The practice of farming out certain services was the fruit of conditions. It is virtually the same as was followed by Lord Northcliffe in many of his secondary publications in London. He farmed their advertising out to advertising agents. The railways farmed out to express companies the swifter-than-freight carriage of goods; and to the Pullman Company the night comfort of passengers. But the fast freight line game was in a different category from these present-day services. It was regarded as legitimate business then; if a revival of it were attempted now it would be given another name.
It grew from the hoary notion that it was all right to give private favours at the public expense. If a concern brought a large amount of traffic, it got a better rate than its smaller competitor. That notion of the proprieties opened the door to the fast freight line, which wasn’t a railway at all, but an inside track which had no honest business to be there.
A group of men who happened to be high-up railway officials organized a company called, say, the Minnehaha Fast Freight Line. The company got preferential rates on all the freight it turned in. The company labeled its cars and went out after business. It charged the shipper the same rates as the railways did, but promised him more rapid delivery. The railways gave preference to the so-called fast freight, though they got less revenue from it, pound for pound, than they received from the freight they pushed aside for it.
The complications that arose from this favouring of fast freight companies were many and were often amusing. On the Grand Trunk I was soon told off for special auditing, and in 1884 was sent to Detroit, with W. B. Pollock, of the New York, West Shore and Buffalo Railway, to audit the books of an agent of a fast freight line who had received more money than he accounted for, because of the system of collecting payment from shippers. Incidentally, straightening out the tangle led to my going into railway service across the line, and almost made me an American.
On this continent there was so much distrust of railways by railways that when a great business corporation sent, say, a trainload of sugar from New York by a fast freight line, to be distributed to different points in what was still regarded as the west—Ohio, for instance—the money for the whole service would be paid to some central agent of the fast freight line, who, in due time, paid their proportions to the railways which received parts of the traffic. Unraveling bookkeeping tangles was always a revel to me. Pollock and I discovered that the fast freight line agent at Detroit was a good many thousand dollars astray in his reckoning.
That piece of work procured for me the offer of a clerkship on the West Shore line, which runs down the western side of the Hudson river, and this involved a removal to New York.
After a year and a half, the West Shore was taken over by the New York Central group, and the office force was transferred from the old Stewart Building near Cortland street to the head office of the bigger system in the Grand Central Station at Forty-second Street, to make the necessary accounting adjustments. When this was finished salaries were reduced. I thought the offer to me was beneath my merits; and, having a promise that in pending changes on the Jersey Central I would be sure of a position, I returned to Montreal to await developments. They were much delayed, and, not loving idleness, I did some special work for Mr. Hawson.
At last the offer from the Jersey Central came. It was a good offer, which would probably have led to rapid promotion, for the man who was to have been my chief soon after died, and according to all custom I should have succeeded him as assistant auditor of freight receipts. Of my colleagues in New York a considerable proportion won high promotion—my fellow auditor of the Detroit fast freight agent’s accounts, W. B. Pollock, is now the head of the whole marine department of the New York Central lines.
When the offer did come I had just arrived at Portage la Prairie, and had not begun work. I might have gone East again, had not Horace Greeley’s advice been earnestly repeated to me, with results one sees no reason seriously to regret. Anyway, it is no use speculating on what would have become of my family if, instead of finding them through a Portage la Prairie merchant’s house—my father-in-law had the leading retail and wholesale store in the town—I had turned again east, before the wide streets of the Manitoba town had become familiar.
My sister had kindly kept from me a letter which would probably have resulted in a life spent in producing Ceylon tea. Mr. Baker, my first chief in the West, induced me to answer unfavourably a telegram which almost certainly had within it the makings of an American citizen. So, it would seem, does Providence sometimes steer our barque.