Mackenzie and Mann’s original railway carried settlement a hundred miles north of the line beyond which implement manufacturers had refrained from extending their credit. They went, not only where railway obligations had not gone, but where, aforetime, railway obligation was afraid to venture. They looked ultimately to great fortune for themselves—there has never been any pretense to the contrary. But they had in them infinitely more than a lust for pelf. The first justice that is done to these two men is a frank recognition of the pioneering, constructive passion which made of them great Canadians.
Ambition that was all self-sacrifice never braced a continent with steel. The money changers do not open the purse of Fortunatus to Simon Pure altruists. Railways must be carried to completion on the financial engines that are available to mundane men. The Canadian Northern was brought into being because the time had come when more than the C.P.R. was needed in Western Canada. It is not good for a railway to be alone in so broad a land. The combination that had grown out of a contest over the ownership of a corral-full of mules away up in the Selkirks was the ordained instrument to prove that an impossible piece of work could be done.
Sir William Mackenzie, in his favourite car, the Atikokan—which was bought while it was being used by Admiral Dewey on his triumphal tour—was discussing with a guest one night in 1905 the prospects of the Canadian Northern, which had not yet reached Edmonton. His inveterate optimism then believed that Hudson Bay would be reached within three years. Asked if he had ever been to the Bay he answered:
“No; I haven’t been to Sao Paulo, either; but I’ve taken a million dollars out of there within the last three years.”
He told of having received an offer from the Grand Trunk to buy the Canadian Northern at the time the Grand Trunk Pacific scheme was brewing, and of refusing it, though there would have been millions of dollars in it for himself and his partner.
“Why didn’t you sell out?” his guest asked.
“I like building railroads,” was the simple, truthful, profound answer.
The money-grubber doesn’t talk that way. He doesn’t act as Mackenzie and Mann always acted.
Many of us, who never had personal control of millions of dollars, and to whom a moderate fortune is a hunger to be eagerly appeased, and a divinity to be constantly adored, cannot conceive of the possession of money being a mere adjunct to those who do great things through their capacity for changing other people’s money into enormous vehicles of commerce.