Toronto, May, 1924.
Trains of Recollection
CHAPTER I.
Suggesting a typically Presbyterian background of Scottish migration to Canada.
It seemed that one’s ability to identify a joke was being tested when one was asked to set down something of what one had seen of the development of Canada during forty years of railway experience. The work I have been doing since coming to Canada in 1882 is the same kind of service that has been well rendered by thousands of men. How could there be anything of public interest in a career that has had only an average share of incident and romance, and more than an average of exacting toil?
But it has been said that the commonplace is the greatest romance of all; and that it often requires the lapse of years for an apparently ordinary event to acquire its true perspective in the things which impart the liveliest interest to life. After all, one was very closely associated with the growth of a great railway system from a feeble and unpromising beginning; and one saw the most extraordinary change from private enterprise to Government ownership that has taken place in the history of transportation. Nine millions of Canadian people are financially interested in the effects of that transformation, and it may help some of them to appreciate the significance of their unexpected proprietorship if one tries to throw a little light upon the evolution of Canada, as it has been affected by four decades of rapidly changing transportation conditions—forty years in which every sensation of success and disappointment has been known to the most fascinating country in the world.
One must find the romance of the commonplace in harking back—it cannot be done by looking forward. There is no joy in the anticipation of a certainty. No surer way of discounting pleasures has ever been invented than to describe them in advance. Everybody knows the bore who ruins any good story he proffers by his assurance that it is very funny indeed. Turnings in our personal roads which have no special interest when they are taken, years afterwards disclose themselves as the most fateful passages in our lives. Sometimes when we have wanted to turn aside from a beaten path, and have been foiled, we have not known how much was bound up with keeping awhile longer the even tenor of what was then a commonplace way indeed.
Perhaps I am alone in viewing, without regret, a turn which was missed in my teens, and which would have taken me to Asia, far indeed from the rigours of Manitoba winters, and from politicians who would assist railway management on lines that have grown hoary with age, and disgraceful in their inefficiency. While working at Stobcross station in Glasgow I answered an advertisement for a clerk on a plantation in Ceylon. No reply to the application reached me, though I anxiously watched for it. Years afterwards, just before coming to Canada, it was told me that an answer to the application did arrive from the Glasgow firm who had the business in hand. The family knew of the matter, and one of them intercepted a letter which was addressed to me, and asked me to come to Glasgow, as it was thought I might be the most suitable applicant for the situation. The letter was concealed, I believe, with the connivance of my excellent mother; otherwise, I might now be curing tea for Sir Thomas Lipton. About that time, by the way, the first of the Lipton shops was opened in Glasgow, and the astounding sight was witnessed of a provision retailer advertising his bacon by weekly cartoons of Irish pigs on the hoardings—for bacon, and not tea, was the early Lipton specialty.
One often envies the Canadian-born—even one’s own children—their fortune in being natives of this land. But occasionally one meets Canadians whose envies are of the reverse order. They say that it must be fine to have spent a youth amidst the historical treasures of the Old Lands; and fine also to have had the experience of finding in Canada an entirely New Land—to have chosen it for oneself, and to have had so much direct control over one’s own destiny; and the destinies of one’s offspring, to remote generations. Immigration is a romance of the commonplace, perhaps; though there isn’t much glamour in the outlook of a poor wight who has left all his kindred, is facing an unknown country, and is finding the ocean a bottomless woe, on which nothing stays where it is put.