THE CALL FOR THE RAILWAY
National Unity--The Fight for Western Trade
We have seen how in England a succession of workers almost apostolic in
continuity had brought the steam railway to practical success, and how
in Canada, before the railway came, men were making shift with bateau
and steamer, with stage-coach and cart and caleche, to carry themselves
and their wares to meeting-place and market. Now we may glance for a
moment at the chief hope and motive of those who brought the locomotive
across the seas.
In all but the very earliest years of railway planning and building in
Canada, two aims have been dominant. One has been political, the
desire to clamp together the settlements scattered across the
continent, to fill the waste spaces and thus secure the physical basis
for national unity and strength. The other has been commercial, the
desire to capture the trade and traffic of an ever-expanding and {28}
ever-receding west. Local convenience and local interests have played
their part, but in the larger strategy of railway building the dominant
motives have been political and commercial. They have been blended in
varying proportions; each has acted against the other as well as with
it, but at all times they give the key to facts which otherwise remain
a meaningless jumble of dates and figures.
The political motive is familiar and needs only brief reference. That
the present Canada is not a natural geographical unit is an undeniable
fact. Each of the principal sections has more natural connection with
the corresponding section of the United States than with the other
parts of Canada. And sixty years ago it was doubtful whether any
common sentiment could take the place of the physical unity which was
lacking. There was, of course, no national consciousness, based on
common history and common aspirations. At best the link of the
scattered colonies was that of common loyalty to the British crown, and
at worst a common inherited antagonism to the great republic to the
south. Yet far-seeing and courageous men were not content to accept
the decrees of geography or of the {29} diplomats who had been
over-generous in conceding territory to American claims. They sought
unity and understanding, out of fear of aggression from their
overshadowing neighbours and out of faintly shaping hope of what the
northern half-continent might become.
For unity, knowledge and daily intercourse were needed; for knowledge
and intercourse, speedy and cheap transportation was essential. Within
each province and between the two Canadas much had been done, but
neither river, canal, nor turnpike could serve to annihilate the vast
distances that separated east from west and west from farthest west.
Only the railway could achieve such a task.
But more was needed than patriotic sentiment. All-red speeches might
adorn a banquet or win an election, but facts--or fictions--as to
freight and dividends were needed to beguile the capital from
investors' pockets. The hope of securing for the Canadian provinces
the trade and traffic of the golden West was, in early years as in
late, much the strongest factor in railway policy.
When the white man came to North America, he found himself hemmed in to
the Atlantic coast by the long range of the Appalachians. These
mountains, though not {30} lofty, were rugged and covered with dense
forests and tangled undergrowth. There were few doorways to the great
open spaces beyond. On the far north the southward intrusion of the
ocean, known as Hudson Bay, opened a precarious way, important in the
early days of the white man's period, possibly to become important
again in our own, but negligible during the intervening years. From
the south, entrance could be had by the Mississippi and its
tributaries, offering for most of the year ten thousand miles of
navigable waters. In the east the St Lawrence system, stretching three
thousand miles westward from the sea, and the Hudson and Mohawk rivers,
passing through a gap in the Alleghanies, offered still more convenient
access.
Early and late in the history of the white man's America the land and
the trade of the interior have been the prize sought by rival nations
and rival cities, and the possession of a speedy and convenient route
has been the means of securing the prize. The later warfare was less
spectacular than the old, but no less keen. The navvy took the place
of the Indian, pick and shovel and theodolite the place of bow and
musket, and a lower freight {31} by a cent on a bushel of wheat became
the ammunition in place of the former glass beads or fire-water. But
seventeenth- or eighteenth-century Englishmen and Frenchmen on Hudson
Bay, Spaniards and Frenchmen on the Mississippi, Frenchmen and
Englishmen on the St Lawrence, Dutchmen and Englishmen on the Hudson,
did not strive more eagerly for control than the Montreal and Halifax,
Portland and Boston and New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore and New
Orleans of the nineteenth century. The struggle became especially
intense when the advancing flood of settlers cut their way through the
Appalachian woods and burst into the prairies of the Mississippi
valley. There was no longer a ten-year struggle to clear a space of
forty or fifty acres; at once the soil was ready for the plough. For a
few years the grain of the valley states was needed for their own
inrushing settlers, but a surplus grew rapidly and had to find an
outlet in the east or in Europe. The miraculous speed of western
settlement and the magnitude of the prize at stake soon centred public
interest on the question of the route which was to provide this outlet.
The Mississippi route was the first to be {32} developed. In canoe and
pirogue, bateau, flatboat, and ark, settlers went up and produce came
down. But the winding stream, the shifting channel, the swift current,
the frequent snag and sand-bar made navigation down-stream dangerous
and navigation upstream incredibly slow: the heavier vessels took three
months for the trip from New Orleans to Louisville. With the coming of
the steamboat a strong impetus was given alike to settlement and to
export trade. By the forties New Orleans ranked the fourth port in the
world and the Mississippi valley exceeded the British Isles in the
ownership of ships' tonnage. In 1850 the Mississippi still carried to
the sea cargoes twice the value of those that sought the Lakes and the
Erie Canal, though in the import trade these proportions were reversed.
At this time a line drawn east and west through the centre of Ohio
marked the commercial watershed. Not until after the Civil War did the
glories of the Mississippi pass away.
Next, New York devised its master-stroke, the Erie Canal. Gouverneur
Morris and De Witt Clinton saw the opportunity which the Mohawk-Hudson
cleft in the Appalachian barrier offered, and the state rose to it.
{33} Digging was begun in 1817, and in 1825 the first barge passed from
Lake Erie to the Hudson. At first the canal was only a four-foot
ditch, but it proved the greatest single factor in the development of
the region south of the Lakes. Prosperous cities--Buffalo, Lockport,
Rochester, Syracuse, Utica, Schenectady--sprang up all along the route.
Cost of transport from Buffalo to New York was cut in four. The
success of New York led Pennsylvania to build canals through the state
to Pittsburg, with a portage railroad over the Alleghanies, while in
the west canals were dug to connect Lake Erie with the Ohio, and Lake
Michigan with the Illinois and the Mississippi.
To the Canadian of that day the West meant Upper Canada or Canada West,
and 'the far west' meant Illinois and Indiana. The Saskatchewan was to
him little more than the Yang-tse-Kiang. But although the far west was
not under his own flag, it dominated his thoughts as greatly as the
North-West has dominated our thoughts half a century later. Canada
sought its share of the western trade. The Canadian provinces were
thinly peopled, their revenues were scanty and their credit low, but
the example of New York stirred them to the effort to remove the
barriers to {34} navigation in the St Lawrence, and to offer their
magnificent lake and river ship-route against the petty barge canal
which was capturing the western trade. The Welland Canal was built to
carry east-bound traffic beyond the point where Buffalo tapped it, and
by 1848, as we have seen, canals were completed on the St Lawrence,
providing a nine-foot waterway from Chicago to Montreal.
It was a magnificent effort for a struggling colony. But it was
scarcely finished--the paeans of self-congratulation on the unexpected
discovery of an enterprise quite Yankee in its daring were still
echoing--when it was found to have been made largely in vain. So far
from monopolizing the trade of the western states, the St Lawrence
route Was not even keeping the east-bound traffic of Upper Canada
itself. The reasons were soon plain. The repeal in 1846 of the Corn
Laws and in 1848 of the differential duties in favour of the St
Lawrence route were temporary blows. The granting of bonding
privileges by the United States in 1845 drew traffic from Canada to
southern routes. Ocean rates were cheaper from New York than from
Montreal; in 1850, for example, the freight on a barrel of flour from
New York to {35} Liverpool was 1s. 3 1/2d., while from Montreal it was
3s. 0 1/2d. This was because the majority of the vessels arriving at
Montreal came in ballast, and also because on the outward voyage the
offerings of timber made rates high. Timber enjoyed a preference in
the British market, and, as has happened since, this preference was
simply absorbed by the vessel owner. But most important of all, in the
United States the railway, with its speedy, all-year service, had
already taken the place of the canal. The Canadian ports were fighting
with weapons obsolete before completed.
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