Political union was accomplished, but its permanence was contingent upon physical union also being accomplished, for British Columbia had stipulated for a railroad. Thus the newly-created Federal Government found themselves confronted by a task which for magnitude and difficulty would have been worthy the statesmanship of a Julius Cæsar. They had to furnish their geographical colossus with a steel backbone. They had to lay parallel rails round a wide arc of the earth’s circumference—traversing the untracked wilderness, skirting mountains and chasms, hewing a way through forests, blasting a way through rock, filling up bogs, lowering lakes and bridging rivers innumerable; they had to make a level roadway three thousand miles long, placing sleepers a foot apart along its entire length, and building stations at intervals of sixteen miles.
The gigantic enterprise was put in hand; but continuity of policy proved impossible with a national executive that was subject to party changes. At the end of several years only 700 miles of line had been laid, and the Government were anxious that someone else should go on with the job. Eight daring capitalists formed themselves into a syndicate, and undertook to have the line constructed by 1891 in consideration of receiving twenty-five million dollars and twenty-five million acres of prairie. They made splendid progress, but, presently running short of cash, they asked the Government to lend them £6,000,000—accommodation that was granted on the understanding that the line should be finished in 1886, or five years earlier than had been originally stipulated. It was finished in 1885, and a few months later trains were running across Canada from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Hence its name, The Canadian Pacific Railway—long ago colloquialised by universal usage into the “C.P.R.”
Federation rendered modern Canada possible. But modern Canada was created by a railway—by that railway—by the C.P.R. In 1881, before the line was commenced, the Dominion had 4,324,810 inhabitants, of whom 4,153,800 lived in the settled areas in the East—areas forming but a small fraction of the new country. The balance of population—171,000 persons, of whom nearly half were Red Indians—was distributed as follows: 66,000 in Manitoba, 49,000 in British Columbia, and 56,000 in the remaining far-stretching regions of Canada. To-day there are more than a million and a half people in those territories where, before the railway was made, there were only 171,000; and—with the tide of immigration gaining in momentum every year—the national affairs of this earth provide no anticipation more assured than that the present inhabitants of Central and Western Canada are but the vanguard of a population which, within the experience of persons now living, will be counted by tens of millions.
Most railways have come into existence merely to serve a nation’s needs. It was, as we have seen, the higher fate of the C.P.R. first to create the nation whose needs it was to serve. Out of that fact sprang traditions that have moulded the destiny and that conserve the character of one of the most gigantic, most powerful, most prosperous, and most public-spirited corporations in the world. It is sometimes said that a joint stock company has no soul to be saved and no hindquarters to be kicked. Irreverent remarks of that sort do not apply to the C.P.R. Those who have lived or travelled in Canada will not need to be told about that remarkable and unique institution. But the rest of the world are not in a position to know, and certainly could never guess, the rôle filled by that railway in a stirring national drama. To the Bourses of Europe the C.P.R. is only a triumphant corporation that makes a clear annual profit of over £5,000,000, that is constantly and successfully extending its enterprises, and that issues to its proprietors at par new stock that commands a high premium. But those facts merely reveal the C.P.R. in its public character. Its domestic character is the interesting study.
The C.P.R. is the servant, friend, partner (and, I had almost written, pal) of the settler in Central and Western Canada. No soul, indeed! Why, of the C.P.R.’s several titles to the world’s esteem, the first place must be given to what I can only call its psychological worth.
One of the growing community of prosperous grain-growers in Alberta was telling me the story of his early experiences—how he arrived with his large family on the land, and how he and his sons set to work and built their house. “Yes,” I said, “but where did you and your family live before the house was ready?” “Oh,” he replied, “the C.P.R. very kindly lent us a shack to be going on with.”
Another settler, also reviewing his initial efforts, explained that, being a muff at his new work, he failed to make timely arrangements for harvesting his first crop, which consequently was ruined. “Having counted on the grain to see me through,” he added, “I was fairly broke. But the good old C.P.R. came to my rescue. They gave me work near my place and paid me well, and next spring they lent me horses and fitted me out with seed—in fact, they helped a lame dog over the stile.” A third Canadian farmer had bought irrigated land from the C.P.R. on the usual basis of easy annual payments. “But,” he explained, “the minor canals had not been completed in our neighbourhood, and water did not reach my ditches until two months after I got there. Having to run up to Calgary, I called in at the C.P.R. and told them about it. They were most apologetic, and said they were very much to blame, as the land ought not to have been sold as irrigated land until the water was actually there; so, quite of their own accord, they gave me an extra year’s grace before my first payment became due.”
There is a conscientiousness about the C.P.R., a thoughtfulness, a something that is downright human, not to say kind-hearted. In travelling across the ocean and the land you see the big things of the C.P.R.—its magnificent liners, its palatial hotels, its superb feats of engineering—but somehow the real greatness of the company seems to lie in the little personal acts of which I have given three examples. It is difficult to find a definition that fits the C.P.R. To liken it to a philanthropic society is out of the question; one cannot associate the idea of philanthropy with an organisation which, with its stock ranging well above 200 “on Change,” distributes over £3,000,000 per annum in the form of a 10-per-cent. dividend. The C.P.R. leaves upon the mind an intangible impression of a paradoxical character. It suggests a sort of Socialist Government run by shareholders for profit.
Chatting with a puzzled C.P.R. officer, I tried to make him realise how deeply a visitor from England was impressed by the C.P.R. in its ethical—quite apart from its engineering and financial—aspect.
“But, don’t you see,” he argued, “that the C.P.R. is directly interested in the success of every settler, and that the greater his success the more grain and other freight will he send over our line? Besides, the more a man prospers out here, the more powerful is he as a human magnet to attract friends and relatives from the old country. Looked at from those points of view, every new arrival is an important asset, and we have to see to it that the asset matures. In other words, if through inexperience or want of cash the settler meets with difficulties at the outset of his career, we have a definite interest in helping him through those difficulties. As a matter of fact, in advancing money for seed, etc., we run no appreciable financial risk, since certain success awaits the Canadian farmer who sticks to his work, provided he possesses the necessary modicum of common sense. If he is any good at all, we know he will get on all right, even if he does not know that himself. Therefore I assure you the action of the C.P.R. has a strictly business, not to say selfish, basis.”