The Masques of Ottawa Part 23

There was always money to be had. A map of Canada in Mackenzie's satchel when he went to England to see money lenders seemed under his talk as big as the whole British Empire. It was not common Empire patriotism to refuse either the money or the guarantees for the bonds.

The whole of Canada backed Mackenzie's notes. It was he, not Sir Thomas White, who invented the principle of Victory Loans whereby the nation becomes your banker. Between building a new line and operating a line built last year, there was no system of accounting that could audit his books. The centipede became so vast and complex that no banker could begin to understand it. Mackenzie never made the effort.

He was developing Canada.

The Saskatchewan valley was the one great trunk Eldorado, the greatest discovery of natural resources ever made in Canada. The settlers in that valley wanted more people, the people wanted the railways, the Government needed the voters, and Mackenzie wanted settlers, people, voters, Government and all. If a Government was obstreperous, Mackenzie might lend a heavy hand to help turn it out at the next election. It was not proper for a Government to obstruct him. He was the over-man.

In no other nation has there ever been a man who could play such a prodigious and prodigal game with the resources of the whole country.

Mackenzie mobilized the nation before the war. Millions of people in Canada used to regard him as a sort of magnified Daniel Drew--the father of Wall Street and watered stock and corrupt-contract railways.

But Mackenzie was a broader man than Drew, with a much higher sense of honour. Drew admitted that he was a wonderful Methodist, that he had been a profiteer of the Civil War, and that he had starved a railway of rails so that it killed a large number of people in an accident.

Mackenzie was no Methodist; and he never was a profiteer from any emergency of the people. He wanted Canada to prosper. All his profits must come from greater wealth in Canada, which he did much to produce.

Mackenzie had more faith in Canada than most of the politicians had.

He wanted a great Canada, chief Dominion in a great Empire, The best way to conserve a nation's wealth, he said once, is to develop its resources. We never had such a developer. He never was a born railwayman, any more than he was a pure financier. He was a colossal exploiter of national resources by means of borrowed money. In the era before Mackenzie we had Clergue at the Soo. Clergue was a pigmy forerunner of Mackenzie. What Clergue did in Algoma the other man aimed to do for the whole country, And he almost did it.

Asked once why he gave so much leeway to men like Mackenzie and Mann, Sir Wilfrid Laurier is reported to have said:

"Well, what other kind of men could you have to do such remarkable work?"

Beaverbrook said at a dinner in Canada not long ago:

"I never was a William Mackenzie. I created nothing as he did."

The debacle of Mackenzie railways was never contemplated by Mackenzie.

He did not even imagine that it was possible--except that he was prophetically troubled by the ambition of Laurier to create a third transcontinental. He had the right of way in this. He and Mann had developed the Canadian Northern out of a little stub line in Dauphin, Manitoba. The thing grew because it served the people, and the people lived in a fertile country that needed a road to market. The whole basic idea of the Mackenzie roads was to give more and more people a road to market. The original idea of the Grand Trunk Pacific and the National Transcontinental was to rival the Canadian Pacific monument to John A. Macdonald by erecting a railway monument to Wilfrid Laurier.

The race of the railways just about broke the nation's neck. It was not all the fault of Mackenzie that the race ever began, or that it was carried on to insanity. He was a practical philosopher to perceive that a Government is an elective corporation capable of manipulation in the interest of an all-Canada enterprise needed and wanted by the people. He was a master cynic to surmise that when the future came to balance the accounts, Father Time would be a very bewildered a.s.signee.

The war was very ill advised. Mackenzie had no use for war. He never could see in the predicament of a nation any chance to profit for himself. He wanted perpetual prosperity. It never occurred to him, perhaps, that some day critics would arise to say that the country called Canada had done more for William Mackenzie than he had ever done for the country; and that when the parent utility of the cycle which he had helped to create was declared bankrupt, he had no rights in the case whatever and never should have been paid a dollar of indemnity for the common stock.

But as the country had submitted to Mackenzie's system of building railways, so it was compelled to be content with the Royal Commission method of adjudicating what the builders should get out of the wreck.

Financiers and politicians and common citizens may wrangle till doomsday about the ethics of this debacle. They will never get anybody to understand it. The thing is an economic outlaw like its author.

Mackenzie as a common storekeeper would have been sold for taxes. As a railway builder he staged the greatest pageant of industry ever known in Canada, and when the show went off the road because it was no longer able to pay its bills, took what he could salvage of the properties and left other men to wrestle with the reconstruction.

We shall never have another Mackenzie. Bigger men may arise. More unusual characters may stalk out of obscurity into places of eminence and power. But there never again can be an era like the Mackenzie epoch, because that kind of experience is suffered and enjoyed but once in a nation's lifetime. He still has big interests, some of them gradually being taken over by governments and munic.i.p.al corporations.

But he has shot his bolt, and it was a Jovian big one. No doubt he is enormously rich. That does not matter. Canada no longer cares whether he is rich or poor. Once a demiG.o.d in our national ledgers, he is now a grizzled relique of his former energy. He used to be a despot feared by those who had to work under him, admired for his superhuman audacity and power to get what he wanted just because he knew why and when he wanted it, and capable of inspiring an almost insane loyalty to a man-made system that never was anything at all but an economic mirage.

He is now just William Mackenzie, more or less a citizen, now and then interviewed laconically by a reporter who never can extract anything but arid commonplaces from what he says to the public.

Because, to William Mackenzie there never was any real public. What he cared about was the prosperous nation upon which he could build and build without limit till he died. When the nation came to a crisis in the war he did nothing to help it, except to let the Railway War Board pool his lines for traffic and the Government commandeer his ships.

The man who years before had been regarded as the greatest doer in Canada, when the country and all Mackenzie's works along with it came to the great test, never so much as lifted a personal finger to help in the work that had to be done. Mackenzie had done his work in prosperity. In the great predicament he had no function. The nation paid him his ducats and let him go.

This, if we are concerned about the man value of Canada, is a tragedy.

For there was in William Mackenzie somehow, with all his ruthlessness and audacity and semi-piratical creed, the element of a kind of great man. There is in his uncommon face the look of a man who with less excess of one quality might have become a wonderful citizen. Nature made him vastly selfish on a scale big enough to devise a totally new scheme for over-capitalizing Canada. She denied him the commoner human qualities that make a man a constructive citizen whether his country is in weal or woe.

The epic which Mackenzie and his partner achieved in this country out-bid in dimensions, variety and the use of practical imagination, even the work of Rhodes in South Africa. It was a feat of economic and financial engineering which but for its peculiarly selfish energy and ruthless characteristics, might have become a monumental contribution to the human welfare of Canada. No man of common brain or conventional ethics could have been the dynamic head of such a work. For years, decades, this astounding adventurer exercised his precarious despotism over the country that he might make its prosperity a factor in his own success. In gambling with its securities he hoped to multiply its wealth without diminishing its happiness. The constructive imagination and tireless energy that he expended on his great cycle of utilities, had it been spent by a poet would have produced epics and dramas. But in all the things he did and the words he said, there is no record of any sentiment of sacrifice for the good of a nation.

William Mackenzie had his day, while Governments rose and fell. His day is done. The public which he dazzled and outwardly despised has no credulity left for any further hero-worship of such a man. "Well, what does Mr. Mackenzie want now?" was the oft-repeated query of the bewildered Laurier to Mackenzie agents in Ottawa. No Canadian Premier will ever ask such a question again. Ottawa has no further possibilities for William Mackenzie of any interest to the public. The kind of prosperity created by such men as he is played out in Canada forever.

The forecast than Mackenzie and Flavelle might form a new two-man junta to operate National railways was too absurd even to merit denial. Such a partnership would merely revive the old Schoolman debate of the Middle Ages--What happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object? The two mentalities are incompatible. For twenty years the chief common ground between them was the Canadian Bank of Commerce, of which Sir Joseph is a director, who long ago discovered that the total a.s.sets of the bank were but a turbine in the Niagara of Mackenzie finance.

And William Mackenzie who built the conspiracy of enormous interests with which his name is identified, was never meant to be a railway operator at all. One might as well expect Lloyd George to be a successful manager of Sunlight Soap and of Lord Leverhulme.

THE IMPERIAL BRAINSTORM

LORD BEAVERBROOK

Lord Beaverbrook could stroll into an Arab camp and in five minutes be psychologically persona grata as the man who could make something out of almost nothing. He could learn the Arab language, adopt their customs, interpret their ideas, transact their tribal business, and go away without an Arab to admit that the strange new chief--or whatever they might call him--would ever learn to be a true Arab.

This man without a congenial country has an unlimited talent for adapting himself to the necessities of time, place and opportunity. He has little or no power to a.s.similate himself to the real life of the people. He trailed like a comet through the land of his birth and left it in a mirage of finance before Canada had made him a citizen. He went to England where in a few months he had made himself intimate with public affairs; and in ten years, "with all his honours thick upon him," he has not yet become an Englishman.

Once only I met this extraordinary man, at close range, for a number of hours. He was a most absorbing study; and he knew it. There never was a moment when Beaverbrook could not consciously estimate the effect of his actions upon some other man, or group of men. As an actor he is not a mediocrity.

A personal friend vividly describes meeting him at a small semi-private dinner in a Canadian city. The ostensible occasion was a mere complimentary affair to his lordship. The psychological objective was--something else. There began the conjecture. What was it?

It must be inferred. There are some men who study the effect of themselves upon a group. The group method of psychology is essentially Beaverbrookian.

A number of speeches had been pre-arranged for this dinner on behalf of various interests. At the close of the talks Beaverbrook was asked to respond to a toast of his own health. He did so in a perfectly amazing confessional of a speech, saying things which he said he felt sure no journalist present would publish. He was asked questions. Each question meant one more speech. He made four in all, occupying much more than an hour of time in a most graphic and humanly interesting account of things that had happened behind the curtain in British politics, shrewd estimates of the signs of the times, forecasts of coming events and vivid delineations of great men whom he had intimately met in various parts of Europe.

In all this there was not a trace of embarra.s.sment or of suspicion. The little dynamo with the prodigious head and the baby mouth and the intense, deepset, restless eyes stood by his chair, and with knuckles on the table much of the time, talked down into the flowers directly in front of him. He spoke sometimes in a husky, low voice, now and again in a smothered shriek, again in a tragic whisper. He was in a small gathering and he seemed to know that though the dingy, mysterious room was somewhat high, he had no need to lift his voice to the shrill impetuous discord that is said to characterize his speeches in Commons or Lords. He was carried away by some indefinable atmosphere. What it was he scarcely knew. After the dinner he shook hands with people, delivered himself of a number of snappy brusqueries, laughed a good bit and, almost the last to leave the charmed precinct where he had unbosomed himself among "congenial" souls, he wandered out.

Next day, lying poseurishly on a lounge in his room at the hotel, he said to a confidante who had been with him at the dinner:

"Bunting!" (that is not the true name) "Will you kindly repeat to me some of the things I seem to have said last evening. I know I talked an unconscionably great deal. What on earth did I say?"

As it had been a perfectly abstemious occasion, one imagines that Beaverbrook at the dinner was sincere, though playing the actor, and that in his room he was both theatrical and insincere.

This man has a confusing, but in his own mind seldom confused, orbit of his own. He was a conundrum in Canada. He is an enigma in England.

That he still considers himself a Canadian, because he was born here, fortuned here and voluntarily exiled from here after he had completely mystified a large number of people as to his working psychology, is proved by the fact that he continues to come back here. He also professes to be manning the _Daily Express_ with Canadians. He has been for ten years the intimate of Bonar Law, also a distinguished Canadian of sorts. And a few months ago there was a rumour, which no one remembers him to have refuted, that he was a likely candidate for the Governor-Generalship of Canada. Of course if ever Rideau Hall should take Beaverbrook for a tenant, it will be time to take refuge in a Canadian republic.

It is easy to think disagreeable things about Beaverbrook, because he is so enormously interesting, so pathologically unusual, and altogether so brilliant and resourceful a phenomenon. I have called him the Imperial brainstorm. A dozen other t.i.tles would fit him as well. There are times when one almost imagines himself mingling an element of real liking for the man with one's unfailing admiration of his remarkable ability. But always when you feel like that cordial handshake and talking to him with brusque familiarity, there is the intuitive feeling that one of the two, perhaps both, might live to regret it.

You cannot absorb the atmosphere of such a man. Whatever the sterling qualities of his character, the approximate miracles of his achievements, the warlike strategy of his career, you judge him at last by that indefinable but inexorable law of common congeniality. To live at close range with Beaverbrook, to become part of his daily scheme of vibrations, to work either with, or for, or even over him as a regular part of one's programme would be to a normal man a penalty almost amounting to a crime.

Though of course tastes differ, even in companions. There are people who rather like hobn.o.bbing with Beaverbrook. Some are interested in his idiosyncrasies, as though he were a good subject for a novel. Some enjoy the sensation of playing moth to a social flame. Others--perhaps--have a deep respect for his money which, like Carnegie's, is supposed to be a perplexity to himself to know how to spend it that he may die poor.

Well, the n.o.ble lord has his idioms. Discussing the details of the little dinner already referred to a flippant but devoted critic said:

"I think he would enjoy speaking right in front of that huge fireplace.

He would consider it Napoleonic."

As to the social orbit of Beaverbrook, one may suspect that it is a rather exotic atmosphere in which the sense of true human equation is lost in a jumble. A man who can entertain almost simultaneously, at his country home, financiers, politicians, authors, and actresses from his own theatre at Hammersmith, may be regarded as a shrewd social mergerist but scarcely as a subtle entertainer of congenial souls. As for the discomfort of knowing what to do with his money, Beaverbrook has never complained; during his latest visit to Canada he was offered and he refused the purchase of two bankrupt newspapers each of which thought that the acquisition of such a side line to the _Daily Express_ might enable him to do some of the good in this country which he failed to achieve while he lived here.

Estimating this man by the superficial but rather subtle qualities by which he has achieved success, it seems a sort of irony to think what he might have done and did not do for the country of his birth. What did he ever do for Canada? Before the war--nothing. He made huge fortunes here. He created mergers here. He started consolidated companies here that in time fought their way into the appreciated valuations of the stock market. He became Canada's greatest adventurer in creating a sort of "wealth" from the merging of small, sometimes decrepit, concerns under a new name and new issues of stock; just as Mackenzie was our greatest adventurer in creating wealth from borrowed money. Beaverbrook worked mainly with small groups to whom he left the task of raising most of the capital. Thus his personal gains came neither from the immediately increased earnings of companies which he amalgamated, nor directly from the pockets of the shareholders. Beaverbrook never made a dollar by defrauding a director or luring unsuspicious dollars out of the pockets of common people. That species of tactics so often practised by men who are near criminals was quite beneath him. The laboratory where he got his results was the stock market, which of course has its own codes of ethics and plays its own remorseless game of making or breaking men.

His career here had most of the elements of romance. Son of a poor parson born in a cross-roads Ontario hamlet, brilliant but erratic student at Dalhousie University, down-at-the-heels insurance agent in Halifax, youthful merger of two small banks at a time when he was unable to pay for his own clothes--we have here symptoms of a career which might have turned into a character of high value in Canadian politics, public service or social reform.

But Nature thrives on migrations. Even a man sometimes takes better root when he is transplanted. The Beaverbrook that England has is a more unusual character than the Max Aitken that Canada lost. Canada to be sure had lost enough brilliant men to other nations and imported enough able men from abroad. It was time to produce and to keep our own. There was national work for them all to do. Aitken came up in the boom time of Canada. He fitted the time. A nation's financial adversity was no occasion for him. He followed the wake and profited by the experiences of builders of railways, industries, banks and provinces. Every move forward of the country in commercial expansion was a nudge ahead for his chariot of fortune. He was the most successful "bull" factor Canada ever had. But in all probability, were he to be flung into one of the demoralized nations of democratized Europe he could make money even in disaster.