“Yes,” he said, “paper requires a great deal of care. When I took it up I didn’t know anything about it, and that was a little disadvantage for a while. You ask why I took it up. Well, I had a railroad—four hundred miles—and I sold it. I felt rather lost without my railroad. So I took up paper.”
Could any explanation be more complete or more simple? J. R. Booth hadn’t enough to occupy him, so he “took up paper.”
Before going further with our conversation, I ought to explain what lay behind that other simple sentence: “I had a railroad.”
From an admirable biographical sketch in Collier’s I take the following interesting facts: “Booth had no idea of becoming a railway owner till Governor Smith, of Vermont, came along one day and told a hard-luck story. Smith and his associates had started the Canada Atlantic as a feeder to the Central Vermont, and the enterprise was costing money. They asked for the co-operation of Booth. They got it; and one day J. R. Booth woke up to the realisation that he must take the work over and carry it on himself if it was to be done at all. It might be throwing good money after bad, and it might not. Booth plunged again. He built the Canada Atlantic from Couteau Junction to Depôt Harbour, and he built the Ottawa, Arnprior and Parry Sound Railway, four hundred miles of main line and a hundred miles of sidings. He bought engines and cars and he built shops. There being no terminus on the Georgian Bay, he created a terminus. When the line was nearly completed to the bay, he invited the Premier of Canada, Sir Wilfrid Laurier—then in his first year of office—to go over it with him. They went to the end of the steel, and from there walked half a mile to the shores of the bay, described by Sir Wilfrid as ‘a bleak shore, without a building upon it.’ ‘This,’ said J. R. Booth, ‘is the terminus of my railway.’ The Prime Minister asked: ‘Where is your trade to come from?’ Booth answered: ‘I shall have to create it. I shall have to collect it from Port Arthur, from Duluth, from Chicago, and from both sides of the lakes. I shall have to build elevators. I shall, perhaps, have to buy wheat in order to furnish trade for my railway.’
“All that the one-time bridge carpenter told the Prime Minister he would do he did. He made Depôt Harbour. He built elevators. He put a line of steamers upon the lakes, and he forced so much of the Western trade into a new channel down through Ontario that the Canada Atlantic was carrying yearly two hundred thousand tons of flour and package freight and twenty million bushels of grain. The man who built it had seen to it that the railway was a good one. Other people saw that it was a good one. The Canadian Northern hankered after it. Seward Webb, of New York, went so far as to get an option on it—an option which is said to have left the New York financier poorer and J. R. Booth richer by a quarter of a million. The Conservative Opposition in the Canadian Parliament wanted the country to buy the Canada Atlantic, and join it to the Inter-Colonial as an alternative to the Grand Trunk Pacific project. The Government refused to do it, because they said that they could not do what J. R. Booth had done. Then along came the Grand Trunk and took the Canada Atlantic, and John R. Booth put fourteen million dollars down into his clothes.”
I think he must, at first, have been glad to be rid of his railroad responsibilities. At any rate, that was one of the occasions when, as though in festive mood, he played the part of Santa Claus in the family circle, presenting each of his two sons and each of his two daughters with one million dollars—a little attention certainly calculated to fortify a parent in the esteem of his children.
But, as we have learnt, any temporary feeling of relief was followed by a sense of not having enough to do; and so he set in to assist feeding the newspaper Press and the cardboard users of Europe and North America.
And now to resume the report of our conversation.
“But,” I said, when he confessed to having felt lost without his railway, “you still had your enormous timber business to occupy you?”
“Oh,” he replied, “I’ve been in lumber so long that the exciting part of it has got worn off.”