This is the apologia of the private car, as to which there is probably more misapprehension in the public mind than about any other aid to railway business. The notion is abroad that there is as much relation between the private car and hard work as there was between the melodies and the briefs of a certain eminent lawyer, addicted to drops in aitches, of whom a competitor is said to have remarked: “’Ere ’e comes, the ’oly ’umbug, ’ummin’ an ’ym; ’ow I ’ate ’im”.

There are private cars and private cars. Most of them should not be called by that name. Very few which are properly so designated belong to railwaymen.

One chilly evening, just after sundown, a Saskatchewan farmer was crossing, with his yoke of oxen, a siding where stood a car, well lighted and blinds undrawn. He saw a short-bearded, middle-aged man sitting, with three other prosperous looking persons, at the table, which was well-appointed with spotless linen, and the sort of ware without which a meal is nowhere. He watched a white-coated man enter; and he halted his cattle to see this man hand around a dish, and stand respectfully while the other people took from it what they required.

Fascinated, the farmer stayed there till the meal was concluded, cigars were burning, and the blinds were drawn. He was abroad later than he had expected, and had not reckoned on so chilly an evening. He shivered as he commanded Buck and Bright to proceed; and he talked to himself—as he has told the story since.

The lazy luxury of these railway magnates! Lolling over the country in private cars, waited on hand and foot, out of the money which poor devils like himself, shaking with cold, and working their bodies to skin and bone, paid to the railway for dividends and luxuries like the cars that made these men feel like kings and act like tyrants. The farmer would soon show these oppressors where they got off at. They’d begin by getting off the private car—and so on and so forth, in human nature’s human way.

One story is good till another is told. The rolling-in-luxury side of this episode of a siding on a chilly October night is this:

The man at the table head was the railway president. Two of his guests were representing financial houses. The fourth man was his secretary. The car had been dropped at the siding because, next morning, teams would be there to drive the party forty miles north to inspect the country through which it was intended to build a branch line; and in which it had been reported that there were many farmers to whom getting out their grain was a burdensome operation, depriving them of the chance to prosper by their season’s work.

The financial men were from London, and could facilitate or hinder the flow of millions of dollars to Canada for the development of agriculture. They were touring the country to see what sort of conditions their clients were being invited to back. They wanted to visit a typical piece of country without railway facilities; and to get an idea of the courage and capacity of pioneers who would start farms in the wilderness ahead of means of economically getting their produce to market.

The president was on his annual inspection trip—just as necessary to efficient discharge of his duty as a farmer’s Sunday walk around his fields is to his knowledge of his crops. He did not want to drive for whole days across new country. His trusted engineers and locators were in the habit of doing that; and time was valuable. But it was good policy to go personally with the men who were extremely influential in the money market that was as important to the Saskatchewan farmer as the wheat market is. All day he had been with his guests, telling them about the country, and observing the condition of the track and stations through which the train passed; and receiving messages off the telegraph wire.

Long after the farmer had gone to bed, and his oxen had exchanged cud-chewing for slumber, the railway president, having said “Good-night” to his guests, was dictating replies to the messages he had received during the day, and working as hard as if he had been in his office fifteen hundred miles away.

It is true that the car looked like self-indulgent wealth to the farmer sitting in the wagon outside; to whom it seemed the height of luxury to be waited upon by a man in a white coat. But it was all in a hard day’s work to the man who was getting the money to build railways into the prairie country, without which the owner of a yoke of cattle would be forlorn indeed. The president, who came from the farm, would regard it as the height of luxury to have nothing more to worry about than to sit on a binder for a few hours, and see the nodding heads of wheat fall on to the carrier, to be delivered in rows of sheaves to the stooker.

Any business man who has worked his heart out to establish something out of nothing, and has overcome difficulties that had a knack of springing up out of nowhere, and spoiling the best-laid calculations, knows that most capital has to be wrung out of trouble.

The farmer too, knows this; for sitting on a binder isn’t all golden grain; and chores have their own worries. But he is apt to associate difficulties only with manual labour. Never having travelled in a car that is also an office he doesn’t apprehend what working on wheels really is.

The point is that, to a man harassed by a multitude of cares, as a railway executive is, there is no such thing as luxury. He cannot even envy the sensation of my countryman who was encountered at a funeral.

Into a carriage starting for the cemetery there stepped a man who was unknown to the mourner already there. As the journey proceeded the mourner questioned his companion. Was he a relative of the corpse? No. An old friend then? No, in fact he didn’t know the corpse. Then he would be a friend of some friends? No, indeed, he was a stranger entirely; but he hadn’t been very well, and the doctor had ordered carriage exercise for his liver.

The general superintendent of the Lake Manitoba Railway and Canal Company was incessantly up and down the road for three or four years before he had a car that was called his own. He travelled with the other passengers when passengers were present, and in the conductor’s caboose when the train was all freight. A freight conductor has a private car—business couldn’t be carried on without it. He is compelled to ride somewhere. In cold weather he is entitled to as much warmth as a passenger. On long runs he must have something to eat. Nobody begrudges him his caboose. Uninformed resentment is reserved for the magnate, so-called!

When we had extended from Dauphin through Swan River, and were operating the Muskeg Limited between Winnipeg and the cordwood swamps of Marchand I did have a car of my own. It was very much of a used car, for it had housed Mr. Mann during construction of the Calgary and Edmonton. While a contractor is on his job he is compelled to be a good deal of a gipsy. The real difference between his private car and a gipsy caravan is that the gipsy can move anywhere he likes, and the contractor is compelled to stay with the tracks.

Mr. Mann’s car had a romantic name—the Sea Falls. It had stood up nobly under every kind of treatment—and bumping over skeleton track is treatment enough to annoy even a constructor’s equipage. When we gave it such a renovation as pride and revenue permitted, we also extinguished its name for a number—19 was the all-sufficient description of the old Sea Falls, and Number Nineteen came to be regarded femininely.

I don’t think she ever learned to dance the hornpipe, but she certainly danced. The ideal car for construction purposes must not be heavily built. Yesterday a friend was talking about ideal fishing country in the northern recesses of Frontenac county, to which many wealthy Americans come every year. “You can only get into it with a Ford,” he said.

The old Sea Falls, invariably called a she, was the first and chief Henry of the Canadian Northern. Up to a venerable age she was never off the track. She rolled and leaped and ricocheted, when Billy Walker or Joe Beef let his engine get gay over a stretch of gravel ballast. Sometimes, I think, she skipped along like a flat stone thrown almost horizontally at the lake; but, whatever happened to any neighbouring equipment, Number Nineteen sustained the reputation of the Sea Falls, and remained true to steel.

The superintendent, by the way, must also be a thoroughgoing gipsy if he is any good as a superintendent. He has an office, of course, at his chief divisional point, where he can be seen when people have to come to him. But his real office is the table off which he eats his meals. His stenographer is his constant travelling companion. The public seldom sees his car, for it is carried at the tails of freights, as a rule, and is left at all sorts of minor-looking places, where work has to be done.

But what about the cars of which the public sometimes sees and hears? They are of three sorts—the railway cars, the statesmen’s cars, and the absolutely private cars whose owners pay for haulage on as commercial a basis as the passenger who buys his ticket at the counter.

Broadly, the trip which the Saskatchewan farmer saw, in part, can be taken as typical of what may be called the presidential inspection of properties and prospects, during the expansion phase of a railway. The chief executive of an established road that covers a continent is compelled to travel a great deal; and to know that his journeying days are his hardest, however inured he may be to resting on restless wheels.

His secretary loads several boxes with correspondence, much of it relating to matters to be taken up at points to be visited, and much concerning all kinds of business accumulated at the head office. Where inspection of physical property is an objective—which is always the case, for, wherever you go, you are on the property for whose maintenance you are held responsible by shareholders and public—the President while the train is moving will be found sitting at the observation end of his car, with his secretary by his side, watching everything as it comes into an instantly dissolving view.

On a siding he sees a couple of cars belonging to an American road, for which rental is being paid for every day that they are on his system. They may be in this unlikely place for very good reason—and again there may be some neglect of duty in their present location. Note is made of it, for the attention of the superintendent concerned. At the fourth telegraph post, after mileage six hundred and fifty-three, there is a stack of ties, with weeds growing about them in a profusion which suggests that there has been unwise distribution of costly, deteriorating material.

A station not stopped at gives evidence of slovenliness in the agent. The next has flower beds in lovely bloom—the proof of a pride in his post for which the agent will receive a word of appreciation from a superior who does not forget that he is also a colleague.

Crossing one of the fast-diminishing number of wooden trestles it is observed that the water barrels are not well filled. Further on a tank is leaking water—and money.

During a stop at a division point the President hurries to the roundhouse, to get his own idea of the efficiency with which the power is being handled, and repairs made without undue delay.

After a day of this description you arrive at a city where the City Council and the Board of Trade are waiting to press for a pledge of improvements which, to them, are most important items in a civic programme.

In the afternoon, perhaps, you passed through a station of a small and juvenile town for which the local Board of Trade had urged the desirability of another express truck, and a larger cattle pen, so that passengers on the express trains might get a better idea of the magnitude of the business done at that point.

Sometimes the difference between the small town and the big city is only of degree. Local patriotism is a mighty fine asset in every community. One finds no fault against the urgency with which local problems are pressed upon a harassed railway executive, with the remark, often heard, that what is asked is a very small matter for so large a railway. Many a mickle makes a muckle; and there are limits to what can be done with the revenues of a railway, every department of which has an Oliver-Twist-like propensity for demanding more.

Take an instance of the problems that beset your railway president as he flits about the country—the passenger accommodation at St. John. The Intercolonial station is on low ground. It is one of the structures which do not reflect the magnificent ambitions of members of Parliament, whose chief end in public life is to get public money spent in their ridings—well spent on the whole, of course, but spent. Lately the train sheds that served the purpose of a metal umbrella, had collapsed, and temporary shelters over the platforms had to be put up.

Long ago, plans were prepared for a rearrangement of the station accommodation, which would bring the passengers into a building on a higher level, discharge baggage at a lower elevation, improve the street railway facilities, and generally give to St. John what everybody admits St. John needs, on a business-like basis.

The cost of over a million and a half dollars must be shared by the National Railways, the civic government and the street railway. The improvements were held up because the railway executive believed the other parties to them should contribute more to the cost than at first they were willing to undertake. “Let George do it” is not an isolated view of expenditures in which what some people no doubt would like to call the king’s railway is concerned, jointly with other public and semi-public authorities.

Situations like that at St. John abound in varying magnitude. They call for an armoury of qualities which any one man might be forgiven for not possessing. They are just a part of the day’s responsibilities which crowd into the private car.

They abide with the executive while he is showing guests the aspects of Canada in which they are specially interested. Consider two examples from Canadian Northern ante-public-ownership days. The first excursion that looked like a joy ride to everybody except to the men responsible for completing it, was the visit, in 1898, to Dauphin and Winnipegosis of as many members of the Manitoba Legislature as could go to see the railway that had been built under legislative guarantee. Having none of our own, we had to hire sleeping and dining cars from the Canadian Pacific. The trip occupied two long days with a banquet in Dauphin on the night out.

The last considerable excursion attributable to public responsibilities was the Parliamentary journey to the Pacific Coast when the road to Vancouver was prepared for business, in 1915. The ever-ready cynic can say that these excursions are near, but extravagant relatives of the electioneering campaign of which the cheap cigar is a nauseating and corrupting feature. But, looking back through the severe spectacles of the prohibition age, and not forgetting that the prairie air, especially as it approaches the Great Divide, is very prone to sharpen Eastern appetites, I think it is well within the truth to declare that journeys like these have been performed absolutely in the public interest.

The most solicitous railway in the world cannot give to a member of Parliament the faculty of imparting to his constituents and to the public generally the highly instructive information which has come to him in his representative capacity. All it can do is to give him the opportunity to acquire knowledge of the development of his country which only travel under informing auspices can bestow. That we did, at various times, and left the event to a providential future.

Prince Arthur of Connaught travelled over the Canadian Northern from Edmonton, when on his way home from Japan, whither he had been on a special mission for King Edward. To act as if a railway owed nothing of courtesy to such a representative of majesty would flout the amenities of civilization. The Prince of Wales travelled thousands of miles over the Canadian National system. This journey couldn’t have been prevented without injuring public sentiment, and couldn’t be accomplished without making the most and the best of the private car.

There was the courtesy of finance in other personally conducted travels such as those, say, of Mr. Andrew Jameson and Mr. Robert Kindersley—to give two typical instances of civilities that had practical respect to the future, from the farmers’ as well as from the railway builders’ point of view.

Mr. Jameson was an ex-governor of the Bank of Ireland, and a leader in Irish manufactures and finance. In 1907 he was revisiting this continent with his wife and daughter Violet. The family travelled with me from Winnipeg to Edmonton. Mr. Jameson had a qualification for sizing up Western Canada which not many of our visitors brought with them. As a young man he had been a rancher on the Texas prairies. One of his reminiscences of that experience was a testimony to the intensity of the youthful patriotism which flourishes beneath the stars and stripes.

Jameson, driving several days over an unfamiliar trail, stayed one night at a rancher’s house in which was a son of about eight years of age. After supper, the boy, who should have been in bed, devoted himself to observation of the stranger. While Jameson was smoking, the youngster planted himself between his knees, and watched him intently for some time. At last he broke silence.

“I can see you ain’t no American citizen,” he said.

“How do you know that? Are you sure?” Jameson asked.

“You bet I am. I can see you ain’t no American by the way you smoke.”

“That’s very interesting,” Jameson replied. “And how do you know I’m not an American citizen by my smoking?”

“You don’t spit.”

As an indication of what happens sometimes in a private car, it can be said that the little town of Vibank, between Brandon and Regina, is a memorial of a very agreeable couple of days with the Jamesons. It commemorates Violet Jameson, and the institution with which her father was closely associated. Nobody would suspect an Irish origin for Vibank; but it is as truly Hibernian as Pat Murphy himself.

Mr. Kindersley, since he first became concerned with the Canadian Northern has been knighted, for distinguished services during the war, and has succeeded Lord Strathcona as governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company. He had charge of the issuing of war certificates—the scheme by which scores of millions of pounds were raised by the creation of certificates which, on payment of sixteen shillings and sixpence, guaranteed the recipient a sovereign after five years. As governor of “The Company,” Sir Robert toured Canada in 1920, in celebration of the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the chartering of the Hudson’s Bay Company by Charles the Second, who gave to Prince Rupert and his fellow gentlemen adventurers the territory draining into the Bay. It didn’t belong to Charles, but he had the ways of kings in those days, and gave it, exacting in return the tribute of two elk and two beaver, whenever he visited the domain.

Before the war Mr. Kindersley came several times to Canada as the representative of Lazard Brothers, the great financial firm of London, Paris and New York. That house under-wrote millions of dollars’ worth of Canadian Northern securities; and, therefore, was intimately concerned in the enterprise, as to investing in which their clients would be largely guided by their example.

Sir Robert Kindersley is one of those Englishmen whose eminent affability of manner might be taken by some of our neighbours for evidence of an extreme remoteness from business acumen. But a shrewder business man never crossed the Atlantic.

The first division point between Saskatoon and Calgary is Kindersley, in the midst of what used to be the greatest of all buffalo ranges—the buffalo paths ploughed across by farmers are many of them six inches deep, to this day. A magazine article about the beginning of the town preserved, as was seldom done, (for writers with a gift for vividly seeing the possibilities of an apparently common proceeding are not always on the spot), the personalities, scenery, atmosphere and other conditions that belong to the nativity of a busy town. “The First of Kindersley” was illustrated, and its most characteristic picture was a photograph of the town-lot auctioneer’s small table and a suitcase, standing alone on the illimitable plain.

When the later regime of the Canadian National railways began, the cars of the president and the vice-presidents who required such were deprived of their names, and were known to the service by numbers only. Their doors were not even painted “Official,” but announced to the visitor that he was entering a “Business Car.”

A similar adaptation to useful uses applied to the several cars that are used by Cabinet ministers. About the propriety of the Prime Minister traveling in an exclusive car there are surely no two opinions. Some departmental chiefs, too, are in the working class when they are on journeying duty bound. There can be too much of a good thing, of course, and, at times, judging by sundry signs and wonders that have come forth, this possibility has been discerned by the Cabinet as a whole, against the aspirations of a colleague whose ideas of official frugality and personal convenience were not endorsed.

Sir Sam Hughes was an old friend of Sir William Mackenzie, dating back to the time when he defeated Mr. Mackenzie for the Conservative nomination for Victoria county, in 1891. When he became Minister of Militia in 1911, and began an extraordinary career of activity and independence, he felt he needed a car in which the work of the department could be done by a chief who intended to be as nearly ubiquitous as was possible to a Cabinet Minister tied to Parliament for several months in each year.

Colonel Hughes asked me to get him a private car, that was to be serviceable rather than ornamental. I bought a Pullman—they were then being taken off the road rather freely by the Pullman Company on account of the steel car coming into favour—had it fitted up, and turned over at a cost of about seven thousand dollars. The bill was promptly paid, and the Roleen, named after the minister’s daughter, was very freely used.

When the war came the Roleen had little rest. Valcartier Camp was on our line out of Quebec, so that I was a good deal concerned with the early movement of troops, and knew how incessantly on the job Sam Hughes was. Most Friday nights he left Ottawa for Valcartier, and returned Monday mornings. He regarded himself, as everybody knows, as the real lynch pin of Canada’s share in the war. At all costs he would have things done; and often enough they were done at a first cost of traditional Cabinet responsibility. He honoured this as much in the breach as in the observance; and was consequently not exactly beloved of all his colleagues.

His creation of honorary colonels was an exercise that gave him immense pleasure. He could not understand why some of the recipients of his favor were not as delighted to receive as he was to bestow. One, who returned to him the imposing commission signed by the Governor-General—which, by the way contained a mistake in spelling, such as probably appears on many of these treasured parchments—was surprised, after Sir Sam’s death, to receive it from the Militia Department.

Another member of the first Borden Cabinet regarded an exclusively private car as a necessary aid to his departmental efficiency. Soon after being installed he asked us to procure him one, giving his assurance that it would be promptly paid for. This assurance was requested because I knew of another Cabinet Minister who once borrowed a car from the C.P.R. and never returned it, even when he left the Government.

After awhile, and following repeated enquiries from the Minister, reflecting the urgency of delivery, a converted Pullman was ready for him, on receipt of word that the order-in-council authorizing payment had been passed.

The car was kept at Chicago for a fortnight, and was then brought as far as Sarnia and held for several weeks more. The order-in-council was never passed; the car was re-named, and was used for several years by the third vice-president of the Canadian Northern. Many will remember the Toronto.