Canada has a national habit of veneration for the C.P.R. just as England used to have for Kitchener in Egypt. The travels of H. M. Stanley in Africa were not more wonderful than the everyday lives of Sandford Fleming's engineers routeing that great new line through the Rockies; and the legend of Monte Cristo scarcely more fabulous than the exploits of Van Horne in getting the money or the work done without it. The man who bought supplies for Van Horne (when there was money) and wrote letters or sent telegrams when there was none, got a finer preparation for being a great railwayman than most Premiers ever got for the duties of public life.
The sensations of the cured scriptural blind man who saw "men as trees walking" were repeated to Canadians of thirty-five years ago who read about those legendary Scots, Yankees and Canadians who flung that chemin de fer over Canada to start a Confederacy into a nation. And there was no Boys' Own Annual in Canada to tell the tale, as it should have been done, along with the tales of the Northwest Mounted Police and the adventures of the Hudson's Bay Company. George Stephen, Donald A. Smith, Robert Angus, Sandford Fleming, John A. Macdonald, Van Horne, the young Shaughnessy—all seemed then to be not merely doers of the undoable, but men of mighty imagination and a sort of Old Testament morality. Even the Pacific Scandal seemed as necessary a part of the narrative as the story of Joseph's coat and of Jacob and Esau were of the epic of Israel.
Well, admittedly, most of that has faded from the Canadian Pacific. We read the annual address of the C.P.R. President with yawns. It all seems considerably like what is said and done at any directors' meeting of a rubber factory or a street railway. You read the names of the directors and few of them strike you with any sense of novelty or of awe. The room in which these magnates meet is—just a room; it used to be thought of as a sort of Doges' Palace of finance. You may even note that one of the directors is baggy at the knees, and any two of them may be talking along the corridor about that very ordinary thing—the cost of living.
Of all the men at any C.P.R. directors' meeting, Lord Shaughnessy knows most about the steep side of finance. He was the spender when there was nothing to spend. The romantic adversities of those days never left him. He came down to the presidency with the fear of no-funds in his soul. From the beginning until then he had felt all the ragged edges of C.P.R. life. He had grimly chuckled to Van Horne, the occasionally helpless wizard, over the hard times. And hard times never really left the road until Van Horne handed the C.P. over to Shaughnessy just at the edge of the era when the system was getting ready to handle phenomenal traffic arising out of stupendous immigration.
From then on till the day that he also went out was the epoch when traffic and travel became vaster than the road, and greater than the men. It was his to operate, and to build as well. But the operations were all of a system which had creaked into through traffic from Yokohama to Montreal as far aback as 1889; and the new lines built under Shaughnessy were just branches of the old trunk. Shaughnessy took over bulging receipts after he had spent years at painful expenditures. He took over a despotism and made it an autocracy.
It was not in his practical, unromantic temperament to play the Gargantuan role. He had not the mentality. Van Horne left the road when the road threatened to become bigger than its creator. Shaughnessy began to work on it when he knew that the bigger he made the system the greater would be his own executive authority, and the bigger the dividends to the holders of stock.
There was a radical contrast between these two men; and as much between the road built by Van Horne and the system operated and magnified by Shaughnessy. The former would not have his shadow dwarfed by the dimensions of his own creation. The latter had created nothing: he would have the shadow of the thing fling itself so vastly over the nation—and the nations—that whenever men spoke of C.P. they thought of Shaughnessy, and when they said his name they mentally took off their hats to the headship of the greatest system of its kind in the world.
This may or may not have been Shaughnessy's intention. It was certainly the effect. We have all gone through the era of profound respect for the cold autocrat of the twentieth century, as some of us did that of awesome veneration of the railway giants of the nineteenth. We have read newspaper stories—some of them buncombe—about this man's all-seeing eye as he travelled over the system, as we did of the peripatetic omniscience of James J. Hill and the Gargantuan humours of Van Horne. We have consented that the system perfected by Shaughnessy was the most marvellous known of its kind, and therefore the man at its head must be a phenomenal administrator.
Very likely we have been warped by our enthusiasm. Shaughnessy was no miracle man. He was a wonderful maestro of details, a clear-headed organizer of systems and a man to provoke high respect in those who had to deal with him at close range. But he had perhaps less sheer ability for detail than Van Horne, who as a rule despised the botheration of it. I have heard Van Horne dictating to his secretary a mass of intimate instructions to a contractor about how to build a rotunda in a hotel in Cuba, at the same time with his left hand on a drawer full of complicated notes on his philosophy of life, which with the other lobe of his brain he was traversing in order to engulf the interviewer as soon as the letter was finished. Shaughnessy never could have carried on such an interview, lasting four hours of a busy life. His talks to the press must be curt and comprehensive—or else elliptical. He had no exuding vivacity. When I talked to him—or listened to him—he was cold and exact. He left his chair only to walk erectly to the window. He deviated not a syllable from the subject in hand—the system. He worshipped that: as much as any Mikado ever did his ancestry. He paid passing veneration to Van Horne—when from the slant of his remark I surmised that he was critical even in his admiration for that epical character.
Shaughnessy is essentially a system-man. When he travelled he had his practical jokes and his Irish stories and his fondness for the social side; but he was conventionally as correct as a time-table. Had there been a spark of genius in him he would have extinguished it for the sake of betterments to the most conventional Colossus in Canada. The C.P.R. was supposed to lead. It was built for dividends, and born in politics. It had craft at its cradle. The new policy under Shaughnessy was bigger. It had to do less with Asia, with spectacle, with carved gods; more with Europe, with immigration posters, with land settlement. Shaughnessy had taken over a system which could be used ostensibly as the agent of the Immigration Department and of the Interior; effectively as the base of population-supply on its own account.