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.