He was appointed in 1915 on an "Economic Commission" which seems to
have practised a rigid economy on what it did for the country, because
it was never heard of again. However, it was No. 1A of the 46 war-time
commissions, and because Mackenzie was a member it should have a
memorial.
There is one man in Germany something like William Mackenzie, who makes
money almost by magic out of utilities and buys up concerns in other
countries with money which he made in his own. His name is Hugo
Stinnes. Mackenzie is a bigger man and a higher type than Stinnes; but
each man regards his country as a commercial asset to be developed;
each is a wizard of a species of applied finance. For years Mackenzie
was of speculative interest in Canada to people who had never even seen
his photograph. He was the man who had a second headquarters in Ottawa
and a branch office in every provincial legislature except Prince
Edward Island. We almost had Provincial Premiers lullabying to their
Cabinets:
"Hush ye, hush ye, do not fret ye,
The Black Douglas shall not get ye."
Mackenzie seemed to arise about twenty-five years ago from some magic
mountain and to stride down upon the plains with the momentum of a Goth
army. He was a contractor who became for ten years a demigod.
Sometimes before the war when people saw him on the street they paused
to watch him walking as though a black bear had suddenly wandered down
from Muskoka.
"By Jove! Mackenzie's back again."
"And is that William Mackenzie?"
"Did you never see him before?"
"No, sir, I never saw him before."
"Well, take a good look. He's just going to lunch. That man brought
back sixty million dollars this time from Threadneedle Street. A gang
of reporters met him at Montreal to get the good news---more money for
Canada. Great game! He got forty millions a year ago or so."
"Who's that benign man with him?"
"That's a Provincial Premier. His province wants more railways and the
Government has to guarantee more bonds----"
"Oh, then he sells bonds with Provinces for security?"
"That's the big idea. Why, what's wrong with it?"
"Oh, I guess it's all right."
"Of course it is. Railways can't be built out of earnings of lines
built last year. Traffic's too thin; has to be developed. Mackenzie's
building lines for a real population Canada, my boy, is a terrific
country to railroad. The C.P.R. got land and cash grants. Mackenzie
takes Government-guaranteed bonds. The whole country is on the same
road. We import people on to homestead land and we have to borrow
money to set the people up so that they'll become real Canadians----"
"Yes, especially at election time. But tell me--who finally owns these
railroads?"
"Well, you've got me. Nobody has figured that out yet. Everything is
too new. All I know is that Governments are behind Mackenzie, and the
people elect the Governments, and the people want the roads, and if
they don't get 'em the Government probably goes out. Anyhow I take off
my hat to Sir William Mackenzie as a great man."
Nine-tenths of Canada used to think that Mackenzie was a great man.
The more he borrowed in England on Government-guaranteed bonds, and the
more he invested in Mexico and South America, and the greater number of
street railways, power plants, transmission lines, ore mountains, new
towns, smelters, docks, ships, whale fisheries, coal mines and land
companies that he and his able partner Mann were able to octopize, the
greater the country thought both these men were--and especially
Mackenzie.
Toronto Board of Trade once gave a dinner to these men to celebrate the
fact that by the building of the new line to Sudbury at a cost of about
fifteen millions, Toronto was at last actually located on a Mackenzie
road and had a right to be made the headquarters of the system. A deer
in some places could have jumped from that line to the new line of the
C.P.R. built at the same time--and about the same cost. There was no
farmer in Ottawa to prevent the C.P.R. from getting a charter to
double-track this line. It was the same year that Mackenzie
inaugurated the Canadian Northern line of steamships, the two Royals,
and for lack of tidewater was compelled to dock them at Montreal under
the shadow of the C.P.R., who of course did not join in the civic
welcome. And in the same year people were talking--as they are now
again--about Toronto and Port Arthur becoming ocean ports. The wonder
was that Mackenzie did not see to it. But he was fairly busy, tying
Halifax to Vancouver by the Yellowhead Pass, and giving Provincial
Cabinets new ideas about government.
Without a doubt William Mackenzie had a mandate from this country to do
a great work--and he overdid it. Bankers and other financiers agreed
that he had found new ways of investing creative money. Scarcely a
teacher of geography but admitted that Mackenzie was changing the map
of this country so fast that a new one became necessary every three
years. New towns sprang up at the rate of a mile a day of new railway
built by Mackenzie. Every new town became a monument to this man's
faith in the future of Canada. Even the old city of Montreal, preserve
of the C.P.R., lent its mountain to Mackenzie for a tunnel and a "Model
City" on the hinter side.
There was always money to be had. A map of Canada in Mackenzie's
satchel when he went to England to see money lenders seemed under his
talk as big as the whole British Empire. It was not common Empire
patriotism to refuse either the money or the guarantees for the bonds.
The whole of Canada backed Mackenzie's notes. It was he, not Sir
Thomas White, who invented the principle of Victory Loans whereby the
nation becomes your banker. Between building a new line and operating
a line built last year, there was no system of accounting that could
audit his books. The centipede became so vast and complex that no
banker could begin to understand it. Mackenzie never made the effort.
He was developing Canada.
The Saskatchewan valley was the one great trunk Eldorado, the greatest
discovery of natural resources ever made in Canada. The settlers in
that valley wanted more people, the people wanted the railways, the
Government needed the voters, and Mackenzie wanted settlers, people,
voters, Government and all. If a Government was obstreperous,
Mackenzie might lend a heavy hand to help turn it out at the next
election. It was not proper for a Government to obstruct him. He was
the over-man.
In no other nation has there ever been a man who could play such a
prodigious and prodigal game with the resources of the whole country.
Mackenzie mobilized the nation before the war. Millions of people in
Canada used to regard him as a sort of magnified Daniel Drew--the
father of Wall Street and watered stock and corrupt-contract railways.
But Mackenzie was a broader man than Drew, with a much higher sense of
honour. Drew admitted that he was a wonderful Methodist, that he had
been a profiteer of the Civil War, and that he had starved a railway of
rails so that it killed a large number of people in an accident.
Mackenzie was no Methodist; and he never was a profiteer from any
emergency of the people. He wanted Canada to prosper. All his profits
must come from greater wealth in Canada, which he did much to produce.
Mackenzie had more faith in Canada than most of the politicians had.
He wanted a great Canada, chief Dominion in a great Empire, The best
way to conserve a nation's wealth, he said once, is to develop its
resources. We never had such a developer. He never was a born
railwayman, any more than he was a pure financier. He was a colossal
exploiter of national resources by means of borrowed money. In the era
before Mackenzie we had Clergue at the Soo. Clergue was a pigmy
forerunner of Mackenzie. What Clergue did in Algoma the other man
aimed to do for the whole country, And he almost did it.
Asked once why he gave so much leeway to men like Mackenzie and Mann,
Sir Wilfrid Laurier is reported to have said:
"Well, what other kind of men could you have to do such remarkable
work?"
Beaverbrook said at a dinner in Canada not long ago:
"I never was a William Mackenzie. I created nothing as he did."
The debacle of Mackenzie railways was never contemplated by Mackenzie.
He did not even imagine that it was possible--except that he was
prophetically troubled by the ambition of Laurier to create a third
transcontinental. He had the right of way in this. He and Mann had
developed the Canadian Northern out of a little stub line in Dauphin,
Manitoba. The thing grew because it served the people, and the people
lived in a fertile country that needed a road to market. The whole
basic idea of the Mackenzie roads was to give more and more people a
road to market. The original idea of the Grand Trunk Pacific and the
National Transcontinental was to rival the Canadian Pacific monument to
John A. Macdonald by erecting a railway monument to Wilfrid Laurier.
The race of the railways just about broke the nation's neck. It was
not all the fault of Mackenzie that the race ever began, or that it was
carried on to insanity. He was a practical philosopher to perceive
that a Government is an elective corporation capable of manipulation in
the interest of an all-Canada enterprise needed and wanted by the
people. He was a master cynic to surmise that when the future came to
balance the accounts, Father Time would be a very bewildered assignee.
The war was very ill advised. Mackenzie had no use for war. He never
could see in the predicament of a nation any chance to profit for
himself. He wanted perpetual prosperity. It never occurred to him,
perhaps, that some day critics would arise to say that the country
called Canada had done more for William Mackenzie than he had ever done
for the country; and that when the parent utility of the cycle which he
had helped to create was declared bankrupt, he had no rights in the
case whatever and never should have been paid a dollar of indemnity for
the common stock.
But as the country had submitted to Mackenzie's system of building
railways, so it was compelled to be content with the Royal Commission
method of adjudicating what the builders should get out of the wreck.
Financiers and politicians and common citizens may wrangle till
doomsday about the ethics of this debacle. They will never get anybody
to understand it. The thing is an economic outlaw like its author.
Mackenzie as a common storekeeper would have been sold for taxes. As a
railway builder he staged the greatest pageant of industry ever known
in Canada, and when the show went off the road because it was no longer
able to pay its bills, took what he could salvage of the properties and
left other men to wrestle with the reconstruction.
We shall never have another Mackenzie. Bigger men may arise. More
unusual characters may stalk out of obscurity into places of eminence
and power. But there never again can be an era like the Mackenzie
epoch, because that kind of experience is suffered and enjoyed but once
in a nation's lifetime. He still has big interests, some of them
gradually being taken over by governments and municipal corporations.
But he has shot his bolt, and it was a Jovian big one. No doubt he is
enormously rich. That does not matter. Canada no longer cares whether
he is rich or poor. Once a demigod in our national ledgers, he is now
a grizzled relique of his former energy. He used to be a despot feared
by those who had to work under him, admired for his superhuman audacity
and power to get what he wanted just because he knew why and when he
wanted it, and capable of inspiring an almost insane loyalty to a
man-made system that never was anything at all but an economic mirage.
He is now just William Mackenzie, more or less a citizen, now and then
interviewed laconically by a reporter who never can extract anything
but arid commonplaces from what he says to the public.
Because, to William Mackenzie there never was any real public. What he
cared about was the prosperous nation upon which he could build and
build without limit till he died. When the nation came to a crisis in
the war he did nothing to help it, except to let the Railway War Board
pool his lines for traffic and the Government commandeer his ships.
The man who years before had been regarded as the greatest doer in
Canada, when the country and all Mackenzie's works along with it came
to the great test, never so much as lifted a personal finger to help in
the work that had to be done. Mackenzie had done his work in
prosperity. In the great predicament he had no function. The nation
paid him his ducats and let him go.
This, if we are concerned about the man value of Canada, is a tragedy.
For there was in William Mackenzie somehow, with all his ruthlessness
and audacity and semi-piratical creed, the element of a kind of great
man. There is in his uncommon face the look of a man who with less
excess of one quality might have become a wonderful citizen. Nature
made him vastly selfish on a scale big enough to devise a totally new
scheme for over-capitalizing Canada. She denied him the commoner human
qualities that make a man a constructive citizen whether his country is
in weal or woe.
The epic which Mackenzie and his partner achieved in this country
out-bid in dimensions, variety and the use of practical imagination,
even the work of Rhodes in South Africa. It was a feat of economic and
financial engineering which but for its peculiarly selfish energy and
ruthless characteristics, might have become a monumental contribution
to the human welfare of Canada. No man of common brain or conventional
ethics could have been the dynamic head of such a work. For years,
decades, this astounding adventurer exercised his precarious despotism
over the country that he might make its prosperity a factor in his own
success. In gambling with its securities he hoped to multiply its
wealth without diminishing its happiness. The constructive imagination
and tireless energy that he expended on his great cycle of utilities,
had it been spent by a poet would have produced epics and dramas. But
in all the things he did and the words he said, there is no record of
any sentiment of sacrifice for the good of a nation.
William Mackenzie had his day, while Governments rose and fell. His
day is done. The public which he dazzled and outwardly despised has no
credulity left for any further hero-worship of such a man. "Well, what
does Mr. Mackenzie want now?" was the oft-repeated query of the
bewildered Laurier to Mackenzie agents in Ottawa. No Canadian Premier
will ever ask such a question again. Ottawa has no further
possibilities for William Mackenzie of any interest to the public. The
kind of prosperity created by such men as he is played out in Canada
forever.
The forecast than Mackenzie and Flavelle might form a new two-man junta
to operate National railways was too absurd even to merit denial. Such
a partnership would merely revive the old Schoolman debate of the
Middle Ages--What happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable
object? The two mentalities are incompatible. For twenty years the
chief common ground between them was the Canadian Bank of Commerce, of
which Sir Joseph is a director, who long ago discovered that the total
assets of the bank were but a turbine in the Niagara of Mackenzie
finance.
And William Mackenzie who built the conspiracy of enormous interests
with which his name is identified, was never meant to be a railway
operator at all. One might as well expect Lloyd George to be a
successful manager of Sunlight Soap and of Lord Leverhulme.