Lectures and Essays

by Goldwin Smith

If he ever got into serious difficulties it was not from miscalculation but from financial embarrassment which in 1866 pressed upon him in such a manner and with such severity that his property of all kinds was largely committed and he weathered the storm only by the aid of the staunch friends whom his high qualities and honourable conduct had wedded to his person and his fortunes. In the midst of his difficulties he pushed on his works to their conclusion with his characteristic rapidity. His perseverance supported his reputation and turned the wavering balance in his favour. The daring and vigorous completion of the Lemberg and Czarnovitz works especially had this good effect and an incident in connection with them showed the zeal and devotion which Mr. Brassey's character inspired. The works were chiefly going on at Lemberg five hundred miles from Vienna and the difficulty was, how to get the money to pay the men from Vienna to Lemberg, the intervening country being occupied by the Austrian and Prussian armies. Mr. Brassey's coadjutor and devoted friend Mr. Ofenheim, Director General of the Company, undertook to do it. He was told there was no engine but he found an old engine in a shed. Next he wanted an engine driver and he found one but the man said that he had a wife and children and that he would not go. His reluctance was overcome by the promise of a high reward for himself and a provision in case of death for his wife and family. The two jumped on the old engine and got up steam. They then started and ran at the rate of forty or fifty miles an hour between the sentinels of the opposing armies who were so surprised, Mr. Ofenheim says, that they had not time to shoot him. His only fear was that there might be a rail up somewhere. But he got to Lemberg and paid the men who would otherwise have gone home, leaving the line unfinished for the winter. The Emperor of Austria might well ask, Who is this Mr. Brassey, the English contractor for whom men are to be found who work with such zeal and risk their lives? In recognition of a power which the Emperor had reason to envy he sent Mr. Brassey the Cross of the Iron Crown.

It was only in Spain, the land where two and two make five, that Mr. Brassey's powers of calculation failed him. He and his partners lost largely upon the Bilbao railway. It seems that there was a mistake as to the nature of the soil, and that the climate proved wetter than was expected. But the firm also forgot to allow for the ecclesiastical calendar, and the stoppage of work on the numberless fete days. There were, however, other difficulties peculiarly Spanish,—antediluvian finance, antediluvian currency, the necessity of sending pay under a guard of clerks armed with revolvers, and the strange nature of the people whom it was requisite to employ—one of them, a Carlist chief, living in defiance of the Government with a tail of ruffians like himself, who, when you would not transact business as he wished, "bivouacked" with his tail round your office and threatened to "kill you as he would a fly." Mr. Brassey managed notwithstanding to illustrate the civilizing power of railways by teaching the Basques the use of paper money.

Minor misfortunes of course occurred, such as the fall of the Barentin Viaduct on the Rouen and Havre railway, a brick structure one hundred feet high and a third of a mile in length, which had just elicited the praise of the Minister of Public Works. Rapid execution in bad weather, and inferior mortar, were the principal causes of this accident. By extraordinary effort the viaduct was built in less than six months, a display of energy and resource which the company acknowledged by an allowance of L1,000. On the Bilbao railway some of the works were destroyed by very heavy rains. The agent telegraphed to Mr. Brassey to come at once, as a bridge had been washed down. There hours afterwards came a telegraph announcing that a large bank was carried away, and next morning another saying that the rain continued and more damage had been done. Mr. Brassey, turning to a friend, said, laughing: "I think I had better wait till I hear that the wind has ceased, so that when I do go I may see what is left of the works, and estimate all the disasters at once, and so save a second journey."

Mr. Brassey's business rapidly developed to an immense extent, and, instead of being contractor for one or two lines, he became a sort of contractor-in-chief, and a man to be consulted by all railway proprietors. In thirty-six years be executed no less than one hundred and seventy railway and other contracts. In his residence, as in his enterprises, he now became cosmopolitan, and lived a good deal on the rail. He had the physical power to bear this life. His brother-in-law says, "I have known him come direct from France to Rugby having left Havre the night before—he would have been engaged in the office the whole day." He would then come down to Rugby by the mail train at twelve o'clock, and it was his common practice to be on the works by six o'clock the next morning. He would frequently walk from Rugby to Nuneaton, a distance of sixteen miles. Having arrived at Nuneaton in the afternoon he would proceed the same night by road to Tamworth, and the next morning he would be out on the road so soon that he had the reputation among his staff of being the first man on the works. He used to proceed over the works from Tamworth to Stafford, walking the greater part of the distance, and would frequently proceed that same evening to Lancaster in order to inspect the works there in progress, under the contract which he had for the execution of the railway from Lancaster to Carlisle.

In constructing the Great Northern Railway the difficulties of the Fen Country were met and surmounted. Mr. Brassey's chief agent in this was Mr. Ballard, a man self raised from the ranks of labour but indebted for the eminence which he ultimately attained to Mr. Brassey's discrimination in selecting him for the arduous undertaking. He has borne interesting testimony to his superior's comprehensiveness and rapidity of view, the directness with which he went to the important point, disregarding secondary matters and economizing his time and thought.

The Italian Railway enterprises of Mr. Brassey owed their origin to the economical genius of Count Cavour and their execution drew from the Count the declaration that Mr. Brassey was one of the most remarkable men he knew; clear-headed, cautious, yet very enterprising and fulfilling his engagements faithfully. "We never," said the Count, "had a difficulty with him." And he added that Mr. Brassey would make a splendid minister of public works. Mr. Brassey took shares gallantly, and, when their value had risen most generously resigned them with a view to enabling the government to interest Piedmontese investors in the undertaking. So far was he from being a maker of corners. It is justly remarked that these Piedmontese railroads constructed by English enterprise were a most important link in the chain of events which brought about the emancipation and unification of Italy.

Mr. Brassey has left on record the notable remark that the railway from Turin to Novara was completed for about the same money as was spent in obtaining the Bill for the railway from London to York. If the history of railway bills in the British Parliament, of which this statement gives us an inkling, could be disclosed, it would probably be one of the most scandalous revelations in commercial history. The contests which led to such ruinous expense and to so much demoralization, both of Parliament and of the commercial world, were a consequence of adopting the system of uncontrolled competition in place of that of government control. Mr. Brassey was in favour of the system of government control. "He was of opinion that the French policy, which did not admit the principle of free competition, was not only more calculated to serve the interests of the shareholders, but more favourable to the public. He moreover considered that a multiplicity of parallel lines of communication between the same termini, and the uncontrolled competition in regard to the service of trains, such as exists in England, did not secure so efficient a service for the public as the system adopted in France." Mr. Thomas Brassey says that he remembers that his father, when travelling in France, would constantly point out the superiority of the arrangements, and express his regret that the French policy had not been adopted in England. "He thought that all the advantage of cheap service and of sufficiently frequent communication, which were intended to be secured for the British public under a system of free competition, would have been equally well secured by adopting the foreign system, and giving a monopoly to the interest of railway communication in a given district to one company; and then limiting the exercise of that monopoly by watchful supervision on the part of the State in the interests of the public." With regard to extensions, he thought that the government might have secured sufficient compulsory powers. There can be no sort of doubt that this sort of policy would have saved England an enormous amount of pecuniary loss, personal distress and public demoralization. It is a policy, it will be observed, of government regulation, not of government subsidies or construction by government. It of course implies the existence of an administration capable of regulating a railway system, and placed above the influence of jobbery and corruption.

For the adoption of the policy of free competition Sir Robert Peel was especially responsible. He said, in his own defence, that he had not at his command power to control those undertakings. Mr. Helps assumes rather characteristically that he meant official power, and draws a moral in favour of the extension of the civil service. But there is no doubt that Peel really meant Parliamentary power. The railway men in the Parliament were too strong for him and compelled him to throw overboard the scheme of government control framed by his own committee under the presidency of Lord Dalhousie. The moral to be drawn therefore is not that of civil service extension, but that of the necessity of guarding against Parliamentary rings in legislation concerning public works.

Of all Mr. Brassey's undertakings not one was superior in importance to that with which Canadians are best acquainted—the Grand Trunk Railway, with the Victoria Bridge. It is needless here to describe this enterprise, or to recount the tragic annals of the loss brought on thousands of shareholders, which financially speaking was its calamitous sequel. The severest part of the undertaking was the Victoria Bridge. "The first working season there," says one of the chief agents, "was a period of difficulty, trouble and disaster." The agents of the contractors had no experience of the climate. There were numerous strikes among the workmen. The cholera committed dreadful ravages in the neighbourhood. In one case, out of a gang of two hundred men, sixty were sick at one time, many of whom ultimately died. The shortness of the working season in this country involved much loss of time. It was seldom that the setting of the masonry was fairly commenced before the middle of August, and it was certain that all work must cease at the end of November. Then there were the shoving of the ice at the beginning and breaking up of the frosts, and the collisions between floating rafts 250 feet long and the staging erected for putting together the tubes. Great financial difficulties were experienced in consequence of the Crimean war. The mechanical difficulties were also immense, and called for extraordinary efforts both of energy and invention. The bridge, however, was completed, as had been intended, in December, 1859 and formally opened by the Prince of Wales in the following year. "The devotion and energy of the large number of workmen employed," says Mr. Hodges, "can hardly be praised too highly. Once brought into proper discipline, they worked as we alone can work against difficulties. They have left behind them in Canada an imperishable monument of British skill, pluck, science and perseverance in this bridge, which they not only designed, but constructed."

The whole of the iron for the tubes was prepared at Birkenhead, but so well prepared that, in the centre tube, consisting of no less than 10,309 pieces, in which nearly half a million of holes were punched, not one plate required alteration, neither was there a plate punched wrong. The faculty of invention, however, was developed in the British engineers and workmen by the air of the New World. A steam-traveller was made and sent out by one of the most eminent firms in England, after two years of experiments and an outlay of some thousands of pounds, which would never do much more than move itself about, and at last had to be laid aside as useless. But the same descriptions and drawings having been shown to Mr. Chaffey, one of the sub-contractors, who "had been in Canada a sufficient length of time to free his genius from the cramped ideas of early life," a rough and ugly machine was constructed, which was soon working well. The same increase of inventiveness, according to Mr. Hodges, was visible in the ordinary workman, when transferred from the perfect but mechanical and cramping routine of British industry, to a country where he has to mix trades and turn his hands to all kinds of work. "In England he is a machine, but as soon as he gets out to the United States he becomes an intellectual being." Comparing the German with the British mechanic, Mr. Hodges says, "I do not think that a German is a better man than an Englishman; but I draw this distinction between them, that when a German leaves school he begins to educate himself, but the Englishman does not, for, as soon as he casts off the thraldom of school, he learns nothing more unless he is forced to do it, and if he is forced to do it, he will then beat the German. An Englishman acts well when he is put under compulsion by circumstances."