As Shaughnessy worked it out the C.P. had a scheme of national expansion that acted independent of government; its own ships, trains, roads, docks, land offices, immigration agents, poster-advertising—until the average European looking for a way out of economic slavery believed that the C.P.R. was the owner and operator of Canada. A belief which was not contradicted, except officially, at home.
William Mackenzie set the pace for building; Shaughnessy for operation. But Shaughnessy built fast. He did it under a handicap of two systems against one. The difference was that an average new line under Shaughnessy paid dividends, or at least did not appreciably lower dividends already declared.
Under Lord Shaughnessy it was unofficially believed that the head of the C.P.R. was somehow overlord to governments. Shaughnessy the impenetrable was not the agent of a democracy, but an emperor. He had his counterpart in Japan. The Orientalism which Van Horne infused into the system even while he laughed it out of court, was solemnly accepted by the man who came after. But it was the Orientalism of efficiency. Shaughnessy was its symbol. Away from it he was of little consequence except as a benevolent citizen with statesmanlike views upon how governments should govern. Within it he was mighty. He felt himself the apex of a thing that knew no provincial boundaries. He consciously made it the instrument of Empire. He was inordinately proud of its morale. To him it was a complicated army. He felt it assimilating men who lived, moved and had their being in C.P.R.—as he had. He was the great human rubber stamp. He had extra power. He lived on fiats and papal bulls. Men learned to tremble at his nod—not at Shaughnessy, but at the man who personalized the infallible system. And as governments came up and capsized in the storms of public sentiment, the great system went on in its sullen but splendid way, a sort of solar system in which parties and governments gravitated.
It would have needed a greater soul than Shaughnessy to be cynical about C.P.R. It often needed his latent Irish humour to appreciate the larger cynicism which it expressed concerning the country. The pap-fed infants of Mackenzie and Hays served but to illustrate by contrast the perfection and the well-oiled technique of the dynamo operated by Shaughnessy. It became an obsession with him, as it did with Flavelle over a commercial company, that "the king can do no wrong." His annual report bristled with pride over the Company's achievements. He insisted upon the inherent morality of the thing and of the men who were its officials. And the older he grew the more Shaughnessy became absorbed in it. In his career the office of President reached its climax. It was shorn of much of its aspect of awe as soon as he left it.
His knighthood was a slight decoration on so august a personage; as though the king had decorated the Mikado. The baronage more nearly fitted the case. Shaughnessy was not too passionately a Home Ruler to take it. But he was never so good a president of the C.P.R. after he got it. He became particular over forms and etiquette. One almost looked for a change of guard at the gate when entering the President's office.
No pomp, however, could undo such efficiency, and in the main such national sanity. Shaughnessy always liked to have a voice in national affairs. That was partly tradition. It also kept the public from remembering that the railway after all was a creature of government and of politics. It sometimes deflected public attention from the "melon" patch which was the Toronto World's sobriquet for the C.P.R. "pork barrel," and from the ever potential lobby maintained by the company at Ottawa. Of course lobbies are always repudiated. No self-respecting railway ever knows it by that name. There is no department of lobbyage in the head offices. The art is never taught. But it is childish to dodge the public necessity of a great corporation being represented at the centre of national legislation. In fact, C.P. has loomed so large in public affairs that a member of Parliament for the Company would sometimes have been scarcely ridiculous. Whenever Lord Shaughnessy went to Ottawa, it was public news. He never went for his health, seldom without some issue too big for a subordinate to handle. Had the Minister of Railways gone to Montreal to see Mr. President, it would have seemed quite as natural.
The war gave Lord Shaughnessy for a time almost equal prominence with Sir Sam Hughes. His quite sensible speech criticizing the haphazard and costly methods of recruiting made Hughes retort that to raise the First Contingent was as great a task as building the C.P.R. Lord Shaughnessy earned that absurd retort because of his announcement to the Government that he meant to make the speech; as though the nation would be waiting to hear it. There was room for one super-governmentarian at Ottawa; never for two. It was Hughes vs. Shaughnessy.
Lord Shaughnessy's retirement from the presidency was not sudden. He had reached his zenith. His eyesight was bad. But he had not lost his grip. The war threw such an unusual load on the system and so changed its complexion that it became necessary to have a younger man. There is reason to believe that the war rudely upset much of the Imperial dignity of the great system. The C.P. was no longer a law unto itself. It was part of the national pool. The President was no longer a sublime autocrat; he was a public agent. The life blood of a globe-girdling system was drained by the war, even while it retained its supremacy as the greatest railway and more than held up its end compared with the railway muddle in the United States. Never again could the C.P. recover its splendid isolation of greatness. Public ownership was being thrust upon the nation by the bankruptcy of the other roads. Shaughnessy had no real fear that it would ever absorb the C.P.R. But he had reason to suspect that a huge Government system would be more or less of a menace to the system which he had spent his life to build up. There was no better way than to retire, leaving the chief administration to a man of his own choice and retaining the post of Chairman along with the room occupied by the old President. Even here the old autocrat survives. The proposal made by Baron Shaughnessy to pool all the railways, except the Grand Trunk, and to put them all under C.P. administration with a guarantee of dividends to C.P. shareholders—was a magnificent play to the gallery. The other roads were undeniably bankrupt, when even the splendid showing made by the management could not make their records palatable to the public. It was a strategic time to advertise once, finally and for all, the unequalled efficiency of the old Transcontinental.
But Canadian railwaydom is dominated by C.P.R. as naturally as tides by the moon. The Railway Association, once the Railway War Board, are now a junta of dividendists and of paid chiefs of the Government system, to oppose—whenever necessary—the adverse judgments of the Government's Railway Commission. The road which was the tangible nexus of Confederation was built by two Americans, one of whom became a high-tariff Tory and a knight, the other an Imperialistic baron who believed in Dominion Home Rule for Ireland when the average Canadian considered Home Rule as treasonable as annexation. It is the prerogative of any robust Canadian to oppose either infection from Broadway or domination from Downing Street. But, regarding the strategic position of Canada in the misnamed "British Empire," we might all take a cue from Lord Shaughnessy, who has had all the internationalizing emotions of which any man is normally capable, and can challenge any man to shew where he has ever compromised conscience or country.