_Reciting events, the Great War being chief, which destroyed the
Canadian Northern._
Nothing in North American transportation quite equals the rise and
fall of the Canadian Northern. Those who were intimately associated
with its twenty-six years’ history scarcely realized the extent to
which Mackenzie and Mann were unique among the roadmakers of all
the continents. For the accumulation of wealth, and also for the
domination of railway systems of huge mileage, James J. Hill was in
a class by himself. He died worth sixty million dollars--without a
will. He obtained vast riches through the iron ore deposits of the
Mesaba range, in the Minnesota hinterland of Lake Superior--there was
nothing like it in Canada. His railways connected Chicago with the
cities and plains of the United States northwest, even to the Pacific
Ocean. His ships sailed to Nippon and far Cathay.
Sir William Mackenzie and Sir Donald Mann made no enormous fortunes
out of the railway they built from Atlantic to Pacific tidewaters.
But they performed a feat which no American combination ever
achieved. Their enterprise was more original than anything which Hill
carried to profitable result; for they began beyond where Hill, and
even the Canadian Pacific, had left off. Indeed, Hill pulled out of
Canadian railway building rather than share responsibility for the
first line on Superior’s northern shore.
Mackenzie and Mann’s original railway carried settlement a hundred
miles north of the line beyond which implement manufacturers had
refrained from extending their credit. They went, not only where
railway obligations had not gone, but where, aforetime, railway
obligation was afraid to venture. They looked ultimately to great
fortune for themselves--there has never been any pretense to the
contrary. But they had in them infinitely more than a lust for
pelf. The first justice that is done to these two men is a frank
recognition of the pioneering, constructive passion which made of
them great Canadians.
Ambition that was all self-sacrifice never braced a continent with
steel. The money changers do not open the purse of Fortunatus to
Simon Pure altruists. Railways must be carried to completion on the
financial engines that are available to mundane men. The Canadian
Northern was brought into being because the time had come when more
than the C.P.R. was needed in Western Canada. It is not good for a
railway to be alone in so broad a land. The combination that had
grown out of a contest over the ownership of a corral-full of mules
away up in the Selkirks was the ordained instrument to prove that an
impossible piece of work could be done.
Sir William Mackenzie, in his favourite car, the Atikokan--which was
bought while it was being used by Admiral Dewey on his triumphal
tour--was discussing with a guest one night in 1905 the prospects
of the Canadian Northern, which had not yet reached Edmonton. His
inveterate optimism then believed that Hudson Bay would be reached
within three years. Asked if he had ever been to the Bay he answered:
“No; I haven’t been to Sao Paulo, either; but I’ve taken a million
dollars out of there within the last three years.”
He told of having received an offer from the Grand Trunk to buy the
Canadian Northern at the time the Grand Trunk Pacific scheme was
brewing, and of refusing it, though there would have been millions of
dollars in it for himself and his partner.
“Why didn’t you sell out?” his guest asked.
“I like building railroads,” was the simple, truthful, profound
answer.
The money-grubber doesn’t talk that way. He doesn’t act as Mackenzie
and Mann always acted.
Many of us, who never had personal control of millions of dollars,
and to whom a moderate fortune is a hunger to be eagerly appeased,
and a divinity to be constantly adored, cannot conceive of the
possession of money being a mere adjunct to those who do great
things through their capacity for changing other people’s money into
enormous vehicles of commerce.
The money-making side of Mackenzie and Mann, the Canadians, was,
if you like, what the penchant for fussing with detectors and
amplifiers is to the radio fan. He’s after the result--the miracle
of the perfectly reproduced voice, singing a thousand miles away. He
cannot get his result by being indifferent to the peculiarities of
the squeal that precedes the tone.
Mackenzie and Mann could not have built and acquired approximately
ten thousand miles of railways by preaching altruism and despising
the money market. They could not have done it if their sole
propulsion came from love of money for money’s sake.
As construction contractors they would have piled up huge profits;
and would have got out when the getting was good. As this is written
the Mackenzie estate is being realized for the heirs. Without knowing
anything of the details, I think it can be predicted that the
popular notion that Sir William piled up fabulous wealth out of the
opportunities furnished by Government guarantees, and construction
contracts let to himself at his own price, will prove to be as vain
as some of the other current delusions about him.
From time to time, base and baseless charges were made to the effect
that moneys raised in London for railway construction were used
for other purposes, and that excessive contractors’ profits were
selfishly provided for. Two grosser libels were never perpetrated.
The first is merely absurd. The second is almost equally so when
the costs of construction per mile of the Grand Trunk Pacific and
National Transcontinental and the Canadian Northern are compared.
It has already been suggested that the Canadian Northern was not
conceived as a transcontinental railway, with the beginning of the
Lake Manitoba Railway and Canal Company’s line between Gladstone
and Dauphin. The scheme, as a scheme, growed, with Topsy-like
inevitability. Before it could finally prosper it was perforce
surrendered to its chief guarantors by its authors. It is not
necessary to wait for Time’s final justification, in dollars and
cents, before the nation understands its essential magnificence--and
also the extent to which another sort of ambition in the political
and railway worlds contributed to its temporary bafflement.
To judge it broadly, and surely, the first requisite is an
appreciation of the prairie factor in any Canadian transcontinental
railway. The reports and maps of forty-five years ago show the
C.P.R. main line originally projected across territory, every mile
of which, between the Red River and the ascent to the Yellowhead
Pass was first given a railway by Mackenzie and Mann. In less than
twenty years the Canadian Northern, developed from a pioneer piece of
track, operated, in all departments, by a force of fourteen, into a
system which, during the war, was running trains into centres of one
thousand population and over, representing ninety-seven per cent. of
the populations of Manitoba and Saskatchewan and ninety per cent. of
the population of Alberta.
In 1915-16, the traffic year of the most prolific crop the West had
ever grown, the Canadian Northern hauled 132,000,000 bushels of grain
to Port Arthur from the prairies. We were then in the pinch of the
constriction which finally brought about national ownership; and
insufficiency of equipment caused us to lose a good deal of our share
of the grain traffic.
Even so, although the C.P.R. had every advantage, including its
double track all the way between Winnipeg and Fort William, and
nearly all the way from Winnipeg to Moose Jaw, we hauled 31.1 per
cent. of the total, against the C.P.R.’s 56.3 per cent., and 12.6 per
cent. of all other lines.
Deferring allusion to the controversial question of the wisdom of
projecting two new transcontinental railways in the first decade of
this century, it is worth while glancing at the Canadian Northern’s
relation to the growth of the nation’s business as affected by the
construction of the sections north of the Great Lakes, and across the
mountains to Vancouver.
Each of these sections is a timbered area; and each has contributed
materially to the distinction earned by the Canadian Northern, of
being the greatest Canadian carrier of forest products. Thirty
per cent. of the capacity of all the lumber mills of Canada was
on Canadian Northern lines. Thirty-two per cent. of the traffic
created by Canadian lumber mills was water-borne; so that the C.N.R.
competed for just about half of the rail-hauled lumber business of
the country. Taking 1915-16 as a representative year, here are the
figures of lumber hauled by the three great Canadian systems:
Canadian Northern 3,883,739 tons
Canadian Pacific 3,832,163 ”
Grand Trunk and Grand Trunk Pacific 2,297,925 ”
During 1917, the last year before nationalization, we hauled 3,850
cars, or eighty-five million feet, of lumber up the Fraser Canyon and
over the Yellowhead Pass. The timber on territory tributary to the
Canadian Northern main line in British Columbia was then figured at
30,380,000,000 feet; and on Vancouver Island, between Victoria and
Alberni, at 25,000,000,000 feet.
While my own work was in the operating and traffic departments, it
was, of course, concerned with the fundamental features of the system
as a whole. Grades are as much a part of traffic as cars and cargoes.
When we began to emerge as a potential transcontinental, what was the
outlook for ultimate prosperity, so far as it would be governed by
ease of operation, and the magnitude of population to be served?
Ease of operation is mainly a matter of low grades. The Canadian
Northern main line from Atlantic tidewater to Pacific tidewater
has better grades than all the other railways on the continent.
The mountain sections, of course, are the most eloquent of grading
advantage or disadvantage to the railways crossing them. The
importance of low grades between the prairies and the Pacific was
immensely enhanced by the Panama Canal, which has already made
Vancouver a great grain port. The Canadian Northern maximum climb
between Edmonton and Vancouver is four-tenths of one per cent., or
twenty-six feet per mile. The Grand Trunk Pacific grades are almost
equally good, but as they lead to Prince Rupert, 400 miles farther
than Vancouver from the canal, the balance of advantage is obvious,
as between the two junior routes.
The C.P.R. was first projected to reach the Pacific through the
Yellowhead Pass, which is by far the best for railway purposes
between Mexico and the Yukon. But the main line location being
changed, two climbs over summits were necessary before the long
descent to the ocean down the Thompson and Fraser rivers could
begin--over the Rockies, at the Kicking Horse, and over the Selkirks,
by the pass Major Rogers discovered, forty-three years ago. The
maximum altitude reached by the Canadian Northern is 3,700 feet. The
maximum of the C.P.R. is 5,332 feet, with a drop to 2,443, and a
second rise to 4,340 feet.
The maximum Canadian Northern grade eastward is seven-tenths of one
per cent. The C.P.R. maximum is two per cent.--it was over three
during thirty years of operation. Put another way, by the time you
are twenty miles beyond Calgary on the C.P.R. you are as high as the
highest summit of the C.N.R., and on the C.N.R., instead of having to
rise a further 1,600 feet, and then to climb in a few miles, 1,900
feet more, there is only a negligible second rise to get over the
watershed of the Canoe and the North Thompson rivers, whence the road
to the Pacific is downhill.
The contrast between the Canadian Northern and the more southerly
American roads is even greater. The Union Pacific switchbacks to a
maximum of 8,200 feet, and the Sante Fé to 7,421 feet.
The difference made by the grades to operating costs can be judged
by the difference in the load which an engine can pull up a
four-tenths and a one per cent. grade. Up twenty-six feet to the
mile--four-tenths--a 190-ton locomotive will haul 3,768 tons. Up
sixty-feet per mile--one per cent.--she will drag only 1,780 tons.
The disparity increases with the acclivity.
The Canadian Northern, then, had the elements of a great permanent
success, given enough tributary population creating traffic to earn
expenses and fixed charges during the earlier operating years. That
there was calamitous overbuilding of Canadian railways nobody will
deny. To attempt to fix responsibility for it might invite a certain
degree of political controversy which no lover of a quiet life
desires. This is a strictly moral tale, and a few facts will point
out their own moral.
In 1904, when a general election solidified the Grand Trunk Pacific
legislation, the Canadian Northern had already in existence 2,500
miles beyond Port Arthur, all aiding the Western development which
was absolutely vital to Canada’s future. This railway was altogether
a native growth, the executive force in which had been concerned
with Western railway construction since before the first locomotive
entered Winnipeg. There was no imposition from without--no grandiose
scheme intended to dazzle an electorate, or fill a Parliament with
swelling pride. The Canadian Northern grew in Time’s own fruitful
womb; and struck its roots deep and wide all over the Western land.
From the point of view of the prairie provinces’ development, the
nicer problem of the wisdom of hastening the Superior and Mountain
sections may be put aside momentarily by this question: “What would
be the relative positions of the two junior railways if their
revenues depended solely on traffic originating between the Great
Lakes and the Great Mountains?”
In different terms, the question is: “How do the old Canadian
Northern and the old Grand Trunk Pacific compare, twenty years after
the Grand Trunk Pacific was launched, as servants of the country,
which is the only reason for their existence?”
Every commercial traveller who knows the West, and every superficial
observer of the flow of grain to the Lakes’ head, is aware that years
and years before the G.T.P. hauled its first car of wheat into Fort
William, the Canadian Northern avalanche of grain converged upon Port
Arthur from branches which appeared upon the map like the fingers of
a hand.
In the year of the first G.T.P. car’s arrival at Fort William the
Canadian Northern earned nearly twenty-one million dollars. If the
Canadian Northern had remained a prairie road, doing business only
between the Lakes and Mountains, it would never have been in Queer
Street, but would have more than paid for operating costs, fixed
charges and betterment requirements out of revenue, because it was
the West’s own product to meet the West’s own needs.
Neither as a prairie road, nor as a prairie-and-mountain road has
the Grand Trunk Pacific ever earned its operating expenses. The only
section which has shown more earnings than operating expenses, is
the line between Winnipeg and Fort William, which was built as the
National Transcontinental. That result has only been possible to
this piece of line because Canadian Northern traffic is handed to
it at Winnipeg, under the co-ordinating arrangements without which
for many years to come the Grand Trunk Pacific, which was built at
unprecedented expense per mile for a pioneer road, would resemble
nothing so much as the seven lean kine of Joseph’s immortal dream. To
a large extent the former National Transcontinental is being used as
the old Canadian Northern harvesters’ second track between Winnipeg
and Lake Superior.
Why, then, did the Canadian Northern fall, and two great builders
with it? The obvious but misleading guess is that the prosperous
middle was bankrupted by the lean and voracious Montreal-Port Arthur
and Edmonton-Vancouver ends. Ambition o’er-leaped itself and met the
fate excessive leaping invites. The man who is a better biter than
chewer will always choke. The guess and comment are plausible--much
more plausible than what I believe is the true explanation of the
debacle of Mackenzie and Mann, which was, finally, the war. There
were other contributing causes, of course, but the real overwhelmer
was Armageddon.
Few men seemed to realize in 1911 and 1912 that the period of swift
expansion which had given prosperity to all sorts of businesses in
Canada was about to conclude. Hindsight is proverbially better than
foresight. It is easy, even for statesmen, to realize now, that there
had been too little increase in the basic productions of agriculture,
and too much addition to manufacturing and other plants which could
only flourish permanently on a constantly expanding fruition of the
soil, along with steady development of forest and mining industries.
Sir George Paish, editor of “The Statist”, after a tour of Canada
before the war, said that we had furnished ourselves with plants
capable of taking care of three times our then production from
natural resources. Immigration was flowing too much to cities and
towns. Free land was becoming comparatively scarce, and even in the
prairie country sixty-five per cent. of the immigration was keeping
off the farms. Early in 1912 the Government was warned in its
Special Commissioner’s Report on Immigration that the basis of its
immigration policy should be changed so as to deflect public money
into scientific land settlement.
In the fall of 1912 signs of an approaching constriction of C.N.R.
earnings began to appear. The Superior and Mountain sections were
under way. The London money market, partly through conditions caused
by wars in the Balkans, was not as responsive as before. Dominion
and Provincial Government guarantees did not now ensure the immediate
sale of securities, at the most favourable prices. In the spring
of 1914 application to Parliament for special assistance became
imperative.
We had been able to meet all fixed charges out of revenue every year
since 1897. Connection of Toronto with Port Arthur around the north
of Lake Superior had been made on the first of January. But, with a
diminishing immigration and a slackening of employment in the cities,
it would take time to win for this part of the system between older
and younger Canada, a traffic commensurate with the proportion of
the total trade between East and West which the Canadian Northern
had created. Even to-day, the old Canadian Northern originates heavy
East-and-West business for other railways.
The British Columbia lines, which were being constructed at a speed
and an economy that was possible only because of the long experience
of engineers like M. H. MacLeod and T. H. White, were bound to cost
more than the amounts of any Government guarantees. It had become
necessary to finance some construction by short term notes, at a
higher interest than guaranteed securities called for. Application
was, therefore, made to the Government at Ottawa for guarantees
amounting to forty-five million dollars, to enable the road to be
finished between Quebec and Vancouver.
Sir William Mackenzie, who always handled financial business at
Ottawa, was turned down flat by the Government. But, as Sir Donald
Mann says, a refusal never meant any more to him than a spur to
persistence in advocating his cause. After much labour in placing the
facts where they could be appreciated, the aid was promised. Against
considerable opposition, in the late spring the legislation was
passed and Sir William went to England to raise the money.
He succeeded in placing a substantial proportion of the securities
with a great financial house. A first issue of three and a half
million pounds was taken by the public, less than three weeks before
the formal declaration of war against Germany. The financial house
did not repudiate its bargain, but there was no prospect of raising
money in London for Canadian railway construction in August, 1914,
or subsequently, during the war. Indeed, the British Government
prohibited any issue of any description from any of the Dominions,
while hostilities lasted.
It would have been unwise to stop work in Canada because of a war
the duration of which was not foreseen. Though we were restricted in
pace, construction went on, the money for which was obtained in New
York, through more short term notes, with the securities unsold in
London as collateral. Guaranteed as the collateral securities were,
they could only realize about sixty per cent. of their face value.
This and the higher rate of interest, had the effect of considerably
raising the cost of capital required for construction.
When, to inaugurate the linking of Quebec and Vancouver by the
Canadian Northern, an excursion of Parliamentarians from the St.
Lawrence to Burrard Inlet was arranged in the fall of 1915, it was
clear that New York must be permanently drawn upon, if the situation,
believed to have been finally saved at midsummer, 1914, were not to
descend into disaster.
Sir William Mackenzie, at an age when chiefs of the C.P.R. retire on
their highly deserved pensions, faced a heavier task than anything
that confronted Stephen, Smith, or Van Horne in the C.P.R.’s most
trying period. The Canadian Government, with London still an
inexhaustible reservoir, was the C.P.R.’s last and safest resort.
Mackenzie saw a world war engrossing every energy of the Dominion,
and rendering London financially impotent to him. For sheer tenacity,
for courage which attacked the most formidable obstacles without a
quail; for capacity to bring things to pass, I think Canada has not
yet begotten his equal. The marvel is, not that he and Sir Donald
Mann could not finish all that they had begun; but that they carried
it so nearly to the triumph, hope of which had been like a pillar
of cloud to them in the days whereon the multitude applauded, and a
pillar of fire in the night of difficulty such as they had endured
when the non-Canadian was preferred before them, and when the panic
of the fall of 1907 smote North America.
Beginning as an unknown venturer into Lombard street, Sir William
Mackenzie had brought to Canada over three hundred million dollars
for Canadian Northern Railways, which had made possible an amount
of development of all kinds, the subtraction of which from Canada’s
economic content to-day would leave the nation poor indeed. But,
while this was happening, the star of Canada had been in the
ascendant, and it seemed that British money had at last developed an
unchangeable westward impetus.
There seem to be investment flows and ebbs in the affairs of
men. They are without the regularity in time, but they have the
variability in volume of the Bay of Fundy tides. One recalls periods
wherein there was either so little opportunity or inclination to
proceed with the development of the earth’s natural resources that,
as an old London friend said, a man with a hundred thousand pounds to
lend could take it down to the City, and not earn enough with it to
buy his lunch. There is, no doubt, a psychological explanation of the
accession and diminution of fiscal confidence in times of peaceful
commerce undisturbed by the threat of war. There is also a partial
accountability for the turning of capital into this or that channel
of increase. It is the tendency of investment to overplay its hand
when the habit has grown of putting faith and cash into a particular
species of enterprise.
During the first period of Canadian railway expansion following
the Crimean war wheat in Ontario went up to two dollars a bushel.
Real estate in towns like Whitby and Ingersoll rose to the fabulous
price of $300 per foot frontage--the selling value of land on
Jasper Avenue, Edmonton’s greatest thoroughfare, when the Canadian
Northern approached from the East, and the capital of the infant
Alberta had been set up there. Van Horne’s faith in the empty West
was based on the fertility of its soil and the certainty that the
United States would soon fill sufficiently to create a demand for
more northern lands. But that expectation would be fulfilled--or
its fulfilment accelerated--when shrewd men would induce capital to
flow into the virgin terrain. The C.P.R. had the tremendous task of
pioneering with steel across the Canadian plains. The northern areas
of Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta awaited an equal, indeed, a
more daring enterprise. Mackenzie and Mann were the all-Canadian
instrumentalities for the adventure. They must obtain capital through
London.
Representation there was a vital concern, seeing that it was not
proposed to hand control of the great enterprise to directors who
knew no more of Canada than was known by the English administration
of the Grand Trunk. Absent treatment was no part of the creed of the
two boldest Canadians of their time. The financial representative
was found in a man of extraordinary mentality and financial genius,
Mr. R. M. Horne-Payne. His services to Canada are really registered
in the creation of vast agricultural regions out of solitude, and in
the firm establishing of communities, from quiet hamlets to rushing
cities, where the highest amenities of civilization have succeeded
the wandering buffalo, and have substituted the sawmill for the
towering pine.
The final reliance for Canadian railway expansion was of course, the
comparatively small British investor. But, with so many opportunities
to place money all over the world, this multitudinous host could not
be depended on to produce, at a day or two’s notice all the money
that was required to build a thousand miles of track from Pembroke
to Port Arthur. Rushes to gold and silver camps have no counterpart
in railway building spread over many years. To windward of the small
investor, there must, therefore, be anchorages in the deeps of
underwriting.
The railway requires, say, fifteen million dollars for a certain
range of construction. Experience has shown that the wide advertising
of an issue in the British money market usually brings at once
subscriptions of from thirty to forty per cent. of the money
required. Great financial houses must be found to guarantee purchase
of the whole issue; they, in turn, retailing the securities as the
demand for them continues. The retired colonel, who takes five
hundred pounds’ worth of Government-guaranteed debenture stock on
to-day’s advertising, will be ready for more at midsummer, when
he gets what he wants from his broker--and that is how issues are
absorbed, when they are not all snapped up as soon as they are
offered.
[Illustration: A. J. MITCHELL
“Vice-president in charge of finance ... retired with the president”
(P. 170)]
[Illustration: R. M. HORNE-PAYNE
“A man of extraordinary mentality and financial genius”
(P. 243)]
The financial representative of the swiftly-growing Canadian
Northern required, then, three outstanding qualifications--first,
great and sincere faith in Canada’s immediate future; secondly,
capacity to impart his confidence to important underwriters; and
thirdly, a sound judgment of the temper and capabilities of the
investing class whose response is the primary justification of the
underwriters’ confidence. Mr. Horne-Payne, in a degree that can
only be appreciated by those who have worked with him, has these
qualifications--the proof of which was the British investment of over
three hundred million dollars in the Canadian Northern, during his
representation of it.
One illustration only of his faculty can be given. A friend saw him
at his house in Brentwood, Essex, early one autumn. “I have just come
in after motoring from Buxton, where I have had a short holiday,”
said Horne-Payne. “We passed through Leamington. I think I can get
about three hundred and fifty thousand pounds out of the town next
winter.” The records show how accurate his forecast was.
The war changed all that. With London closed to him, the indomitable
Sir William, who never parted with his nerve, found in New York
a combination which was willing to consider seeing the Canadian
Northern through, by taking care of the millions of dormant
securities that must become active, by paying off the short-term
notes; and by furnishing the funds necessary to raise the system to a
standard worthy of its Dominion-wide theatre of operation.
While we hung on to the job of making the best of a heart-breaking,
never-ending crisis, which even the delusive gains of the war could
not mitigate, the New York syndicate invited Mr. E. E. Loomis, now
President of the Lehigh Valley Railroad, and Mr. J. W. Platten,
President of the United States Mortgage and Trust Company, of New
York, to report on the value of the property. These gentlemen, in
turn, appointed Messrs. Coverdale and Colpitts, two Canadians of high
standing in the engineering profession in the United States, who had
been conspicuously engaged in railway and industrial valuations, to
examine thoroughly the physical features and contributories of nearly
ten thousand miles of Canadian Northern railway.
A year was spent on this investigation. But, while it was going on,
the Dominion Government, in view of the perilous condition of the
old Grand Trunk, as menaced by its offspring, the G.T.P., and of the
utterly hopeless position of the National Transcontinental, which the
Grand Trunk had refused to take over, appointed a Royal Commission,
consisting of Sir Henry Drayton, chairman of the Dominion Board of
Railway Commissioners, President Smith of the New York Central lines,
and Mr. William Acworth, an eminent British railway economist, to
report on the whole railway situation of Canada. No criticism is due
the Government for this action, in view of its commitments to both
junior transcontinentals.
Early in 1917 the Coverdale-Colpitts report was printed. It
absolutely justified the broad policy on which the Canadian Northern
had been built; and there was good reason to expect that the New York
syndicate would participate in Canadian Northern responsibilities.
But on its heels came the Drayton-Acworth report, recommending
nationalization, and the Smith minority report, demurring. No
syndicate in the world would have committed itself to heavy financing
of a great railway system, under such conditions. The New York people
held off. We held on, but with only the scantest chance of coming
through the war corporately alive.
In the end the Government assumed control of the Canadian Northern
congeries of railways. The alternative was a receivership and
reorganization, in which the guaranteed securities would have to be
honoured by the Governments concerned; and the unsecured investors
would have to take their meagre chance of full salvation. On the
whole, perhaps, the best interests of the greatest number were best
served by what was done. But if Mackenzie and Mann had been merely
bent on self-service they might have come more profitably out of a
formal Canadian Northern bankruptcy.
They held almost all the capital stock. Their position would have had
what Grand Trunk junior shareholders have since called the nuisance
value of a certain ability to hamper any attempt to make a settlement
without their concurrence. But the British investors were held to
have the dominant claim. The arbitrators’ award of ten million
eight hundred thousand dollars to the capital stockholders, limited
beforehand by agreement with the Government to a round ten millions,
meant no such gain to them. They had pledged their interest, and the
money had gone into construction. Certainly they had stood to gain
by the success of the great venture. They also stood to lose. They
lost, and raised no voice in lamentation.
In no sense do these discussions profess to be a history of the
Canadian Northern, or of the two remarkable men whose partnership
made the railway. Perhaps I was daily too deeply immersed in meeting
the responsibilities which grew out of the superintendency between
Gladstone and Dauphin, to be qualified to present the story in its
historical perspective. But that immersion at least gave me, in many
respects, a unique all-around intimacy with the enterprise itself,
and its bearing upon the expanding life of Canada during a most
fateful quarter of a century.
Sir William Mackenzie spent much of his time on trans-Atlantic
missions. He was also interested in many other undertakings which
absorbed their due proportion of his time. Sir Donald Mann, whose
capacities are in keeping with the solidity of his physical frame,
did a great deal of planning ahead. The problem of access to the
Pacific was very much in his mind for twenty years, though he said
little about it. The railway policy on which the British Columbia
Government appealed to the country in December, 1909, was worked
out during Sir Donald’s visit to Victoria in the preceding winter.
Negotiations for charters were almost entirely in his hands.
It was not a sinecure to keep pace with the multitudinous demands
for equipment in men, material and methods which arose out of the
addition of an average of nine furlongs of railway per day to the
system, for the first eighteen years; and of a total of 1,958 miles
in 1915. Between six and seven hundred towns and shipping points are
on the map as the direct result of that record, with every phase of
which I was closely associated. We had good fortune in assembling an
able, loyal and economical staff. Errors were made, of course--who
makes no mistakes never makes anything. But if the story of the rise
and fall of the Canadian Northern is ever written by some man who
can by no possibility be called an interested partisan, his finding,
on the unquestionable facts, can only be that the creators of the
enterprise deserved more of their country than it is now possible for
both of them to receive.