A rather cynical friend used to say his title to respectability was that he was permitted to live in Toronto. For twenty-one years I have been enabled to read that title clear. In truth, Toronto is a goodly city, which doesn’t think of itself more highly than it ought to think, although it has a contrariwise repute. Occasionally one is inclined to observe that it might have thought a little more generously of some who have served it better than has always been recognized—Sir William Mackenzie and Sir Donald Mann, for examples.

When the movement of Canadian National officials to Montreal began, early in 1923, there were about twenty-five hundred employees of the system in Toronto. At say, an average of two dependents, that means a population of seven thousand five hundred; and with their support of butchers, and bakers, grocers and tailors, candlestick makers, and show-ticket takers, say fifteen hundred more. Half of Toronto’s manufacturing output goes to the West. In the prairie country, at least, it can fairly be said that one-fourth of the development of this century has been directly due to the building of the Canadian Northern. There was no particular reason why a series of railways west of Port Arthur should have their head office in Toronto—I mean from the point of view of efficient administration—except that Mr. Mackenzie lived here, and, as President of the Toronto Railway Company, had spent much of his business activity with the city as his personal headquarters.

Mr. Mann lived in Montreal. His partnership, with the late James Ross, the present Sir Herbert Holt, and Mr. Mackenzie, entailed the carrying of an office in Montreal. The head office of Mackenzie and Mann was opened in Toronto in 1899—three years after the railway to Dauphin, (and to two oceans) was begun. When the Mackenzie-Mann partnership was incorporated, later, it became possible for the two principals to become officers of the railway companies, because they were no longer construction contractors personally—one of those legal situations upon which, according to temperament, it may be declared that the law is an ass, or a Solomon.

At that time the Toronto Railway Company’s building at the corner of King and Church streets was not all required for street railway purposes; and the railway contractors rented three back rooms on the top floor, the architectural firm of Pearson and Darling having the front offices.

Construction was going on in the West, where the accountant, P. C. Andrews, was on the ground all summer. His winter quarters were in Toronto, where he produced his balance sheets from the field records. In 1899, with the move to Toronto, and with work proceeding rapidly east and west of Winnipeg, a young fellow was brought in to take charge of the Mackenzie and Mann accounts. He so continued, with increasing responsibilities during all the strenuous period of Canadian Northern expansion. For a combination of natural capacity in accounting, and experience in the finance of modern Canadian railway construction, I do not think his equal exists. When the Canadian National name superseded the Canadian Northern, A. J. Mitchell was appointed vice-president in charge of finance and accounts, and remained as such until he retired with the president.

After a year the whole top floor of the Toronto Railway Building was occupied by the railway constructors. To desk room here I came at the end of 1902, when it was decided that the Canadian Northern head office must be in Toronto and that somebody familiar with all the details of the operation of completed lines should carry a general responsibility. The title of superintendent was changed to that of third vice-president; and so continued for nearly sixteen years.

In this reference to an office convenience some hyper-critic may discover solid confirmation of the suspicion which has occasionally been formed and fanned in sections of the press which often impugn motives, and seldom examine aspersions. The Canadian Northern, it has been professed, was created as the milch cow for a couple of railway contractors, was forced into an excessive flow of nourishment, and was turned over to the people of Canada after having been drained into an almost fatal exhaustion. When we come to discuss some financial aspects of the railway situation in Canada, this matter may be recurred to. Meantime, it is enough to say that there’s only a mare’s nest in it.

The Canadian Northern did not long remain with desk accommodation on a friendly floor. Negotiations were concluding for the purchase of the building at the corner of King and Toronto streets. Early in 1903, as renters from the Rice Lewis estate, we began to take possession—a process that continued without cessation for all but twenty years. Always somebody was moving. Half the time it was a shift for a whole department, because another department as well as itself required more room.

At the beginning, for instance, the legal department—but there was no legal department of the railway in the generally accepted sense. There was, of course, a great deal of legal business, much of it local in scope, and an increasing amount that was fundamental to the railway’s growth. Such questions as the acquisition of right of way in the West and the adjustment of damage claims were handled by our solicitors in Winnipeg. But important matters like the agreements covering acquisition of charter rights and the physical assets of existing companies, and the creation of new joint stock entities—when we came to require an express company of our own, for example—were dealt with in Toronto, first by Mr. Z. A. Lash alone, and later by a department of which he was the head.

Mr. Lash was a great general counsel. He had no Canadian superior, perhaps no equal, in drafting legal documents. So exquisite was his appreciation of word values that, though others might embody an intention in a series of paragraphs apparently beyond criticism, his mastery of precision and shade was such that he could clothe it in language which had the exactitude of a multiplication table and the clarity of a mirror. His knowledge of the law—especially company law—was wide and profound, as became Edward Blake’s Deputy Minister of Justice in the eighteen-seventies. To rare professional acumen was allied a high individual sense of honour, and a capacity for finance which very fittingly made him vice-president of the Canadian Bank of Commerce.

When the Canadian Northern legal work became altogether beyond the physical capacity of one general counsel, in 1904, there was brought to Toronto from the Department of Railways and Canals at Ottawa, as general solicitor, Mr. Gerard N. Ruel, now vice-president and general counsel of the Canadian National Railways. To work with Mr. Ruel is to enjoy an uncommon experience. Everything that is meant by the phrase “counsel learned in the law” applies to him, as it does to many another practitioner of the baffling science. But no gentleman of the robe of my acquaintance is Mr. Ruel’s peer in an uncanny capacity for absorbing multitudes of facts about territory he has never seen, and in a weird facility as a reader of blue prints. He absorbs topography from maps and plans as a sponge absorbs water. A blue print upside down is instantly as plain to him as it is to other skilled observers who have carefully studied it right side up.

For several years Mr. Lash and Mr. Ruel had rooms near to the President and Vice-president. About 1908 they required more space and had to move to the corner of Toronto and Court Streets, where, indeed, several departments were located. They occupied about half a floor, and gradually encroached on the space of smaller departments which had to find lodgment elsewhere.

Few people have any idea of the magnitude and complication of the legal business of a railway, even when it has settled down into a staid, unexpanding enterprise, from the territorial side of things. But where, almost in a night, an enterprise develops the faculties of a steel magnet operated by an electric crane, and draws all sorts of material to it, lawyers become a very hard-worked section of the organization. A farmer whose land is required for right of way—everybody, in fact, to whom the railway stands in the attitude of a purchaser of an indispensable commodity, at once gets into big business. The moral and intellectual damages involved in cutting a corner off a ten-acre field are simply incalculable; and only a well-fortified legal mind can begin to reduce them to humane proportions.

Possibly the most striking features, from a documentary point of view, of the earlier, and, indeed, the later, years of the Canadian Northern domiciliation at Toronto were the acquisition of charters, and the reception of requests for new railways in every Canadian province except Prince Edward Island. Perhaps, instead of likening the expanding process of the Canadian Northern to a magnet attracting filings, it is better to say that it was very like what movie fans frequently see when they are about to observe some event which has recently taken place in a distant part of the world. The feature is heralded by the appearance of what looks like several sticks thrown into the air—all, seemingly, without direction or intention, but presently falling into an ordered announcement which he who sits may read. That is how the Canadian Northern transcontinental system took shape. From a series of disconnected and apparently unconnectable projections of steel, hanging in suspense, a continuous track was formed, trains ran upon it, and all the organs of a great commerce began to function.

We have seen how the Davis firm had the charter for the Lake Manitoba Railway and Canal Company—and did not finance it. The Manitoba South Eastern was a project that seemed still-born. We connected with Lake Superior by buying the Port Arthur, Duluth and Western—the Poverty, Agony, Distress and Want, as you may remember.

Eastern connection with the prairies was effected on the legs of the Ontario and Rainy River Railway, the original authority for which was held by Port Arthur men like D. F. Burk and Jim Conmee, the latter of whom became well known as far east as Toronto through his membership of the Legislature, and the Conmee Act.

There were two heralds of what was to happen in the eastern section of Ontario and in the farther West, which the uninformed onlooker supposed were peculiar phenomena indeed—the disordered offspring of some misguided promoter with an itch to lay rails which began Nowhere, and ended in a less important place. Nobody now hears of the James Bay Railway—I mean the railway of that designation, and not a railway to James Bay. Not so many years ago, though, flat cars bearing the name were seen in the Don Valley. Another railway whose name has gone the way of forgetfulness was the Edmonton, Yukon and Pacific. Not long since, a facetious writer, having the fact though not the name of this enterprise in his mind, described it as the Edmonton, Yukon and Aurora Borealis.

It was customary when railway charters were legislated into existence to provide that construction must start within two years, or the charter would lapse. Once construction began, it was comparatively easy to induce Parliament to prolong the charter’s life, however fine the thread on which it seemed to hang. Toronto men obtained a charter for a railway to James Bay, and hoped to build it. Among their assets was a secretary, W. H. Moore, whose accomplishments included an assistant editorship of the Monetary Times, a lectureship at Toronto University, and a call to the Ontario bar. The steel approach to the Bay lagged in view of the Ontario Government’s undertaking of the Temiskaming and Northern Ontario Railway, the construction of which produced the discovery of the Cobalt silver mines. The James Bay charter was acquired by Mackenzie and Mann. Mr. Moore moved with it, and in 1904 became secretary of the Canadian Northern, and so remained till the great change.

To sustain the charter, the James Bay Railway was begun on a four-mile line from the Grand Trunk, southeast of Parry Sound, into that town. Parry Sound was off the rails of the old Canada Atlantic, which ends at Depot Harbour. The four miles of the James Bay line gave the town its first railway connection with the world. Regular service was maintained, with the engineer, Jack Findlay, as practically the general manager, passenger and freight traffic agent, superintendent of operation, and repairer-in-chief of the whole system. Jack was a great success; and I have sometimes thought that, if he had been on administrative duty in his youth, when his scholastic education could have been somewhat improved, he would have risen high in the service.

All the time Jack was running the James Bay Railway no problems in motive power reached the head office. He kept his engine in wonderful shape, looked after whatever repairs became necessary, and was as cheerful as Mark Tapley. But there came a day when the Canadian Northern Ontario swallowed the James Bay, and connected Parry Sound with Toronto, at James Bay Junction. Then Jack must have a round house and his faithful engine must be repaired by other hands. From being an all-round genius he became a trade unionist, in spirit and in truth. Those who were associated with him when he kept time on a four-mile system always think of him with grateful joy; and if ever there is a reunion, on any plane, of the pioneers of the Canadian National System, Jack must be there, of indefeasible right.

The Edmonton, Yukon and Pacific, was reminiscent of the Klondyke rush; and a steel record of the seeming diversion of Horace Greeley’s gospel which appeared at first to be the motive of the Mackenzie-Mann ventures into railway-owning company. “Go north,” was the impulse of the Lake Manitoba Railway and Canal venture. “Go north” was the urge of the Edmonton, Yukon and Pacific. There is something peculiarly fateful about this pull to the Aurora. From one of the eminent journalists whom we conveyed through the West, it produced a fascinating discourse on “To the Pole by Rail”. It has made Stefansson famous. Through its possession of him it has brought Wrangel Island into the dreams of an aerial and submarine route that will shorten travelling between London and Tokio by seven thousand miles. But operating surpluses haven’t yet been common to farmost northern railway transportation. The Edmonton, Yukon and Pacific was like the James Bay—it held territory, and it produced a short line that gave a great city its first railway station.

The Calgary and Edmonton on which Mackenzie and Mann were contractors, ended at Strathcona, across the noble valley of the Saskatchewan from Edmonton, then almost hidden among the poplar groves of the northern bank. To build a steel bridge across the valley was a very expensive job. Indeed, at that time to go right into Edmonton would not add enough to the revenue derivable from Edmonton to pay interest on the cost. Competition was a dozen years, and hundreds of miles away.

To hold the E.Y. and P. charter, then, our people built a line eight miles long, from Strathcona to Edmonton, going down a long ravine, crossing the river by a team-and-train bridge, which was in large part a public work, climbing into Edmonton, past the Hudson’s Bay Company’s Fort and the site of the future Parliament Buildings, and getting into the straggling town through lands that were very much of a backyard, but which have developed into property that is now worth millions of dollars to the Canadian people.

The operating situation here was somewhat similar to what obtained at Parry Sound. The engineer was Entwistle, of whose connection with administrative work three things are worthy of note, because they are not likely to be repeated. Some time after the E.Y. and P. was superseded by the Canadian Northern’s arrival from the east, at the end of 1905, Entwistle was made superintendent. But very soon he asked to be allowed to resume his place at the throttle—an illustration of the frequent phenomenon of a refusal of responsibility, which every executive officer of any large enterprise has observed with considerable disappointment. It is surprising how many men decline higher jobs with higher pay, entirely because they are short of faith in their own ability to master unfamiliar affairs. We shall revert to this timidity towards ambition.

A town was named after Entwistle, on the Canadian Northern, west of Edmonton. All the coal for his engine on the E.Y. and P. was dug by the section man from the bank within a few feet of the track on the Edmonton side of the river.

Somewhere is a chart showing the charters that went into the Canadian Northern Railways. It looks like an elaborated genealogical tree of the kings of England, beginning with the Heptarchy. During my second year in Toronto the purchases were made which afforded those who could read the signs of the times an indication that a second Canadian transcontinental railway was taking shape, and that oceanic strategy had already become a daily factor in the scheme. This was before the Grand Trunk Pacific project was publicly launched.

Quebec has had its share of railway enterprises which did not pan out as their promoters expected, but which have played a vital part in the economic development of the province. The most remarkable of the local pioneering railways was the Quebec and Lake St. John. It was built as a colonization road to Lake St. John—the Chapdelaine country, as it may yet come to be called. The early financial troubles of this road look romantic through hindsight; but they were grievous to be borne when they occurred. For instance, there were times when the train could not leave the station at Quebec until the general manager had borrowed enough money from the passengers to buy coal for the locomotive.

The people who promoted this railway also began the Great Northern of Canada, to connect Quebec with Montreal as its first considerable achievement. It left the Lake St. John line at Riviere À Pierre, fifty-seven miles from Quebec, and made for Montreal along the edge of the Laurentian mountains by way of Grand Mere and Shawinigan, where vast paper and power developments have since taken place.

The Great Northern came into the market in 1904, along with its right to enter the east end of Montreal from Joliette, on the charter of the Chateauguay Northern. The Canadian Northern obtained it, with terminals at Quebec harbour, including a million-bushel elevator, since burned to the ground. Of this railway, re-named the Canadian Northern Quebec, I became president. Alone, it was a lame duck. As a connecting link it struck a promissory note.

Railroading in Quebec under these conditions was a very different business from working in the audit department of the Grand Trunk twenty years before. Then, of course, one was occupied with routine, which mainly concerned territory west of Montreal. The Canadian Northern Quebec was Quebec through and through. Railway conduct in the French province has several interesting distinctions.

Whenever a piece of new line was to be opened the occasion was utilized for a celebration in which all varieties of public men participated.

The Quebec and Lake St. John was so essentially a colonization road that everybody took an interest in it and expected to take passes out of it. I am anticipating my story a little; but not spoiling its propriety, by mentioning the opening of a short branch to La Tuque, on the St. Maurice river, where the National Transcontinental crosses that wonderful stream and turns westward. The Canadian Northern had recently acquired control of the road, and I was president of it also. As the branch had been undertaken, and all but completed before our regime, it seemed well for me to be represented at the inauguration by a deputy. A special train went up from Quebec. Cabinet ministers, judges, senators, M.P.P.’s, bankers, merchants were there—every section of the community sent delegates. At La Tuque there was a dinner with speeches in a frigid freight shed, and everybody returned home feeling he had contributed something to a new chapter of the province’s industrial history. The branch hasn’t fulfilled expectations—indeed, it has not been operated for several years, but it had its uses.

That inaugural was in 1907. By that time the opening of a branch line in the West had become so much a matter of course that we thought nothing more of a new service as a historical event than we did of issuing a temporary time card until the next revision of the established schedules.

Allied with this Quebec form of public recognition of railway expansion were the more distinctly political aspects of the development. For nearly thirty years the Intercolonial had traversed the province on the southern side of the St. Lawrence. Whatever else might not be in politics the Intercolonial most certainly was. The railway was as much a part of every candidate’s hopes and fears as the ballot box itself. It was as close to every member’s duty, if he supported the Government, as the orders of the day. A share of dominion over it was one of the sustaining longings of hope deferred in the heart of every opposition M.P. whose constituency it touched.

For two generations, as statisticians reckon time, and for five generations as politicians take the count, the first Government-owned, Government-operated railway in Canada was regarded, in the territory it traversed, more as a rich and benevolent relative than as a servant who gave service only for money received. One feature of the “rich relative” notion of public-owned railways should be mentioned tenderly. It was a legacy from the days when barter was most common as a form of disposing of farm products, and eggs and butter were traded at the general store at values that were amazingly low, for groceries and dry goods, the costs of which were extraordinarily high. Real money was scarce indeed, everywhere, and a job that brought pay in cash was a rare and coveted beneficence. The best job of all was a post with the Government. All over the country there was severe competition for country postmasterships, the revenue from which would nowadays buy but small quantities of gasoline. Wherever the Government railway ran, a job as a section hand became a lawful prize of electioneering war.

It is useless to mourn bitterly over these conditions which are an inheritance not only from the economic construction of Canada, but also from the Government departments of the Old Lands—Britain as well as France. Men bought civil appointments as they bought the right to appoint their own friends to the livings that rewarded the cure of souls. When I was an office boy in Glasgow the system of purchase in the British army was still operating. It cost twenty-two hundred dollars to get a cadetship and sixty-three hundred dollars to become a lieutenant-colonel. Every intermediate step in promotion was paid for commensurately with the rank acquired.

The abolition of purchase in the British army was only achieved after long and bitter opposition. In the younger days of those of us who are still on the humorous side of seventy, the idea that there must be perquisites attached to all sorts of offices was apparently as invincible as the Rock of Gibraltar. The cook had the fat, the fur and the feathers from everything that came into the squire’s kitchen. The official of the College of Heralds and the royal clerk who records the outpourings of the fountain of honour receive their fees. The notion that it isn’t necessary to work very hard at a Government job wasn’t born on this continent. It was expressed in the sinecure that was waiting for a British Prime Minister’s son, and in the ease with which the clerk in Whitehall could begin his work a little after ten, and lay down his quill a little before four.

We are getting away from that quality of public service, though it isn’t always easy to make progress along a straight and thorny path—and it is harder to do it in some parts of Canada than in others. With a country so vast, and a population so diverse, it is impossible that the sectional benefit will always be subordinated to the advantage of the whole. The railway builder, as well as the Government, has to recognize, and at times, to capitulate to something which he does not want in order to be able to get something he really needs. The building of the transcontinental Canadian Northern, as a privately directed enterprise had its share of these difficulties. So did the undertaking of a transcontinental system by the Canadian Government shortly after the Canadian Northern entered Eastern Canada as the second stage of its evolution from a prairie carrier to a nationwide system.

There was a great difference between the methods followed by the Canadian Northern and the Grand Trunk Pacific transcontinentals. Fundamentally, the Canadian Northern was a wheat-country road, designed to cover the most productive regions, and to be assured of the essential business which would carry, later, the more costly construction in the more sparsely populated, less productive territory. The other line was an across-continent project from the beginning, without any initial development of traffic whatever on the prairies. Its cost across the northern wilderness to the Western plains was evidently only guessed before the scheme was submitted to Parliament—at least the public never saw the detailed reports of engineers who had gone over the ground and estimated the cost per mile. The expenditure on original construction was out of all proportion to the earnings, because the road was built on the scale of a trunk main line, when it could only expect to secure revenue from a pioneering service.

There is great disappointment in old Quebec, to this day, because the National Transcontinental is not bringing to the ancient port the business that was predicted for it. It is true that the railway has opened up country in northern Quebec, through the energy and skill of the French-Canadian pioneer to whom the axe is as much the implement of agriculture as the plough. But the Western wheat is not coming to the St. Lawrence by way of La Tuque; and the good people of the city think it ought to be pouring in.

The conditions are impossible for such a consummation and bliss. Wheat moves from the prairies down to the seaboard in accordance with commercial laws of gravitation which express themselves in the relative terms at which cargoes can be shipped from the busiest ports in America, to the biggest ports in Europe. Merely because a railway has been built across Northern Quebec to Quebec harbour, which is closed half the year, the law of commercial gravitation will not be reversed.

But the railway remains a monument to a demand that was based more on the ambitions of a section of Canada than on the true railway factors of a situation that became more political than economic. The cost of construction finally worked out at a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a mile—twice as much as the Canadian Northern spent to build through the mountains from the Yellowhead to Vancouver, with very much more steel bridge work, and very much less wooden trestle than went into the railway between Quebec and Transcona.

What the $150,000 per mile meant, in addition to the purely colonization aspects of the road, can be partially judged from a glance at the map. The National Transcontinental entered a wilderness north of New York, and didn’t leave the wilderness until it was north of Omaha, in Nebraska. In that wilderness, at that time there was not an existing community of twenty white people.

Of course, the times were surcharged with the will to build. The Canadian people, seeing immigration pouring in at a rate of about a thousand people a day, wanted railways and more railways; and demanded them from wherever they seemed likely to come.

To one phase of this extraordinary impulse of the first few years of this century, I think attention has been insufficiently directed. The immense project which was to do for the Laurier fame what the C.P.R. did for the immortality of Sir John Macdonald was put through Parliament in 1904, and a general election endorsed it. Construction began in 1905, with financial and other prestige behind it, such as no other Canadian venture had.

The Grand Trunk Pacific was widely held to have relegated to a negligible situation the railway development that depended on the continuing initiative of two men. But when finally, in the midst of a world war, both enterprises perforce had to come under Government direction, and, as an immediate consequence, the receivership of the G.T.P. had brought the old Grand Trunk into the same control, and all the men who were principally concerned in the activities of the whole period had stepped out, the mileage of the Canadian Northern railways exceeded the combined mileage of the National Transcontinental, the Grand Trunk Pacific and the Grand Trunk in Canada. It is also apparent that if the National Transcontinental and the Grand Trunk Pacific ever justify the capital cost, it will be because of their union with the prairie lines of the Canadian Northern.

I shall recur to this subject, with which is associated the further matter of record—that, even at the time when the Government of Canada so dramatically and mightily entered the Western railway field, it was on the Canadian Northern that popular demand after demand was made for transportation, as the salvation of settlement.

Happily, the appeal for railways and more railways did not strike the third vice-president as directly or as insistently as it did the president and vice-president. I was mainly kept busy in furnishing clothes and tools for the infant that was all legs and arms. It was never satisfied with its outfit; but, as far as the West was concerned, it never failed to earn the cost of its keep, and more.

The facts about the guarantee of bonds of the original line showed that, so far from Mackenzie and Mann being the first importuners for railway construction under Government guarantees, the pressure came from another direction. The West was filling up. Farmers were going into districts long distances from railways. In 1905, the provinces of Saskatchewan and Alberta emerged from the North West Territories, with two brand new Governments, living on the electoral favour of people, most of whom were new to the West, were boundlessly confident of an immediately prosperous future, and were as clamorous for railways as famished lions are for flesh.

In more than one case the first intimation that reached us of an obligation to construct a branch line was the news that a Legislature had passed an Act chartering a railway through a given area, and guaranteeing the bonds.

This sort of demand was not confined to the West. Our entry into Quebec was followed by a constructive appearance in Nova Scotia. Coal measures having been acquired on the west coast of Cape Breton Island, the town of Inverness sprang into existence; and to bring the coal conveniently to shipping a sixty-seven mile railway to Port Hastings on the Strait of Canso was built. The Murray Government, wanting a line from Halifax to Yarmouth along the marvellously indented South Shore, raised the seven million dollars necessary to build it. Our people acquired the fifty miles of existing line from Yarmouth to Barrington; the Halifax and South Western was built to it; and the whole is part of the Canadian National system to-day.

What Nova Scotia obtains, New Brunswick covets. New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island were the only eastern provinces that we were not working in within ten years of the founding of Dauphin in a wheat field. That we stayed out of New Brunswick wasn’t the fault of influential powers centering in Fredericton. For six weeks one deputation, importuning for railway construction, hovered about the Toronto office.

It is charged that the railway building in Canada of the first fourteen years of this century was too prodigal. On the whole, it was, though responsibility for it should be discriminatingly allocated. But in view of what was asked for, and what was acceded to, I think Mackenzie and Mann were entitled to adapt their speech to Clive’s remark when he was cross-examined to show that he had unduly enriched himself in India. As he thought of the treasures he might have taken and didn’t, he said: “By heaven, Mr. Chairman, at this moment I stand astonished at my own moderation.”