The Masques of Ottawa Part 17

"The men who save the world," says _The Onlooker_, "are those who work by rule of thumb; who do the day's work by the day's light and advance on chaos and the painful dark by inches; in other words, the practical men."

Such a motto might be Drayton's crest. He is very practical; too much so to be an interesting personality to the average man. But by his dull and diligent practicality he has done rather more than his bit in helping to re-establish Canada. He would, if he could, cut our imports from the United States in half in order to rectify exchange. Whenever he dies the Canadian $ par on exchange will be found graven upon his heart.

Drayton's tariff tour was one of the most characteristic things he ever did. In this, however, there may have been an element of politics. A travelling tariff commission taking evidence in almost every village with a smokestack from coast to coast must have had some real object.

But Sir Henry had cleaned up most of the possibilities in direct taxation; it was time he tackled the tariff, even though he knew it was largely a show to satisfy the people that the most patient investigator in the world at the head of a small court had taken evidence on what every Tom and d.i.c.k had to say for and against in any part of the country outside of the Yukon. Had it been practicable to hold a session on Great Bear Lake, to determine the trade relations between the copper-kniving Eskimos and the meat-swapping Yellow Knife Indians, Sir Henry would have done it.

Such vast patience is phenomenal even in Drayton. One almost fears that he is becoming interested in a Federal election. If so, the end is in sight. The day we partyize Sir Henry we shall lose one of the oddest and rarest personal ident.i.ties we ever had. But we can better afford to lose his personal ident.i.ty in his party service than to lose both in putting into the Finance Department in 1922 some idealistic experimenter in the efficacy of Free Trade.

THE PERSONAL EQUATION IN RAILROADING

EDWARD WENTWORTH BEATTY, K.C.

The main thing that E. W. Beatty, K.C., did to help win the war was to become President of the C.P.R. And he did it well. A glance at this polished pony engine of a chief executive suggests that he has never done anything but well, and that he is the kind of man likely without preachments to stimulate well-doing in other people.

I first met this self-controlled master of executives not long after he became President. He was most cordial; as Shaughnessy had been austere. Under such a direct impression it seemed that I had at last found a man who would make the inexorable old C.P.R. become a golden door to humanity. Of course I was mistaken. That kind of man is born often enough, but he seldom stays with his birthright. I knew that the railway of railways was no school for the humanities; but this university graduate, Chancellor of Queen's, distinguished counsel and potential eminent judge, bachelor, Canadian born, every inch an athlete and as rugged as Carpentier, seemed to my aroused imagination one who would be as much bigger than the stodgy C.P.R. as that system was greater than others of its kind.

Beatty has not been at his new job long enough yet to prove what I suspect--that I was wrong. But he has been long enough with it to know that the surging ideals and aspirations of a young, healthy man in his own office are pretty rudely shaken down by the practical operation of a great system in a time of financial difficulty.

We talked for nearly an hour. He seemed to have the time and the interest. His big office was as quiet as a library. His desk was almost devoid of signs of labour. Not a paper to be seen that required immediate attention; every item neatly disposed; himself smoking--a fairly strong pipe; scarcely a telephone call to interrupt. He seemed the sculptor's embodiment of strength in reserve; a man who never could be tuckered or peevish or unable to detect either the weakness of an opponent, the penetration of a critic or the need of a man who came to ask him for advice. There was a big instant kindliness about him that would have won the cordiality of the stolidest of interviewers, as we talked about railways, government ownership, the needs of journalism and the value in business of the personal equation--his own phrase which he repeated so often that it seemed to contain something of prophetic intention. He paid his venerating respects to the founders of the C.P.R., but he seemed to have more enthusiasm for Lord Mountstephen than for Van Horne.

I heard him say some strong, sincere things about the uselessness of rich men who would sooner use their money on the gratification of vanity than upon public service. He meant that. He repeated such things at various interviews. In doing so he proved that he himself had always made a G.o.d of very hard work, discipline and self-denial, for the sake of giving his own personality a square deal, without regard to the money he could make. He had the strength and he used it.

As solicitor and chief counsel he became almost a machine to win cases for the railway. He must win, and know how to lose. Fighting a corporation's battles is a good way to believe that the system can do no wrong. But I don't think Beatty was ever blind to the native defects of the C.P.R.

Railroading is a great university of character. Nothing else in our practical affairs attracts such a variety of men. None of our railwaymen have climbed to the peak of the railway operation business quite so successfully and so Canadianly as E. W. Beatty. Most other transportation magnates we have imported from either Scotland or the United States. This one is Canadian from his cradle up. He embodies the best characteristics of the average Canadian in a very high degree.

He is an amateur athlete whom hard work has never been known to make weary. At the end of any perfect day of hard work he has as much strength in reserve as he had in the morning when he came to it. Even in his talk he wastes never a word, states everything clearly and in forcible language, but is seldom curt at the expense of courtesy. He does not talk like any big American executive whose equal or superior he may be in administration. He copies n.o.body. The day's work has always been his exemplar. He has no desire for mere personal success.

Years ago he could have made more money by exporting his brains to the United States. But he preferred Canada where he has made less money, justly earned more fame, and where he can continue to do more work that counts for efficiency in himself and in other people. He is the kind of man--like Arthur Meighen--who inspires other men to go in with him on a heavy task to get it done in a big way.

Beatty's type of mind, though somewhat dry and legal and at times judicial, is also capable of an immensely quiet enthusiasm that transmits itself to other people. He invites discussion, but not familiarity. Not personally careful just to maintain traditions, he profoundly respects the men who created them--and goes ahead to transact business now, and to hand out decisions immediately, that get to-day ahead of yesterday and as near as possible to the day after. He believes in the square deal in action and in the high common sense of a decision. There is no public question upon which his opinion might not be sanely valuable, though one would never expect him to succeed as a leader in politics. As a business reorganizer of McGill University he is bound to consider a college as a "going concern". As Chancellor of Queen's, he upsets all traditions as to the dignity of pure scholarship.

It seemed like a long stride from being Chief Railway Counsel to becoming Chief Executive. But to his practical personality the stride was only a step. On an average this is no lawyer's job. Judges in the United States can preside over big corporations. The chief executive of the C.P.R. works. He must know the system, its men, its technique.

Railroading is a complex of specialities. A good president must enter into the spirit of the man who builds a locomotive and of one who constructs a timetable.

It fell to this first Canadian President that the road ever had to shoulder a load which would have made the wizard Van Horne read up Hercules. Beatty holds the record for getting through with a programme that would have puzzled either of his two eminent predecessors in that office. Shaughnessy at the same age might have done it. Van Horne never. Yet Beatty never could have built the C.P.R. His brain has no wizardry in it. He is a co-ordination of facts that knows not the meaning of magic. He is the most matter-of-fact man in any high executive position in Canada. The task he undertook was all cut out for him. Fate decreed that he should take it. He never dreamed of refusing. And what a task!

The greatest trouble Beatty had to face when he became President was too much traffic, too little rolling stock, an almost tragic scarcity of labour and the McAdoo award in wages. Railroading costs were at an apex before even munitions costs began to be. The collapse of railways in the United States drove a vast amount of traffic over Canadian roads. The two younger transcontinental systems were on the verge of receiverships. The brunt of the burden fell upon the old C.P.R., which at that time, in spite of the McAdoo awards was making a heavy profit.

The cash value of traffic handled was colossal. War work was wearing the railways down. New locomotives and cars were hard to get. Orders could not be placed outside. Canada's railways had to depend on Canada. Ships could not wait, though submarines could. Freight must move. Two hard winters nearly paralyzed all the systems. No new lines were being built. The old lines were wearing out. Canada had the longest hauls of any nation in the world. Our systems were built for the long haul. The railway systems of other countries were demoralized with wastage, low repairs and enormous traffic. Even in short-haul England of the easy climate, there was railway paralysis. But England had great gasoline highways and coastal routes when Canada had neither.

It is said in a report of that period, "General Superintendents in charge of some of the "key" divisions of the big roads have had to work from 12 to 20 hours a day to keep roadbed, rolling stock and crews up to top mark." 22,000 Canadian cars were "lost" in the United States in one winter. What war left of the railways winter did its best to debilitate. Industry stole transportation labour at high wages and rolled out vast quant.i.ties of material that had to be moved, when even C.P.R. efficiency seemed to be just about obliterated from the chart of the world's work.

This was no time for any man to pray that he might be made chief executive of the greatest transportation system in the world; nor a time for Lord Shaughnessy to continue in that office. The work was now too heavy for the autocrat and for a man whose eyesight was bad. A successor had to be found. The directors did it almost automatically.

There was but one man to consider; and he had no experience in any of the mechanical departments.

Beatty was the man. The old autocrat himself had said so; and he knew.

Shaughnessy had taken the road from its wizard creator, and made it the size and efficiency that it was. There was almost apostolic succession. Stories that the Montreal directors favoured one man, the Toronto directors another, and that Shaughnessy gave the casting vote, were mere fabrications. Yet Beatty stated that never in his long years of experience with the system had he a clear ambition to climb up its ladder. He never wanted anything but a large day's work--and he got many. But, when he was made Vice-President, he must have known that he was the man. Vice-Presidents on the C.P.R. are not necessarily presidents to be. One of Beatty's friends travelling with him up from Three Rivers once bought him a picture postcard with the legend, "No mother ever picks her son to be a Vice-President." Beatty smiled it off. He probably knew. This was one of the rare bits of humour that ill.u.s.trated the Shaughnessy regime. His lordship, fond enough of Irish jokes outside, was never humourous inside the system. All the humour in Canadian Pacific was supposed to have died when Van Horne left it.

But now and again a gleam of human insight came from the grim efficiency of the great system, and at least upon one occasion it flashed from the legal department. When the Railway Commission was almost a new thing under that remarkable square-deal chairman, Joseph Pitt Mabee, the town of Trois Rivieres, Que., had a suit, through its Board of Trade, against the C.P.R., involving discrimination in rates.

The counsel for the plaintiff was a French-Canadian who could read, but not comfortably speak, English. The further he went the more bewildered the chairman became, until he ventured to interrupt:

"I have a suggestion to make to my hon. friend who is having difficulty in getting me to understand the case."

The suggestion was that the solicitor for the railway who had made a special study of the Board of Trade's argument for the sake of demolishing it, should himself present that side of the argument in the clear, concise English of which he is a master; that wherever necessary the French counsel should correct the statement; and that afterwards Mr. Beatty should proceed to demolish the argument which he himself had put up. The counsel was agreeable. Mr. Beatty rose to the occasion.

His statement of the case was so satisfactory to the counsel for Trois Rivieres that he afterwards wondered how Beatty was ever able to demolish it and win the case.

Beatty has no hobbies. He cares for no art, collects no curios, has no great house, drives no big cars; cares not at all for society; thinks more of the Amateur Athletic a.s.sociation and the Navy League and the boys of the Y.M.C.A., the athletic equipment of Queen's University and the success of Sir Arthur Currie as President of McGill. He never travels for pleasure. When he goes over the C.P.R., expect results.

The average Montrealer does not even know where he lives. He is said to spend forty minutes a day, indoor weather, at basketball. In summer he camps. Snapshotted in a sweater he looks like a compromise between Babe Ruth batting a home run and Hofmann playing the piano.

When Beatty was first a young lawyer in Montreal he was so lonesome for the city he came from that he used to go down to the station to see the Toronto train pull in. He did not dream then that some day he would be the man that pulls all the trains in; that from his desk he should have a periscope on the world--every day--the greatest intelligence department in America. When he was a school lad in Thorold, afterwards at the Upper Canada "Prep." (where he got so bad a report that his father was advised to take him out of school), he had no idea that he would be Chancellor of Queen's University.

The system and the man. Determining which most affects the other is like the old problem of the hen and the egg. But here, anyhow, is a great system. No man venerates it more than Beatty. He does not even consent to call it a corporation; prefers to think of it as an a.s.sociation, imbued with enthusiasm and loyalty. Now and then he publicly discusses national ownership; none can do it better. He did it at Thorold soon after he was appointed. He argued it in Ottawa with Cabinet Ministers. He did it in Winnipeg. One suspects that Beatty's ability to do this was one of his qualifications for the presidency.

A year before Beatty became president a man high up in the system predicted that the C.P.R. would spend a million dollars to campaign against Bolshevism. He failed to foresee that the stolid old bulwark of things as they are would never need to do any such thing. All it needed to spend was Beatty who, within six months of the time he changed the sign on his door, had convinced the system that a sort of new optimistic vitality had got hold of it. There was once a cynical proverb around those offices: "It's cheaper to buy editors than newspapers." One hears very little of it now. The annual meeting of the Directors may be fine copy for the _Montreal Gazette_, but the yearly banquet of the officials is a matter of real public interest, especially to the young President. There is a psychology in this--"a.s.sociation"--that is not a corporation. How does he gauge it?

From the officials. He does not visit the Angus shops; though if he did he would be welcome. It was an old axiom of Van Horne that what the head is, so also will the system be. Beatty extends the axiom--to include the officials. He would have them radiate optimism, not particularly caring that they get it from him.

For the past two years optimism has been needed. C.P. reports are not what they used to be. Even the stock exchanges tell the tale. But in comparison with American lines, with other Canadian systems--ah! here is always some comfort. Trust Beatty to miss no chance of intimating that he would much prefer to have real compet.i.tion from Government roads. He fervently hopes for Government ownership to succeed. C.P.

cannot thrive on weak compet.i.tion. He has no fear that any sane Government will try absorbing the C.P.R. Even farmers, he thinks, would soon settle down to a sense of responsibility. The old pioneer is a hard organization to make into a tail that does not wag the dog.

Steadily he has advertised to the public that the system is still the handbook of efficiency; let Government roads imitate. National ownership, being impersonal, somewhat Bolshevistic, and very vague, cannot develop the intensive "super-loyalty" of the big private system vested in a board of directors, and the chief.

Since ever he became chief Beatty has made this clear; for a purpose.

Did I omit to say that he is the first C.P.R. president without whiskers; the first with a college degree; the first Canadian born, the first lawyer, the first bachelor and the first man from Toronto who had occupied that position; the youngest of all the presidents; that he used to be an expert at college Rugby; that at Upper Canada "Prep." he was much addicted to pugilism; not to mention the discarded tilt of his Fedora? If so it is because the man himself sets no value on these things. His faith is in the collective personality, called the Canadian Pacific, built up on the Personal Equation.

But Ottawa--what of that? Almost ever since Ottawa was, the C.P.R. has been said to own it. Governments of either party have never been inhospitable to the benign octopus--centipede it became--that had its origin in the Parliament of Canada and wrecked one Tory Government.

The penalty of transcontinental railways is that they require to have mortgages on governments. Presently the worm turns. But that usually costs more money than the mortgage. We are now paying off the mortgages of two great systems. The C.P.R. mortgage was paid long ago.

The President of the C.P.R. is usually regarded as second only to the Premier in point of national management. But Premiers and governments come and go; the President stays on. Suppose that in the year 19-- there should be a Cabinet mainly of farmers. Alberta has a farmer government. Saskatchewan with a "Liberal" government has a Cabinet mainly of farmers. Manitoba sometimes has to remind herself that Premier Norris is a kind of farmer. Ontario has a farmer Premier and more than half a Cabinet of farmers.

This is the age of the farmers' innings. Suppose that a Cabinet of super-Agriculturists at the Capital some day should not agree with Mr.

Beatty that farmers when they get responsibilities measure up and settle down to conservatism. Such a Cabinet might not remember that the C.P.R. had really done so very much for the prairies in comparison with what it has got from the West. It might decree that a lawyer President should be called upon to elucidate why he judges that so efficient a Personal Equation as the C.P.R. should not be "nationalized", if not government-owned, for the good of the whole people, and especially of the people whose traffic creates most of the revenues?

This is merely supposing. In any case Mr. Beatty would be master of the occasion. The lawyer who argued against himself and won at Three Rivers might be able to put up a more convincing argument to Ottawa Farmers than Lord Shaughnessy did to the Union Government when he offered to amalgamate the C.P.R. with the Government roads providing the management should be C.P.R. and the dividends guaranteed.

But of course this is a merely hypothetical argument. There may never be a Farmer Administration in Ottawa. And if there ever should be, we may trust to conservative and progressive old C.P.R. to do its share of injecting a "sense of responsibility" into a Farmer Cabinet to help it measure up and settle down, even if some farmer should buy C.P. shares enough to get himself elected as a director. As it stands to-day in the estimation of the travelling public, who may or may not care a copper about the personality of its rugged and efficient lawyer president, the Canadian Pacific is the one greatest proof that Canada needs no revolution which will interfere with the morale of that system. In fact so long as the C.P.R. holds its own an economic revolution in Canada is impossible.

A BOURGEOIS MASTER OF QUEBEC

SIR LOMER GOUIN

Early in January, 1917, a remarkable dinner was held in Toronto, the first of its kind ever held in that city of Orange Walks. Protestants and Catholics sat side by side. They applauded the same sentiments.

Orator after orator dug into the mines of national idioms. They cracked jokes and told stories and worked up climaxes. The three hundred rose again and again with gla.s.ses of orangeade, and Apollinaris, toasting--Quebec, Ontario, and United Canada. They waved napkins and cheered and sang again and again "For he's a jolly good fellow". A Methodist minister sat at the back of the room next a Congregationalist preacher and pretended to unwrap a _de luxe_ cigar.

Orangemen sat at the same table with Catholics. Macs hobn.o.bbed with 'eaus. They autographed one another's menus. The books of songs were bilingual--French and English. "G.o.d Save the King" was sung in both languages. "O Canada" was done in French. Methodist orators vied with French speakers. Col. George Denison sat next Gen. Lessard. They fraternized as soldiers. The Methodist local-preacher Premier of Ontario sat with the Roman Catholic Premier of Quebec. Sentiment ran high. But no French-Canadian was so emotional as N. W. Rowell, who glorified the heroes of Courcellette; and no Anglo-Canadian was quite so stolid, serious and impressive with homely common sense as Sir Lomer Gouin, the Premier of Quebec. This man spoke slowly, ma.s.sively, almost gutturally like a Saxon, in fluent but accented English. He was far less excitable than the Premier of Ontario on the same subject:

THE RACE UNITY OF CANADA PREFIGURED IN THE BONNE ENTENTE

Three hundred public-spirited men of whom eighty came from Quebec were as one family on this.

At one in the morning the concomity broke up. Not a drop of vin or liqueur in any form had been served. The enthusiasm was, therefore, as natural as the tide of the St. Lawrence, which in the form of the great lakes and Niagara does its best to put its arms round the neck of Ontario before it cuts through the heart of Quebec. To the pure imagination it was somewhat as though a procession of St. Jean Baptiste had suddenly dreamed it was an Orange Walk.