Читать книгу Ordeal by Fire - Ralph Allen - Страница 15

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WELL, the first I knowed the king got a-going, and you could hear him over everybody; and next he went a-charging up onto the platform, and the preacher he begged him to speak to the people, and he done it. He told them he was a pirate—been a pirate for thirty years out in the Indian Ocean—and his crew was thinned out considerable last spring in a fight, and he was home now to take out some fresh men, and thanks to goodness he’d been robbed last night and put ashore off of a steamboat without a cent, and he was glad of it; it was the blessedest thing that ever happened to him, because he was a changed man now, and happy for the first time in his life; and, poor as he was, he was going to start right off and work his way back to the Indian Ocean, and put in the rest of his life trying to turn the pirates into the true path; for he could do it better than anybody else, being acquainted with all pirate crews in that ocean; and though it would take him a long time to get there without money, he would get there anyway, and every time he convinced a pirate he would say to him, “Don’t you thank me, don’t you give me no credit; it all belongs to them dear people in Pokeville camp-meeting, natural brothers and benefactors of the race, and that dear preacher there, the truest friend a pirate ever had!”

And then he busted into tears, and so did everybody. Then somebody sings out, “Take up a collection for him, take up a collection!” Well, a half-a-dozen made a jump to do it, but somebody sings out, “Let him pass the hat around!” Then everybody said it, the preacher too.

So the king went all through the crowd with his hat, swabbing his eyes, and blessing the people and praising them and thanking them for being so good to the poor pirates away off there; and every little while the prettiest kind of girls, with the tears running down their cheeks, would up and ask him would he let them kiss him for to remember him by; and he always done it; and some of them he hugged and kissed as many as five or six times—and he was invited to stay a week; and everybody wanted him to live in their houses, and said they’d think it was an honor; but he said as this was the last day of the camp-meeting he couldn’t do no good, and besides he was in a sweat to get to the Indian Ocean right off and go to work on the pirates.

When we got back to the raft and he come to count up he found he had collected eighty-seven dollars and seventy-five cents. And then he had fetched away a three-gallon jug of whisky, too, that he found under a wagon when he was starting home through the woods. The king said, take it all around, it laid over any day he’d ever put in in the missionarying line.

In its heyday of business adventure Canada never quite produced a pair of entrepreneurs to match the king and the duke of Mark Twain. But in William Mackenzie and Donald Mann—each to be knighted in the fullness of time—it did create two of the most engaging dreamers who ever persuaded their country that what was good for them was good for the country too. They were a rare and able pair, both sprung from good Ontario stock, of the best Scots Presbyterian blood and persuasion. They met first in western Canada, following the golden trail of the C.P.R. By this year, 1914, they loomed as mightily on the stage of current events as Borden and Laurier; compared with their granite Scots-Canadian figures, the German Kaiser and even the British Prime Minister were distant and indistinct.

With their Canadian Northern Railway, Mackenzie and Mann had by now achieved prodigies of promotion that made such other giants in their field as Van Horne, Lord Shaughnessy, Charlie Hays, and J. J. Hill appear as rather stodgy and timid. They had begun with a chaotic and insignificant little complex of feeder lines on the sparse and unprofitable prairies. But they had expanded quickly with government help of various kinds.

All governments, municipal, provincial, and federal, had recognized since the last half of the nineteenth century that only steel rails could galvanize the great mass of Canada to life and prevent it from sinking into paralysis like a lumpish giant. And in those times the notion of public ownership, public utility, and public building was relatively strange and even vaguely terrifying—more so by far than the well-accepted practice of putting public money into private business. Allying their own instincts to the popular philosophy of government, Mackenzie and Mann stretched out eagerly across the country, devouring public money by the sackful.

Mackenzie, the small-town teacher and occasional storekeeper, had become gifted in the ways of high finance. Mann, the student for the ministry and lumber-camp foreman, had become a highly competent construction boss, perfectly willing and able to beat up the average lumberjack with one hand tied behind his back. They had reached their zenith together at a highly favorable time.

The gigantic C.P.R., despite its scandals and its skeletons, was working to the manifest advantage of the country as well as that of its proprietors. All but a few socialists—and socialists were then very few—accepted it as an example of how public help to private enterprise could end in public good. On the other hand, other railroads, notably the Grand Trunk, were in deep trouble even with the substantial aid they had had from the privy purse. As the confident and plausible Mackenzie and Mann continued to expand their Canadian Northern, Laurier and most other Canadians were staunchly in favor of what was to be—depending on the ultimate fate of the Grand Trunk—either the country’s third or its second transcontinental line.

The king and the duke carried through a bewildering array of schemes for finding money. Behind an impenetrable fog of debentures, mortgages, bond flotations, loans, subsidies, and guarantees, they disappeared from the ken of the ordinary Canadian and went on with the exciting business of putting up their railroad. They built hotels, created telegraph companies, express companies, and grain elevators, acquired coal and iron mines, halibut fisheries, and whaling stations. They gave business to subcontractors who were frequently their own creators. They created trust companies and bought and sold a street railway. In time they found themselves so much in debt to the state in its various forms that the state was faced with a difficult decision: either cut off the subsidies and guarantees, force Mackenzie and Mann into bankruptcy, and admit that the state had been grotesquely careless with the taxpayers’ money, or continue the guarantees and subsidies in the hope that Mackenzie and Mann would succeed as the C.P.R. had done in not dissimilar circumstances before.

As outright grants and gifts, the Canadian Northern had by 1913 received more than seven million acres of government land, as much as the area of Belgium or Holland. In addition to these grants of property from the Dominion and the friendlier of the provinces, the promoters had been given about $30,000,000 in cash. For their services as launchers and managers, their creditors had allowed them to keep almost all the common stock of the railroad, now valued at $100,000,000.

The handouts of land and money were only a part of the railway’s benefices from the public purse. In its last ten years the Laurier administration had guaranteed the Canadian Northern’s bonds for more than $50,000,000. In its first three years Borden’s government guaranteed them for almost as much more. The provinces had guaranteed an additional $100,000,000. Thus, in subsidies of cash and land and the underwriting of their credit, more than a quarter of a billion dollars of public money stood behind the empire the king and the duke had built from virtually nothing except their magnificent energy, ability, nerve, and powers of persuasion.

But a quarter of a billion still wasn’t enough. Mackenzie and Mann were now more gloriously and heroically broke than any two men in Canada’s history. Yet so adept had they become at using other people’s money that they were both immensely rich. In a confidential letter to Borden, the Tory banker E. B. Osler said Mackenzie’s closest friends estimated his personal and untouchable fortune at between fifteen and forty million dollars. But his and his partner’s railroad continued to totter on the verge of bankruptcy.

The proprietors now announced to Borden that they needed another $45,000,000 if they were to finish their line to the Pacific coast. This demand was accompanied by the now familiar promise that it was to be positively the last. Borden, to whom the alternatives of abandoning the railroad to ruin and defeat and taking it over as a public property were equally unpalatable, conceived the revolutionary notion that it was time the government safeguarded its equity by taking over some of the common stock. Mackenzie and Mann and their closest associates held $100,000,000 of this, and Borden proposed that they surrender $40,000,000 worth to the nation in return for the new bond guarantee and past obligations.

During the late spring and early summer, debate about the railway question pushed the aborted navy, the Kaiser and Winston Churchill, and even the happily relaxing Stringency well down into the second layer of the nation’s consciousness. The chief entertainment of the debate was provided by two young Tory lawyers—each to become in his own time a Prime Minister. The newest resolution for the relief of Mackenzie and Mann had been framed by Borden’s Solicitor General, Arthur Meighen, and Meighen pressed the case for it with unremitting vigor. This enraged a somewhat older but equally rising Conservative named Richard Bedford Bennett. Bennett assailed the “shameless mendicancy” of the only mildly embarrassed king and duke, whose aides were busy lining up support in the lobbies. His demand was simple and, as events were to prove, prophetic. Let the country take over the railroad at once. When Bennett’s young colleague arose to challenge him he berated Meighen for his “impertinent interruptions” and dismissed him as the gramophone of Mackenzie and Mann.

Bennett, who partly through a mishap of history was to win a place in his country’s memory as a mere defender of wealth and orthodoxy, continued his attack on wealth and orthodoxy for hour after hour. Borden for the most part kept to the sidelines and let the young and confident Meighen take the brunt of Bennett’s attack.

Bennett’s main argument was simple enough. Mackenzie and Mann had assets of their own and they refused to use their own assets either to build the railroad that was making them rich or to rescue it from its difficulties. They wanted the country to pay their debts. Mackenzie and Mann were not even paying the men who worked for them, Bennett said. “Look at the contractors who have been swarming around the hotel corridors in Ottawa. Why have these contractors come here? Because these men would not pay them.” Among the charges he made against Mackenzie and Mann were “boundless ambition,” “greed for wealth,” “falsifications and subterfuge.” And the railroad, he contended angrily, was as bad as the men behind it. In some respects it was unworthy of being called a railroad. It had so much dirt ballast, dirt track, poor ties, light steel, and so many sharp curves and heavy grades that a real railroader would call it at best a “minimum-cost road.” He cried that they had laid a trail of corruption extending from Victoria to Halifax. Of Meighen he demanded again: “Since when did bogus surpluses and false accounts constitute a groundwork and foundation on which to lay a claim for the use of the collective credit of the people of the country?” “Are they [Mackenzie and Mann] insolvent or solvent? There is their annual report sent to investors in England. Here is the report made to the Parliament of Canada. Here is the report you make to those you get money from; here is the report to those you want money from. Here is the mendicant, there is the promoter.”

An exasperated backbencher tried to summarize the operations of Mackenzie and Mann during one of the silences permitted by the outraged Bennett, and this was what he said:

“Who is the Canadian Northern Railway Company? Messrs. Mackenzie and Mann. In order to get aid from this country they form eighteen or more companies, called subsidiary companies, and who are the principal stockholders in the subsidiary companies? Messrs. Mackenzie and Mann. They come to the Canadian Parliament, they go to the different legislatures, and they get money for these different companies; and in getting this money they are getting money for Mackenzie and Mann. They thus form a construction company under the name of Mackenzie, Mann and Company Ltd. and the money they have received from the federal government and the governments of the provinces for Mackenzie and Mann acting as the Canadian Northern Railway Company they pay over to Messrs. Mackenzie and Mann acting as Mackenzie, Mann and Company Ltd., construction agents. So that all the money that is paid out still remains in the pockets of Messrs. Mackenzie and Mann.

“Of course Messrs. Mackenzie and Mann, construction agents, get rich and make money, but the Canadian Northern Railway Company gets poor because it gives all its money to Messrs. Mackenzie and Mann. Messrs. Mackenzie and Mann, as the Canadian Northern Railway Company, come back to Parliament and ask for more aid. They should tell us, if they want to be absolutely fair: we have two moneybags at home; one belongs to the Canadian Northern Railway Company, the other to Messrs. Mackenzie, Mann and Company Ltd. We have taken all the money out of the moneybag belonging to the Canadian Northern Railway Company and we have placed it in the moneybag belonging to Mackenzie, Mann and Company Ltd. There is no more money in the first bag, it is all in the second; kindly fill up the first.”

Laurier, perhaps because he was enjoying the sounds of internal strife in the Tory ranks, perhaps because his own earlier record in the matter was beginning to look increasingly unfortunate, offered little more than perfunctory opposition to the new Borden-Meighen plan for the relief of the railway promoters. He expressed admiration for Mackenzie and Mann, but said that if the country had to go into partnership with them the country should be the senior, not the junior, partner.

The bill giving them another forty-five million passed without much real difficulty. The king and the duke had reason once again to count their blessings and praise their brothers and benefactors.