Because, to William Mackenzie there never was any real public. What he cared about was the prosperous nation upon which he could build and build without limit till he died. When the nation came to a crisis in the war he did nothing to help it, except to let the Railway War Board pool his lines for traffic and the Government commandeer his ships. The man who years before had been regarded as the greatest doer in Canada, when the country and all Mackenzie's works along with it came to the great test, never so much as lifted a personal finger to help in the work that had to be done. Mackenzie had done his work in prosperity. In the great predicament he had no function. The nation paid him his ducats and let him go.
This, if we are concerned about the man value of Canada, is a tragedy. For there was in William Mackenzie somehow, with all his ruthlessness and audacity and semi-piratical creed, the element of a kind of great man. There is in his uncommon face the look of a man who with less excess of one quality might have become a wonderful citizen. Nature made him vastly selfish on a scale big enough to devise a totally new scheme for over-capitalizing Canada. She denied him the commoner human qualities that make a man a constructive citizen whether his country is in weal or woe.
The epic which Mackenzie and his partner achieved in this country out-bid in dimensions, variety and the use of practical imagination, even the work of Rhodes in South Africa. It was a feat of economic and financial engineering which but for its peculiarly selfish energy and ruthless characteristics, might have become a monumental contribution to the human welfare of Canada. No man of common brain or conventional ethics could have been the dynamic head of such a work. For years, decades, this astounding adventurer exercised his precarious despotism over the country that he might make its prosperity a factor in his own success. In gambling with its securities he hoped to multiply its wealth without diminishing its happiness. The constructive imagination and tireless energy that he expended on his great cycle of utilities, had it been spent by a poet would have produced epics and dramas. But in all the things he did and the words he said, there is no record of any sentiment of sacrifice for the good of a nation.
William Mackenzie had his day, while Governments rose and fell. His day is done. The public which he dazzled and outwardly despised has no credulity left for any further hero-worship of such a man. "Well, what does Mr. Mackenzie want now?" was the oft-repeated query of the bewildered Laurier to Mackenzie agents in Ottawa. No Canadian Premier will ever ask such a question again. Ottawa has no further possibilities for William Mackenzie of any interest to the public. The kind of prosperity created by such men as he is played out in Canada forever.
The forecast than Mackenzie and Flavelle might form a new two-man junta to operate National railways was too absurd even to merit denial. Such a partnership would merely revive the old Schoolman debate of the Middle Ages—What happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object? The two mentalities are incompatible. For twenty years the chief common ground between them was the Canadian Bank of Commerce, of which Sir Joseph is a director, who long ago discovered that the total assets of the bank were but a turbine in the Niagara of Mackenzie finance.
And William Mackenzie who built the conspiracy of enormous interests with which his name is identified, was never meant to be a railway operator at all. One might as well expect Lloyd George to be a successful manager of Sunlight Soap and of Lord Leverhulme.
THE IMPERIAL BRAINSTORM
LORD BEAVERBROOK
Lord Beaverbrook could stroll into an Arab camp and in five minutes be psychologically persona grata as the man who could make something out of almost nothing. He could learn the Arab language, adopt their customs, interpret their ideas, transact their tribal business, and go away without an Arab to admit that the strange new chief—or whatever they might call him—would ever learn to be a true Arab.
This man without a congenial country has an unlimited talent for adapting himself to the necessities of time, place and opportunity. He has little or no power to assimilate himself to the real life of the people. He trailed like a comet through the land of his birth and left it in a mirage of finance before Canada had made him a citizen. He went to England where in a few months he had made himself intimate with public affairs; and in ten years, "with all his honours thick upon him," he has not yet become an Englishman.