The main thing that E. W. Beatty, K.C., did to help win the war was to
become President of the C.P.R. And he did it well. A glance at this
polished pony engine of a chief executive suggests that he has never
done anything but well, and that he is the kind of man likely without
preachments to stimulate well-doing in other people.
I first met this self-controlled master of executives not long after he
became President. He was most cordial; as Shaughnessy had been
austere. Under such a direct impression it seemed that I had at last
found a man who would make the inexorable old C.P.R. become a golden
door to humanity. Of course I was mistaken. That kind of man is born
often enough, but he seldom stays with his birthright. I knew that the
railway of railways was no school for the humanities; but this
university graduate, Chancellor of Queen's, distinguished counsel and
potential eminent judge, bachelor, Canadian born, every inch an athlete
and as rugged as Carpentier, seemed to my aroused imagination one who
would be as much bigger than the stodgy C.P.R. as that system was
greater than others of its kind.
Beatty has not been at his new job long enough yet to prove what I
suspect--that I was wrong. But he has been long enough with it to know
that the surging ideals and aspirations of a young, healthy man in his
own office are pretty rudely shaken down by the practical operation of
a great system in a time of financial difficulty.
We talked for nearly an hour. He seemed to have the time and the
interest. His big office was as quiet as a library. His desk was
almost devoid of signs of labour. Not a paper to be seen that required
immediate attention; every item neatly disposed; himself smoking--a
fairly strong pipe; scarcely a telephone call to interrupt. He seemed
the sculptor's embodiment of strength in reserve; a man who never could
be tuckered or peevish or unable to detect either the weakness of an
opponent, the penetration of a critic or the need of a man who came to
ask him for advice. There was a big instant kindliness about him that
would have won the cordiality of the stolidest of interviewers, as we
talked about railways, government ownership, the needs of journalism
and the value in business of the personal equation--his own phrase
which he repeated so often that it seemed to contain something of
prophetic intention. He paid his venerating respects to the founders
of the C.P.R., but he seemed to have more enthusiasm for Lord
Mountstephen than for Van Horne.
I heard him say some strong, sincere things about the uselessness of
rich men who would sooner use their money on the gratification of
vanity than upon public service. He meant that. He repeated such
things at various interviews. In doing so he proved that he himself
had always made a god of very hard work, discipline and self-denial,
for the sake of giving his own personality a square deal, without
regard to the money he could make. He had the strength and he used it.
As solicitor and chief counsel he became almost a machine to win cases
for the railway. He must win, and know how to lose. Fighting a
corporation's battles is a good way to believe that the system can do
no wrong. But I don't think Beatty was ever blind to the native
defects of the C.P.R.
Railroading is a great university of character. Nothing else in our
practical affairs attracts such a variety of men. None of our
railwaymen have climbed to the peak of the railway operation business
quite so successfully and so Canadianly as E. W. Beatty. Most other
transportation magnates we have imported from either Scotland or the
United States. This one is Canadian from his cradle up. He embodies
the best characteristics of the average Canadian in a very high degree.
He is an amateur athlete whom hard work has never been known to make
weary. At the end of any perfect day of hard work he has as much
strength in reserve as he had in the morning when he came to it. Even
in his talk he wastes never a word, states everything clearly and in
forcible language, but is seldom curt at the expense of courtesy. He
does not talk like any big American executive whose equal or superior
he may be in administration. He copies nobody. The day's work has
always been his exemplar. He has no desire for mere personal success.
Years ago he could have made more money by exporting his brains to the
United States. But he preferred Canada where he has made less money,
justly earned more fame, and where he can continue to do more work that
counts for efficiency in himself and in other people. He is the kind
of man--like Arthur Meighen--who inspires other men to go in with him
on a heavy task to get it done in a big way.
Beatty's type of mind, though somewhat dry and legal and at times
judicial, is also capable of an immensely quiet enthusiasm that
transmits itself to other people. He invites discussion, but not
familiarity. Not personally careful just to maintain traditions, he
profoundly respects the men who created them--and goes ahead to
transact business now, and to hand out decisions immediately, that get
to-day ahead of yesterday and as near as possible to the day after. He
believes in the square deal in action and in the high common sense of a
decision. There is no public question upon which his opinion might not
be sanely valuable, though one would never expect him to succeed as a
leader in politics. As a business reorganizer of McGill University he
is bound to consider a college as a "going concern". As Chancellor of
Queen's, he upsets all traditions as to the dignity of pure scholarship.
It seemed like a long stride from being Chief Railway Counsel to
becoming Chief Executive. But to his practical personality the stride
was only a step. On an average this is no lawyer's job. Judges in the
United States can preside over big corporations. The chief executive
of the C.P.R. works. He must know the system, its men, its technique.
Railroading is a complex of specialities. A good president must enter
into the spirit of the man who builds a locomotive and of one who
constructs a timetable.
It fell to this first Canadian President that the road ever had to
shoulder a load which would have made the wizard Van Horne read up
Hercules. Beatty holds the record for getting through with a programme
that would have puzzled either of his two eminent predecessors in that
office. Shaughnessy at the same age might have done it. Van Horne
never. Yet Beatty never could have built the C.P.R. His brain has no
wizardry in it. He is a co-ordination of facts that knows not the
meaning of magic. He is the most matter-of-fact man in any high
executive position in Canada. The task he undertook was all cut out
for him. Fate decreed that he should take it. He never dreamed of
refusing. And what a task!
The greatest trouble Beatty had to face when he became President was
too much traffic, too little rolling stock, an almost tragic scarcity
of labour and the McAdoo award in wages. Railroading costs were at an
apex before even munitions costs began to be. The collapse of railways
in the United States drove a vast amount of traffic over Canadian
roads. The two younger transcontinental systems were on the verge of
receiverships. The brunt of the burden fell upon the old C.P.R., which
at that time, in spite of the McAdoo awards was making a heavy profit.
The cash value of traffic handled was colossal. War work was wearing
the railways down. New locomotives and cars were hard to get. Orders
could not be placed outside. Canada's railways had to depend on
Canada. Ships could not wait, though submarines could. Freight must
move. Two hard winters nearly paralyzed all the systems. No new lines
were being built. The old lines were wearing out. Canada had the
longest hauls of any nation in the world. Our systems were built for
the long haul. The railway systems of other countries were demoralized
with wastage, low repairs and enormous traffic. Even in short-haul
England of the easy climate, there was railway paralysis. But England
had great gasoline highways and coastal routes when Canada had neither.
It is said in a report of that period, "General Superintendents in
charge of some of the "key" divisions of the big roads have had to work
from 12 to 20 hours a day to keep roadbed, rolling stock and crews up
to top mark." 22,000 Canadian cars were "lost" in the United States in
one winter. What war left of the railways winter did its best to
debilitate. Industry stole transportation labour at high wages and
rolled out vast quantities of material that had to be moved, when even
C.P.R. efficiency seemed to be just about obliterated from the chart of
the world's work.
This was no time for any man to pray that he might be made chief
executive of the greatest transportation system in the world; nor a
time for Lord Shaughnessy to continue in that office. The work was now
too heavy for the autocrat and for a man whose eyesight was bad. A
successor had to be found. The directors did it almost automatically.
There was but one man to consider; and he had no experience in any of
the mechanical departments.
Beatty was the man. The old autocrat himself had said so; and he knew.
Shaughnessy had taken the road from its wizard creator, and made it the
size and efficiency that it was. There was almost apostolic
succession. Stories that the Montreal directors favoured one man, the
Toronto directors another, and that Shaughnessy gave the casting vote,
were mere fabrications. Yet Beatty stated that never in his long years
of experience with the system had he a clear ambition to climb up its
ladder. He never wanted anything but a large day's work--and he got
many. But, when he was made Vice-President, he must have known that he
was the man. Vice-Presidents on the C.P.R. are not necessarily
presidents to be. One of Beatty's friends travelling with him up from
Three Rivers once bought him a picture postcard with the legend, "No
mother ever picks her son to be a Vice-President." Beatty smiled it
off. He probably knew. This was one of the rare bits of humour that
illustrated the Shaughnessy regime. His lordship, fond enough of Irish
jokes outside, was never humourous inside the system. All the humour
in Canadian Pacific was supposed to have died when Van Horne left it.
But now and again a gleam of human insight came from the grim
efficiency of the great system, and at least upon one occasion it
flashed from the legal department. When the Railway Commission was
almost a new thing under that remarkable square-deal chairman, Joseph
Pitt Mabee, the town of Trois Rivieres, Que., had a suit, through its
Board of Trade, against the C.P.R., involving discrimination in rates.
The counsel for the plaintiff was a French-Canadian who could read, but
not comfortably speak, English. The further he went the more
bewildered the chairman became, until he ventured to interrupt:
"I have a suggestion to make to my hon. friend who is having difficulty
in getting me to understand the case."
The suggestion was that the solicitor for the railway who had made a
special study of the Board of Trade's argument for the sake of
demolishing it, should himself present that side of the argument in the
clear, concise English of which he is a master; that wherever necessary
the French counsel should correct the statement; and that afterwards
Mr. Beatty should proceed to demolish the argument which he himself had
put up. The counsel was agreeable. Mr. Beatty rose to the occasion.
His statement of the case was so satisfactory to the counsel for Trois
Rivieres that he afterwards wondered how Beatty was ever able to
demolish it and win the case.
Beatty has no hobbies. He cares for no art, collects no curios, has no
great house, drives no big cars; cares not at all for society; thinks
more of the Amateur Athletic Association and the Navy League and the
boys of the Y.M.C.A., the athletic equipment of Queen's University and
the success of Sir Arthur Currie as President of McGill. He never
travels for pleasure. When he goes over the C.P.R., expect results.
The average Montrealer does not even know where he lives. He is said
to spend forty minutes a day, indoor weather, at basketball. In summer
he camps. Snapshotted in a sweater he looks like a compromise between
Babe Ruth batting a home run and Hofmann playing the piano.
When Beatty was first a young lawyer in Montreal he was so lonesome for
the city he came from that he used to go down to the station to see the
Toronto train pull in. He did not dream then that some day he would be
the man that pulls all the trains in; that from his desk he should have
a periscope on the world--every day--the greatest intelligence
department in America. When he was a school lad in Thorold, afterwards
at the Upper Canada "Prep." (where he got so bad a report that his
father was advised to take him out of school), he had no idea that he
would be Chancellor of Queen's University.
The system and the man. Determining which most affects the other is
like the old problem of the hen and the egg. But here, anyhow, is a
great system. No man venerates it more than Beatty. He does not even
consent to call it a corporation; prefers to think of it as an
association, imbued with enthusiasm and loyalty. Now and then he
publicly discusses national ownership; none can do it better. He did
it at Thorold soon after he was appointed. He argued it in Ottawa with
Cabinet Ministers. He did it in Winnipeg. One suspects that Beatty's
ability to do this was one of his qualifications for the presidency.
A year before Beatty became president a man high up in the system
predicted that the C.P.R. would spend a million dollars to campaign
against Bolshevism. He failed to foresee that the stolid old bulwark
of things as they are would never need to do any such thing. All it
needed to spend was Beatty who, within six months of the time he
changed the sign on his door, had convinced the system that a sort of
new optimistic vitality had got hold of it. There was once a cynical
proverb around those offices: "It's cheaper to buy editors than
newspapers." One hears very little of it now. The annual meeting of
the Directors may be fine copy for the _Montreal Gazette_, but the
yearly banquet of the officials is a matter of real public interest,
especially to the young President. There is a psychology in
this--"association"--that is not a corporation. How does he gauge it?
From the officials. He does not visit the Angus shops; though if he
did he would be welcome. It was an old axiom of Van Horne that what
the head is, so also will the system be. Beatty extends the axiom--to
include the officials. He would have them radiate optimism, not
particularly caring that they get it from him.
For the past two years optimism has been needed. C.P. reports are not
what they used to be. Even the stock exchanges tell the tale. But in
comparison with American lines, with other Canadian systems--ah! here
is always some comfort. Trust Beatty to miss no chance of intimating
that he would much prefer to have real competition from Government
roads. He fervently hopes for Government ownership to succeed. C.P.
cannot thrive on weak competition. He has no fear that any sane
Government will try absorbing the C.P.R. Even farmers, he thinks,
would soon settle down to a sense of responsibility. The old pioneer
is a hard organization to make into a tail that does not wag the dog.
Steadily he has advertised to the public that the system is still the
handbook of efficiency; let Government roads imitate. National
ownership, being impersonal, somewhat Bolshevistic, and very vague,
cannot develop the intensive "super-loyalty" of the big private system
vested in a board of directors, and the chief.
Since ever he became chief Beatty has made this clear; for a purpose.
Did I omit to say that he is the first C.P.R. president without
whiskers; the first with a college degree; the first Canadian born, the
first lawyer, the first bachelor and the first man from Toronto who had
occupied that position; the youngest of all the presidents; that he
used to be an expert at college Rugby; that at Upper Canada "Prep." he
was much addicted to pugilism; not to mention the discarded tilt of his
Fedora? If so it is because the man himself sets no value on these
things. His faith is in the collective personality, called the
Canadian Pacific, built up on the Personal Equation.
But Ottawa--what of that? Almost ever since Ottawa was, the C.P.R. has
been said to own it. Governments of either party have never been
inhospitable to the benign octopus--centipede it became--that had its
origin in the Parliament of Canada and wrecked one Tory Government.
The penalty of transcontinental railways is that they require to have
mortgages on governments. Presently the worm turns. But that usually
costs more money than the mortgage. We are now paying off the
mortgages of two great systems. The C.P.R. mortgage was paid long ago.
The President of the C.P.R. is usually regarded as second only to the
Premier in point of national management. But Premiers and governments
come and go; the President stays on. Suppose that in the year 19--
there should be a Cabinet mainly of farmers. Alberta has a farmer
government. Saskatchewan with a "Liberal" government has a Cabinet
mainly of farmers. Manitoba sometimes has to remind herself that
Premier Norris is a kind of farmer. Ontario has a farmer Premier and
more than half a Cabinet of farmers.
This is the age of the farmers' innings. Suppose that a Cabinet of
super-Agriculturists at the Capital some day should not agree with Mr.
Beatty that farmers when they get responsibilities measure up and
settle down to conservatism. Such a Cabinet might not remember that
the C.P.R. had really done so very much for the prairies in comparison
with what it has got from the West. It might decree that a lawyer
President should be called upon to elucidate why he judges that so
efficient a Personal Equation as the C.P.R. should not be
"nationalized", if not government-owned, for the good of the whole
people, and especially of the people whose traffic creates most of the
revenues?
This is merely supposing. In any case Mr. Beatty would be master of
the occasion. The lawyer who argued against himself and won at Three
Rivers might be able to put up a more convincing argument to Ottawa
Farmers than Lord Shaughnessy did to the Union Government when he
offered to amalgamate the C.P.R. with the Government roads providing
the management should be C.P.R. and the dividends guaranteed.
But of course this is a merely hypothetical argument. There may never
be a Farmer Administration in Ottawa. And if there ever should be, we
may trust to conservative and progressive old C.P.R. to do its share of
injecting a "sense of responsibility" into a Farmer Cabinet to help it
measure up and settle down, even if some farmer should buy C.P. shares
enough to get himself elected as a director. As it stands to-day in
the estimation of the travelling public, who may or may not care a
copper about the personality of its rugged and efficient lawyer
president, the Canadian Pacific is the one greatest proof that Canada
needs no revolution which will interfere with the morale of that
system. In fact so long as the C.P.R. holds its own an economic
revolution in Canada is impossible.