Canada has a national habit of veneration for the C.P.R. just as England
used to have for Kitchener in Egypt. The travels of H. M. Stanley in
Africa were not more wonderful than the everyday lives of Sandford
Fleming's engineers routeing that great new line through the Rockies; and
the legend of Monte Cristo scarcely more fabulous than the exploits of
Van Horne in getting the money or the work done without it. The man who
bought supplies for Van Horne (when there was money) and wrote letters or
sent telegrams when there was none, got a finer preparation for being a
great railwayman than most Premiers ever got for the duties of public
life.
The sensations of the cured scriptural blind man who saw "men as trees
walking" were repeated to Canadians of thirty-five years ago who read
about those legendary Scots, Yankees and Canadians who flung that _chemin
de fer_ over Canada to start a Confederacy into a nation. And there was
no _Boys' Own Annual_ in Canada to tell the tale, as it should have been
done, along with the tales of the Northwest Mounted Police and the
adventures of the Hudson's Bay Company. George Stephen, Donald A. Smith,
Robert Angus, Sandford Fleming, John A. Macdonald, Van Horne, the young
Shaughnessy--all seemed then to be not merely doers of the undoable, but
men of mighty imagination and a sort of Old Testament morality. Even the
Pacific Scandal seemed as necessary a part of the narrative as the story
of Joseph's coat and of Jacob and Esau were of the epic of Israel.
Well, admittedly, most of that has faded from the Canadian Pacific. We
read the annual address of the C.P.R. President with yawns. It all seems
considerably like what is said and done at any directors' meeting of a
rubber factory or a street railway. You read the names of the directors
and few of them strike you with any sense of novelty or of awe. The room
in which these magnates meet is--just a room; it used to be thought of as
a sort of Doges' Palace of finance. You may even note that one of the
directors is baggy at the knees, and any two of them may be talking along
the corridor about that very ordinary thing--the cost of living.
Of all the men at any C.P.R. directors' meeting, Lord Shaughnessy knows
most about the steep side of finance. He was the spender when there was
nothing to spend. The romantic adversities of those days never left him.
He came down to the presidency with the fear of no-funds in his soul.
From the beginning until then he had felt all the ragged edges of C.P.R.
life. He had grimly chuckled to Van Horne, the occasionally helpless
wizard, over the hard times. And hard times never really left the road
until Van Horne handed the C.P. over to Shaughnessy just at the edge of
the era when the system was getting ready to handle phenomenal traffic
arising out of stupendous immigration.
From then on till the day that he also went out was the epoch when
traffic and travel became vaster than the road, and greater than the men.
It was his to operate, and to build as well. But the operations were all
of a system which had creaked into through traffic from Yokohama to
Montreal as far aback as 1889; and the new lines built under Shaughnessy
were just branches of the old trunk. Shaughnessy took over bulging
receipts after he had spent years at painful expenditures. He took over
a despotism and made it an autocracy.
It was not in his practical, unromantic temperament to play the
Gargantuan role. He had not the mentality. Van Horne left the road when
the road threatened to become bigger than its creator. Shaughnessy began
to work on it when he knew that the bigger he made the system the greater
would be his own executive authority, and the bigger the dividends to the
holders of stock.
There was a radical contrast between these two men; and as much between
the road built by Van Horne and the system operated and magnified by
Shaughnessy. The former would not have his shadow dwarfed by the
dimensions of his own creation. The latter had created nothing: he would
have the shadow of the thing fling itself so vastly over the nation--and
the nations--that whenever men spoke of C.P. they thought of Shaughnessy,
and when they said his name they mentally took off their hats to the
headship of the greatest system of its kind in the world.
This may or may not have been Shaughnessy's intention. It was certainly
the effect. We have all gone through the era of profound respect for the
cold autocrat of the twentieth century, as some of us did that of awesome
veneration of the railway giants of the nineteenth. We have read
newspaper stories--some of them buncombe--about this man's all-seeing eye
as he travelled over the system, as we did of the peripatetic omniscience
of James J. Hill and the Gargantuan humours of Van Horne. We have
consented that the system perfected by Shaughnessy was the most
marvellous known of its kind, and therefore the man at its head must be a
phenomenal administrator.
Very likely we have been warped by our enthusiasm. Shaughnessy was no
miracle man. He was a wonderful _maestro_ of details, a clear-headed
organizer of systems and a man to provoke high respect in those who had
to deal with him at close range. But he had perhaps less sheer ability
for detail than Van Horne, who as a rule despised the botheration of it.
I have heard Van Horne dictating to his secretary a mass of intimate
instructions to a contractor about how to build a rotunda in a hotel in
Cuba, at the same time with his left hand on a drawer full of complicated
notes on his philosophy of life, which with the other lobe of his brain
he was traversing in order to engulf the interviewer as soon as the
letter was finished. Shaughnessy never could have carried on such an
interview, lasting four hours of a busy life. His talks to the press
must be curt and comprehensive--or else elliptical. He had no exuding
vivacity. When I talked to him--or listened to him--he was cold and
exact. He left his chair only to walk erectly to the window. He
deviated not a syllable from the subject in hand--the system. He
worshipped that: as much as any Mikado ever did his ancestry. He paid
passing veneration to Van Horne--when from the slant of his remark I
surmised that he was critical even in his admiration for that epical
character.
Shaughnessy is essentially a system-man. When he travelled he had his
practical jokes and his Irish stories and his fondness for the social
side; but he was conventionally as correct as a time-table. Had there
been a spark of genius in him he would have extinguished it for the sake
of betterments to the most conventional Colossus in Canada. The C.P.R.
was supposed to lead. It was built for dividends, and born in politics.
It had craft at its cradle. The new policy under Shaughnessy was bigger.
It had to do less with Asia, with spectacle, with carved gods; more with
Europe, with immigration posters, with land settlement. Shaughnessy had
taken over a system which could be used ostensibly as the agent of the
Immigration Department and of the Interior; effectively as the base of
population-supply on its own account.
As Shaughnessy worked it out the C.P. had a scheme of national expansion
that acted independent of government; its own ships, trains, roads,
docks, land offices, immigration agents, poster-advertising--until the
average European looking for a way out of economic slavery believed that
the C.P.R. was the owner and operator of Canada. A belief which was not
contradicted, except officially, at home.
William Mackenzie set the pace for building; Shaughnessy for operation.
But Shaughnessy built fast. He did it under a handicap of two systems
against one. The difference was that an average new line under
Shaughnessy paid dividends, or at least did not appreciably lower
dividends already declared.
Under Lord Shaughnessy it was unofficially believed that the head of the
C.P.R. was somehow overlord to governments. Shaughnessy the impenetrable
was not the agent of a democracy, but an emperor. He had his counterpart
in Japan. The Orientalism which Van Horne infused into the system even
while he laughed it out of court, was solemnly accepted by the man who
came after. But it was the Orientalism of efficiency. Shaughnessy was
its symbol. Away from it he was of little consequence except as a
benevolent citizen with statesmanlike views upon how governments should
govern. Within it he was mighty. He felt himself the apex of a thing
that knew no provincial boundaries. He consciously made it the
instrument of Empire. He was inordinately proud of its morale. To him
it was a complicated army. He felt it assimilating men who lived, moved
and had their being in C.P.R.--as he had. He was the great human rubber
stamp. He had extra power. He lived on fiats and papal bulls. Men
learned to tremble at his nod--not at Shaughnessy, but at the man who
personalized the infallible system. And as governments came up and
capsized in the storms of public sentiment, the great system went on in
its sullen but splendid way, a sort of solar system in which parties and
governments gravitated.
It would have needed a greater soul than Shaughnessy to be cynical about
C.P.R. It often needed his latent Irish humour to appreciate the larger
cynicism which it expressed concerning the country. The pap-fed infants
of Mackenzie and Hays served but to illustrate by contrast the perfection
and the well-oiled technique of the dynamo operated by Shaughnessy. It
became an obsession with him, as it did with Flavelle over a commercial
company, that "the king can do no wrong." His annual report bristled
with pride over the Company's achievements. He insisted upon the
inherent morality of the thing and of the men who were its officials.
And the older he grew the more Shaughnessy became absorbed in it. In his
career the office of President reached its climax. It was shorn of much
of its aspect of awe as soon as he left it.
His knighthood was a slight decoration on so august a personage; as
though the king had decorated the Mikado. The baronage more nearly
fitted the case. Shaughnessy was not too passionately a Home Ruler to
take it. But he was never so good a president of the C.P.R. after he got
it. He became particular over forms and etiquette. One almost looked
for a change of guard at the gate when entering the President's office.
No pomp, however, could undo such efficiency, and in the main such
national sanity. Shaughnessy always liked to have a voice in national
affairs. That was partly tradition. It also kept the public from
remembering that the railway after all was a creature of government and
of politics. It sometimes deflected public attention from the "melon"
patch which was the _Toronto World's_ sobriquet for the C.P.R. "pork
barrel," and from the ever potential lobby maintained by the company at
Ottawa. Of course lobbies are always repudiated. No self-respecting
railway ever knows it by that name. There is no department of lobbyage
in the head offices. The art is never taught. But it is childish to
dodge the public necessity of a great corporation being represented at
the centre of national legislation. In fact, C.P. has loomed so large in
public affairs that a member of Parliament for the Company would
sometimes have been scarcely ridiculous. Whenever Lord Shaughnessy went
to Ottawa, it was public news. He never went for his health, seldom
without some issue too big for a subordinate to handle. Had the Minister
of Railways gone to Montreal to see Mr. President, it would have seemed
quite as natural.
The war gave Lord Shaughnessy for a time almost equal prominence with Sir
Sam Hughes. His quite sensible speech criticizing the haphazard and
costly methods of recruiting made Hughes retort that to raise the First
Contingent was as great a task as building the C.P.R. Lord Shaughnessy
earned that absurd retort because of his announcement to the Government
that he meant to make the speech; as though the nation would be waiting
to hear it. There was room for one super-governmentarian at Ottawa;
never for two. It was Hughes _vs._ Shaughnessy.
Lord Shaughnessy's retirement from the presidency was not sudden. He had
reached his zenith. His eyesight was bad. But he had not lost his grip.
The war threw such an unusual load on the system and so changed its
complexion that it became necessary to have a younger man. There is
reason to believe that the war rudely upset much of the Imperial dignity
of the great system. The C.P. was no longer a law unto itself. It was
part of the national pool. The President was no longer a sublime
autocrat; he was a public agent. The life blood of a globe-girdling
system was drained by the war, even while it retained its supremacy as
the greatest railway and more than held up its end compared with the
railway muddle in the United States. Never again could the C.P. recover
its splendid isolation of greatness. Public ownership was being thrust
upon the nation by the bankruptcy of the other roads. Shaughnessy had no
real fear that it would ever absorb the C.P.R. But he had reason to
suspect that a huge Government system would be more or less of a menace
to the system which he had spent his life to build up. There was no
better way than to retire, leaving the chief administration to a man of
his own choice and retaining the post of Chairman along with the room
occupied by the old President. Even here the old autocrat survives. The
proposal made by Baron Shaughnessy to pool all the railways, except the
Grand Trunk, and to put them all under C.P. administration with a
guarantee of dividends to C.P. shareholders--was a magnificent play to
the gallery. The other roads were undeniably bankrupt, when even the
splendid showing made by the management could not make their records
palatable to the public. It was a strategic time to advertise once,
finally and for all, the unequalled efficiency of the old
Transcontinental.
But Canadian railwaydom is dominated by C.P.R. as naturally as tides by
the moon. The Railway Association, once the Railway War Board, are now a
junta of dividendists and of paid chiefs of the Government system, to
oppose--whenever necessary--the adverse judgments of the Government's
Railway Commission. The road which was the tangible nexus of
Confederation was built by two Americans, one of whom became a
high-tariff Tory and a knight, the other an Imperialistic baron who
believed in Dominion Home Rule for Ireland when the average Canadian
considered Home Rule as treasonable as annexation. It is the prerogative
of any robust Canadian to oppose either infection from Broadway or
domination from Downing Street. But, regarding the strategic position of
Canada in the misnamed "British Empire," we might all take a cue from
Lord Shaughnessy, who has had all the internationalizing emotions of
which any man is normally capable, and can challenge any man to shew
where he has ever compromised conscience or country.