But I am concerned with railway affairs, and am not delivering lectures on the history of Canadian morals. The railroad ethics of to-day are very much ahead of the railway ethics of forty years ago. That is true whether you compare railway standards with railway standards, or look cursorily over the field of commercial and social relationships. One wouldn’t say that saintliness distinguishes the railway business more than it does any other. Indeed, it is commonly supposed that there is more freedom of speech, running into license, among knights of the rail than there is in any other walk of life.
It is still supposed by many otherwise excellent people that, of all corporations, a railway corporation most assuredly has neither body to be kicked, nor soul to be damned. Railwaymen are not a perfectionist crowd. They never set themselves up for paragons. But take them by and large, railwaymen are as worthy a segment of society as any other. In the last forty years there has been at least as notable a progression in the standards of railway behaviour as in other fields of human activity, including the Christian ministry.
Heaven knows there was room for improvement—not in the men, but in the standards which were considered appropriate to a business that was always weirdly competitive, was sometimes wonderfully prosperous, and at other times was woefully depressed. There is a changing orthodoxy in commerce as there is in religion and politics. The railway business is no exception to this rule. The change has been steadily for the better. Of this it will be easy to convince the elder, as I hope it will not be impossible to inform, the younger readers of these remarks.
How far we have travelled, how large have been the revolutions in commercial morality within the memory of people now living, can be indicated by a few facts. I have mentioned a lady now in England who has given sixty-five descendants to Canada. She was eight years old when slavery became illegal in the British dominions. She was sixteen years old when, under the Ashburton treaty which gave to the United States territory that ought to have been part of Canada, the United States and Britain agreed to maintain squadrons off the coast of Africa to prevent further shipment of slaves to the New World. Scores of thousands of the present citizens of the United States were born as slaves. When I came to Montreal the American Civil War which freed the slaves wasn’t as far back as the Boer War is now.
The old lady of whom I have spoken was six years old when the Reform Bill put an end to the system of rotten boroughs in the British Isles, which we still regard as having in all past centuries been in the forefront of moral and political progress. The political corruption of those times, so nauseating when we read about it, was regarded as a matter of course by men and women who were godliest among the good. Nowadays, when we are shocked by stories of buying votes in elections, we sometimes forget the recency of the society from which that form of bribery descends. Financial customs which are reprehensible to-day were respectable not so long ago—in all walks of life.
One mentions these things in a railway retrospect, so that when a few facts as to old-time methods have been given it will not be supposed that in their practices of several decades ago some railway administrations were sinners above all other sinners. They practised the orthodoxies of their times, and were neither better nor worse than the practitioners of orthodoxy in a hundred ranges of human activity.
It may seem a queer question to young people—What would you think, supposing you wanted to go to Chicago on the Canadian National Railways—and, instead of going into the railway office at King and Yonge, and paying, say, sixteen dollars for the ticket, you slipped into a private ticket office up street, and bought your ticket for ten dollars? Or, supposing you were going to San Francisco, instead of buying a through ticket to your destination at the Canadian National or Canadian Pacific office downtown, or at the Union Station, you bought a ticket only for Chicago, at the little office up the street, and then, at Chicago, bought another for the rest of the journey from another privately-conducted office, and saved perhaps twenty-five dollars by doing that, instead of buying your ticket at the railway office in Chicago?
In 1924 it sounds very odd to mention such possibilities to men and women of thirty years of age, who suppose they really know something of the world’s ways. But to older people the suggestion has all the familiarity of reminiscence—it recalls the age of scalping in passenger travel, and of the so-called fast freight lines in the other branch of railway business, which were in full blast when I began to audit accounts in the Grand Trunk head office at Point St. Charles.
What is now told about our railways is not to their discredit, except so far as it would be to the discredit, for instance, of the Christian churches of to-day to remind them that it was not they who directly raised the tone of political morality, or abolished slavery. Canadian railway practice was like the railway practice of other countries—mainly the United States. The Grand Trunk, with its English management and English ideas, had some peculiarities of its own; but, in the main, its relation to scalping and fast freight lines was forced upon it by the prevailing conditions on this continent. Those conditions could only be finally improved by the intervention of public authority, such as the Dominion Board of Railway Commissioners, or the Inter-State Commerce Commission, both of which bodies may be only stages in the evolution towards the public ownership of all railways, which, theoretically at least (though practically it is not so easy of accomplishment), is as sound as the public ownership of the postoffice, the navy, or the geodetic survey.