Читать книгу The Romance of the Canadian Pacific Railway - R. G. MacBeth - Страница 6

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The name of Alexander Mackenzie, the stonemason, who succeeded Sir John Macdonald as Premier of Canada in 1873, deserves to be uttered with profound respect. By the most intense application to work and the most diligent use of his opportunities in the right way, he rose steadily, not only in circumstances, but in the esteem of his fellow-countrymen, till he attained the highest office in the gift of the Canadian people. Born in the Highlands of Scotland, he came out to Canada as a young stonecutter. He returned some thirty years later to the romantic scenes of his childhood as the Premier of the Dominion, a credit alike to the land of his birth and the land of his adoption. Once, in my student days, I met him in Winnipeg. He had made the trip to the far West, but was in poor health—a rather pathetic figure, I thought, whose unflinching resistance of down-grade influences had made his public life harder than stonecutting.

But while we thus pay him personal tribute, we find that, whether as a result of the dissolution of the Allan Company, or pressure of lean years, or the lack of enthusiasm amongst his following in the House, Mackenzie, despite his good intentions, made little progress with the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway during his five years in office. It was not easy for Mackenzie and his supporters, after attacking the general extravagance of Sir John Macdonald’s plan for a transcontinental, to accommodate themselves to carrying out the scheme of a railway from ocean to ocean. Edward Blake, Mackenzie’s great lieutenant, had openly said more than once that the rounding out of Confederation by pledging a railway to British Columbia within a fixed term was too costly. The population of the West Coast Province was only some ten thousand or so of white people, he said, and this country was “a sea of mountains.” One of the chief newspapers of Mr. Mackenzie’s party said that the Canadian Pacific “would not pay for axle grease” over certain sections. Mr. Blake, it is true, in 1891 visited the West Coast over the completed railway, and made a brilliantly humorous and eloquent apology for his mistaken conception of the country. But that was too late to help Mackenzie with his problem, and the fact that Mr. Blake and some others of his party actually voted in the House against Mackenzie’s proposal regarding the Esquimault railway on Vancouver Island did not help the heavily burdened Premier. But one must allow that it is much easier to be optimistic about British Columbia now than it was at that time. Very few people then dreamed of the development that could and would take place in the Province which Mr. Blake, speaking for thousands in the East, called “a sea of mountains.” It looked like that in those days before the world knew that British Columbia had not only mines and forests and fish, but that vast areas would be opened up along the rivers and in the mountain valleys which would prove immensely adapted to agriculture, fruit-growing and dairying. Therefore let us be kind to the men who were sceptical about the whole railway undertaking. We are quoting their scepticism here only to show the problem that Premier Mackenzie had to face when he came into power in 1873. Under all the circumstances he did the best he could at the time—that is, the best that could be done by any man who lacked the full-hearted support of some of his own friends, and who felt that to meet the demands of the naturally impatient and almost resentful British Columbia, was practically impossible in the lean years that seemed imminent and beyond his power to control.

But Mackenzie began on the problem and we find him, in 1874, in an election address to his own constituents in Lambton, Ontario, unfolding his plan. Briefly, the transportation system was to be a sort of amphibious animal. Mackenzie, realizing that traffic by water is the cheapest type of transportation, thought he saw a possibility of securing a transcontinental, without undue cost, by utilizing “the magnificent water stretches” across Canada, linking them together by rail as funds would be available. In this way he claimed that railway construction would be gradual enough to avoid excessive financial expenditure, and that the country would be gradually settled. Settlement would keep abreast with railway construction and thus the possibility of having the railway going ahead of the settlement across an uninhabited, and therefore unproductive, country would be eliminated.

Mr. Mackenzie was perfectly sincere in this, as he was in everything. The plan was not without merit under the circumstances, but it had defects which arose out of a lack of knowledge of the Western country generally, and particularly of the attitude of the people of British Columbia. It also ignored the strange, but characteristic, impulses of human nature in regard to migration. Every now and then in history some section of humanity strikes its tents and goes on the march, railway or no railway. Especially does the Star of the Empire draw people westward. Before there was a railway in the West at all, many of my own kith and kin loaded their few belongings on ox-carts and took their way five hundred miles north-westward to Prince Albert, on the North Saskatchewan. And so also will some people go on in advance of the railway, despite all advice to the contrary. For years I heard it said by some that had the Canadian Pacific not been built so rapidly, settlement would have been more compact along the line. But this theory is contradicted by the actual fact, as we saw it, that when the trains were only running to Brandon, west of Winnipeg, settlers were leaving the train there and trekking on westward with prairie schooners. Great numbers may not thus go forward in any particular case, but since a country grows by the enterprise of the adventurous, it becomes the duty of such a country to follow with utilities, the people who thus widen the horizon of the land.

Moreover, Mackenzie’s well-intentioned policy of using the water stretches would have made transportation too slow and too expensive for shippers, owing to the constant need for transfers, with necessary delays and damages. And, most important of all, that policy indicated too tardy a construction of the transcontinental to satisfy British Columbia, which had entered confederation on the distinct understanding that a railway would be built to the Pacific within reasonable time.

Mackenzie made an effort, by sending Mr. J. D. Edgar to British Columbia, to secure a modification in the terms of Confederation in regard to railway construction. This mission was resented in British Columbia, and Mr. Edgar was recalled. The people of British Columbia looked on the attempt to change the Confederation terms as a breach of faith on the part of Canada, and said so in their usual straight-flung words. Both parties put the case before Lord Carnarvon, who offered to arbitrate. His award was on the whole rather favourable to Mackenzie’s effort for modification, and was accepted in the meantime as the best obtainable. British Columbia, feeling that even the modified terms would not be carried out, began to discuss withdrawing from Confederation, and motions to that effect were actually submitted in the Legislature.

Things were not looking well, and that master diplomat, Lord Dufferin, then Governor-General of Canada, resolved to visit the West Coast, accompanied by his gracious lady. They crossed via Chicago and San Francisco by rail, thence by H.M.S. Amethyst to Vancouver Island. They were warmly welcomed to Victoria, but were given, from the beginning, to understand that British Columbia wanted the railway and wanted it without delay. At one point they saw a horse blanketed and upon the blanket were the words “Good, but not iron.”

In Victoria arches were numerous. One arch had an inscription, “Our railway iron rusts,” and another very conspicuous one had the menacing message “Carnarvon terms or separation.”

Lord Dufferin knew his relation to the Crown and to the Government of the day too well to allow his courtesy to run away with his conception of duty as Governor-General of Canada, and so he declined to drive under the arch which had upon it the threat of secession. So he ordered the carriage to detour until that arch was passed. Afterwards Lady Dufferin said, “The Governor-General would have driven under the arch if one letter had been changed so as to have the inscription read ‘The Carnarvon Terms or Reparation.’ ” The incident caused some excitement, but Lord Dufferin knew his constitutional law too well to be moved. On the whole the visit of this brilliant diplomat and magnetic orator made a great impression for good. His speech at the close of the tour of the Coast was a noble eulogy of the wonderful beauty and potential wealth of British Columbia. While not becoming a partisan advocate for the Dominion Government, Lord Dufferin expressed his view that Mr. Mackenzie had done his best under all the circumstances, and would continue so to do while he was in power. The speech of the eloquent and tactful Governor-General had a pronounced effect in allaying the indignation of the people against the Government of the day. They settled down to wait development with as good grace as possible.

However, after waiting two years more without seeing any railway construction begun on either the mainland of British Columbia or Vancouver Island, Premier George A. Walkem, in the Legislature at Victoria, moved the famous resolution to the effect that unless the Dominion started railway construction by May of 1879, the Province of British Columbia should withdraw from the Confederation and even ask damages from Canada for delay in carrying out their railway promises to the Province. This extraordinary motion was carried by fourteen to nine, with the probable intention of waking up both the Imperial and Canadian Governments to the discontent on the Western Coast. The resolution reached Ottawa in October, 1878, just after the Mackenzie Government had been defeated, and owing to the confusion caused by the change it was put into some pidgeonhole for a rest, and did not reach London till March, 1879. By that time Sir John A. Macdonald, who had come back to power with his aggressive and indomitable Railway Minister, Sir Charles Tupper, was getting down to a new programme of railway building, and British Columbia, in consequence, was becoming more contented and hopeful. So no one asked any questions when the famous secession resolution of the British Columbia legislature found oblivion in the files of Downing Street.

All this does not mean that Mr. Mackenzie was inactive in the matter of the transcontinental railway. Considering the facts we have mentioned already, namely, that many of his chief supporters were lukewarm in regard to the whole project, which they considered premature, and the further fact that there was a cycle of lean years, he strove to get things moving, but the chariot wheels dragged. There was no popular enthusiasm over the undertaking, because the times were hard and there was general failure on the part of the people to get a vision of the illimitable possibilities that lay to westward. But some progress was made. Extensive surveys were carried forward. And several contracts were let for the easier portions of the route. The hard places, like the North Shore of Lake Superior, and the mountains in British Columbia, were not attempted. Lord and Lady Dufferin, at Emerson, Manitoba, in 1877, drove the first two spikes in the portion which started at the international boundary-line, where the railways linked up with an American line. This was later called the Emerson Branch, and ran from the boundary east of the Red River through St. Boniface, across from Winnipeg, to East Selkirk. From Selkirk a portion of the railway to Thunder Bay, on Lake Superior, was begun. It was the plan of the Mackenzie Government to cross the Red River at Selkirk, and strike westward over the prairies, side-tracking Winnipeg, which was then becoming a considerable centre of population. I recall a locomotive round-house at East Selkirk built in Mackenzie’s time, but later abandoned when the line was changed to run through Winnipeg. Budding political orators made merry over this round-house, as being the only assurance they had that a road which would require the stabling of iron horses at a divisional point would some day be constructed.

The slow progress of transcontinental railway building afforded ammunition to the opponents of the Mackenzie Government in the House of Commons. And there is no record of an Opposition ever allowing an opportunity to oppose to go by unused. In one year we find that redoubtable fighter, Dr. (later Sir) Charles Tupper, moving a long resolution urging the Government “to employ the available funds of the Dominion to complete the road.” This was voted down. Next year that unique, somewhat peculiar, but quite brilliantly versatile publicist, Mr. Amor de Cosmos, of British Columbia, moved a vote of censure on the Government for the slowness of their building of the road to the Coast. This resolution did not get far in the House. The Coast was so far away that the project of building all the way to the Pacific gave even the Opposition a chill when it came squarely before them. Hon. George W. Ross, a Mackenzie supporter, moved that only such progress should be attempted as would “not increase the existing rates of taxation,” which manifestly would mean not much progress. Dr. Tupper came back to the attack in April, 1877, with a motion of censure, but this was negatived also. During all this time that astute statesman, Sir John A. Macdonald, was studying the political horoscope, and all of a sudden, in 1878, he propounded a policy of protection and railway construction which caught the popular imagination and he was swept into power again. There was a swift revival of optimism, because there was a revival of trade, and the wave carried the Canadian Pacific Railway enterprise on its crest to new heights of success.