the West had become so much a matter of course that we
thought nothing more of a new service as a historical event than we
did of issuing a temporary time card until the next revision of the
established schedules.
Allied with this Quebec form of public recognition of railway
expansion were the more distinctly political aspects of the
development. For nearly thirty years the Intercolonial had traversed
the province on the southern side of the St. Lawrence. Whatever else
might not be in politics the Intercolonial most certainly was. The
railway was as much a part of every candidate’s hopes and fears as
the ballot box itself. It was as close to every member’s duty, if
he supported the Government, as the orders of the day. A share of
dominion over it was one of the sustaining longings of hope deferred
in the heart of every opposition M.P. whose constituency it touched.
For two generations, as statisticians reckon time, and for
five generations as politicians take the count, the first
Government-owned, Government-operated railway in Canada was regarded,
in the territory it traversed, more as a rich and benevolent relative
than as a servant who gave service only for money received. One
feature of the “rich relative” notion of public-owned railways should
be mentioned tenderly. It was a legacy from the days when barter
was most common as a form of disposing of farm products, and eggs
and butter were traded at the general store at values that were
amazingly low, for groceries and dry goods, the costs of which were
extraordinarily high. Real money was scarce indeed, everywhere, and a
job that brought pay in cash was a rare and coveted beneficence. The
best job of all was a post with the Government. All over the country
there was severe competition for country postmasterships, the revenue
from which would nowadays buy but small quantities of gasoline.
Wherever the Government railway ran, a job as a section hand became a
lawful prize of electioneering war.
It is useless to mourn bitterly over these conditions which are an
inheritance not only from the economic construction of Canada, but
also from the Government departments of the Old Lands--Britain as
well as France. Men bought civil appointments as they bought the
right to appoint their own friends to the livings that rewarded the
cure of souls. When I was an office boy in Glasgow the system of
purchase in the British army was still operating. It cost twenty-two
hundred dollars to get a cadetship and sixty-three hundred dollars to
become a lieutenant-colonel. Every intermediate step in promotion was
paid for commensurately with the rank acquired.
The abolition of purchase in the British army was only achieved
after long and bitter opposition. In the younger days of those of us
who are still on the humorous side of seventy, the idea that there
must be perquisites attached to all sorts of offices was apparently
as invincible as the Rock of Gibraltar. The cook had the fat, the
fur and the feathers from everything that came into the squire’s
kitchen. The official of the College of Heralds and the royal clerk
who records the outpourings of the fountain of honour receive their
fees. The notion that it isn’t necessary to work very hard at a
Government job wasn’t born on this continent. It was expressed in the
sinecure that was waiting for a British Prime Minister’s son, and in
the ease with which the clerk in Whitehall could begin his work a
little after ten, and lay down his quill a little before four.
We are getting away from that quality of public service, though
it isn’t always easy to make progress along a straight and thorny
path--and it is harder to do it in some parts of Canada than in
others. With a country so vast, and a population so diverse, it is
impossible that the sectional benefit will always be subordinated
to the advantage of the whole. The railway builder, as well as
the Government, has to recognize, and at times, to capitulate to
something which he does not want in order to be able to get something
he really needs. The building of the transcontinental Canadian
Northern, as a privately directed enterprise had its share of these
difficulties. So did the undertaking of a transcontinental system by
the Canadian Government shortly after the Canadian Northern entered
Eastern Canada as the second stage of its evolution from a prairie
carrier to a nationwide system.
There was a great difference between the methods followed by the
Canadian Northern and the Grand Trunk Pacific transcontinentals.
Fundamentally, the Canadian Northern was a wheat-country road,
designed to cover the most productive regions, and to be assured
of the essential business which would carry, later, the more
costly construction in the more sparsely populated, less productive
territory. The other line was an across-continent project from the
beginning, without any initial development of traffic whatever on
the prairies. Its cost across the northern wilderness to the Western
plains was evidently only guessed before the scheme was submitted
to Parliament--at least the public never saw the detailed reports
of engineers who had gone over the ground and estimated the cost
per mile. The expenditure on original construction was out of all
proportion to the earnings, because the road was built on the scale
of a trunk main line, when it could only expect to secure revenue
from a pioneering service.
There is great disappointment in old Quebec, to this day, because the
National Transcontinental is not bringing to the ancient port the
business that was predicted for it. It is true that the railway has
opened up country in northern Quebec, through the energy and skill of
the French-Canadian pioneer to whom the axe is as much the implement
of agriculture as the plough. But the Western wheat is not coming to
the St. Lawrence by way of La Tuque; and the good people of the city
think it ought to be pouring in.
The conditions are impossible for such a consummation and bliss.
Wheat moves from the prairies down to the seaboard in accordance
with commercial laws of gravitation which express themselves in the
relative terms at which cargoes can be shipped from the busiest ports
in America, to the biggest ports in Europe. Merely because a railway
has been built across Northern Quebec to Quebec harbour, which is
closed half the year, the law of commercial gravitation will not be
reversed.
But the railway remains a monument to a demand that was based more on
the ambitions of a section of Canada than on the true railway factors
of a situation that became more political than economic. The cost
of construction finally worked out at a hundred and fifty thousand
dollars a mile--twice as much as the Canadian Northern spent to build
through the mountains from the Yellowhead to Vancouver, with very
much more steel bridge work, and very much less wooden trestle than
went into the railway between Quebec and Transcona.
What the $150,000 per mile meant, in addition to the purely
colonization aspects of the road, can be partially judged from a
glance at the map. The National Transcontinental entered a wilderness
north of New York, and didn’t leave the wilderness until it was north
of Omaha, in Nebraska. In that wilderness, at that time there was not
an existing community of twenty white people.
Of course, the times were surcharged with the will to build. The
Canadian people, seeing immigration pouring in at a rate of about
a thousand people a day, wanted railways and more railways; and
demanded them from wherever they seemed likely to come.
To one phase of this extraordinary impulse of the first few years of
this century, I think attention has been insufficiently directed.
The immense project which was to do for the Laurier fame what the
C.P.R. did for the immortality of Sir John Macdonald was put through
Parliament in 1904, and a general election endorsed it. Construction
began in 1905, with financial and other prestige behind it, such as
no other Canadian venture had.
The Grand Trunk Pacific was widely held to have relegated to a
negligible situation the railway development that depended on the
continuing initiative of two men. But when finally, in the midst of
a world war, both enterprises perforce had to come under Government
direction, and, as an immediate consequence, the receivership of the
G.T.P. had brought the old Grand Trunk into the same control, and all
the men who were principally concerned in the activities of the whole
period had stepped out, the mileage of the Canadian Northern railways
exceeded the combined mileage of the National Transcontinental,
the Grand Trunk Pacific and the Grand Trunk in Canada. It is also
apparent that if the National Transcontinental and the Grand Trunk
Pacific ever justify the capital cost, it will be because of their
union with the prairie lines of the Canadian Northern.
I shall recur to this subject, with which is associated the further
matter of record--that, even at the time when the Government of
Canada so dramatically and mightily entered the Western railway
field, it was on the Canadian Northern that popular demand after
demand was made for transportation, as the salvation of settlement.
Happily, the appeal for railways and more railways did not strike
the third vice-president as directly or as insistently as it did the
president and vice-president. I was mainly kept busy in furnishing
clothes and tools for the infant that was all legs and arms. It
was never satisfied with its outfit; but, as far as the West was
concerned, it never failed to earn the cost of its keep, and more.
The facts about the guarantee of bonds of the original line showed
that, so far from Mackenzie and Mann being the first importuners for
railway construction under Government guarantees, the pressure came
from another direction. The West was filling up. Farmers were going
into districts long distances from railways. In 1905, the provinces
of Saskatchewan and Alberta emerged from the North West Territories,
with two brand new Governments, living on the electoral favour of
people, most of whom were new to the West, were boundlessly confident
of an immediately prosperous future, and were as clamorous for
railways as famished lions are for flesh.
In more than one case the first intimation that reached us of an
obligation to construct a branch line was the news that a Legislature
had passed an Act chartering a railway through a given area, and
guaranteeing the bonds.
This sort of demand was not confined to the West. Our entry into
Quebec was followed by a constructive appearance in Nova Scotia.
Coal measures having been acquired on the west coast of Cape Breton
Island, the town of Inverness sprang into existence; and to bring
the coal conveniently to shipping a sixty-seven mile railway to Port
Hastings on the Strait of Canso was built. The Murray Government,
wanting a line from Halifax to Yarmouth along the marvellously
indented South Shore, raised the seven million dollars necessary to
build it. Our people acquired the fifty miles of existing line from
Yarmouth to Barrington; the Halifax and South Western was built to
it; and the whole is part of the Canadian National system to-day.
What Nova Scotia obtains, New Brunswick covets. New Brunswick and
Prince Edward Island were the only eastern provinces that we were
not working in within ten years of the founding of Dauphin in a
wheat field. That we stayed out of New Brunswick wasn’t the fault
of influential powers centering in Fredericton. For six weeks one
deputation, importuning for railway construction, hovered about the
Toronto office.
It is charged that the railway building in Canada of the first
fourteen years of this century was too prodigal. On the whole,
it was, though responsibility for it should be discriminatingly
allocated. But in view of what was asked for, and what was acceded
to, I think Mackenzie and Mann were entitled to adapt their speech to
Clive’s remark when he was cross-examined to show that he had unduly
enriched himself in India. As he thought of the treasures he might
have taken and didn’t, he said: “By heaven, Mr. Chairman, at this
moment I stand astonished at my own moderation.”