The National Dream: The Great Railway, 1871-1881 (63 page)

And finally the farce: “We had the farce laid on the table today. The tragedy and comedy were pretty successful; but the farce, I am afraid, with an impartial audience, in theatrical phrase, will be damned.”

He proceeded to damn it.

“I may say it is too thin. It won’t catch the blindest. It won’t catch the most unsuspicious. No one of common sense, no man who can say two and two make four, will be caught for one moment.… It was concocted here. It was concocted in Ottawa. It was concocted as a political engine.…”

Seven of the signatories to the document, Macdonald pointed out, were disappointed or defeated Liberal candidates in former elections. “No man, be he ever so simple, who is fit to be elected, can read else on these papers than that it is a political trick.…”

He had to pause for a moment. “I am speaking at some disadvantage,” he said, “because I am not well. But I will make myself heard.”

He gathered his strength and continued, moving closer to the nub of his argument. The tender for the new syndicate was prepared “for the express object of enabling the most timid man – including Sir William P. Howland, who would not risk five thousand dollars unless he were certain of getting it again – it is drawn for the purpose of enabling the most timid man to sign this document, knowing that he was safe. It was – heads I win; tails you lose.”

The joker in the pack was the optional clause in the proposed contract which suggested that the new syndicate had no real intention of building anything but the easiest section of the railroad. The first clause, Macdonald showed, did away with the Superior section, the second provided for a rail line to Sault Ste Marie and the United States, the third provided for the government to abandon the British Columbia section and the fourth gave up building anything west of Jasper House. The scheme, then, was nothing more than “an impudent offer to build the prairie section and to do it by means of political friends.” Connecting with the Yankee railways at the Sault would be “to the utter ruin of the great policy under which the Dominion of Canada has been created, the utter ruin of our hopes of being a great nation.…”

“They would be relieved from running any portion of the road that would not pay. Canada might whistle for these connections.… but the people would gradually see that the colonies would gradually be severed from each other; and we should become a bundle of sticks, as we were before, without a binding cord, and then we should fall, helpless, powerless and aimless, into the hands of the neighbouring republic.”

He fought next for the monopoly clause; and here all his passionate distrust of the American colossus came to the fore. The Rhine, he said, had a miserable, wretched end, “being lost in the sands of the approaches to the sea; and such would be the fate of the Canadian Pacific Railway if we allowed it to be bled by subsidiary lines, feeding foreign wealth and increasing foreign revenue by carrying off our trade until, before we arrived at the terminal points of Ontario and of Montreal, it would be so depleted that it would almost die of inanition.”

What chances, Macdonald asked, would an infant country of four million have against the whole of the United States capitalists? The Americans, he reminded the House, had offered to carry freight for nothing and to pay shippers for sending freight their way.

“It would not all come by Sault Ste Marie. It would come to Duluth. It would come to Chicago. It would come through a hundred different channels. It would percolate through the United States, to New York and Boston, and to other ports and, Sir, after our railway was proved to be useless, they might perhaps come into the market and buy up our lines as they have bought up other lines.”

He had some facts and figures dealing with United States railway wars: “The road would become shrunken, shrunken, shrunken, until it fell an easy prey to this ring. We cannot afford to run such a risk.”

He was almost finished, but he wanted to nail down in the clearest possible language his vision of the railway and his vision of the nation. He wanted, he said, an arrangement “which will satisfy all the loyal, legitimate aspirations, which will give us a great and united, a rich and improving, developing Canada, instead of making us tributary to American bondage, to American tolls, to American freights, to all the little tricks and big tricks that American railways are addicted to for the purpose of destroying our road.”

He had spoken for two hours and a half and he had made his point. The
Canadian Illustrated News
, which was less partisan than the daily press, reported that his criticism of the new syndicate “was so searching that he practically killed it, even in the eyes of the Opposition members themselves.”

The morrow would be Blake’s, but first there was a respite. Parliament adjourned at six so that the Members would attend the Governor General’s reception held that evening in the Senate chamber. Sick or not, Macdonald had to be in attendance in Windsor uniform. Friends
and foes mingled and murmured pleasantries, the Members dressed in claw-hammer coats and sporting white kid gloves, the ladies in expensive costumes – scarlet satin and feathers for Lady Macdonald, black silk trimmed with lace for Lady Tilley, black velvet with a white lace overdress for Lady Tupper. The air was fragrant with the perfume of half a hundred bouquets and with the music of a spirited military band, which obliged with waltzes, galops, marches and quadrilles. “Mr. Phil Woods, drummer, used his side drum attachment with excellent effect, particularly in the Mazy Waltz. The invention is quite an improvement on the old-fashioned triangle.”

The following day the Commons got down to business again. Blake had been waiting for this moment. He had not been at ease during the debate. The Government speakers, knowing his uncommon sensitivity, had baited him continually. When thus attacked, he found himself unable to stare his opponents down but instead would pick up a book and pretend to read. Macdonald had challenged him the previous day, asking him to get on his feet and say that he could approve, on the basis of his past declarations, some of the essential features of the new tender. He could not rise to that challenge but now, on this afternoon of January 18, he was prepared to deliver another five-hour speech, crammed with facts and figures to prove why the contract was a disaster and why, indeed, the whole concept of the Canadian Pacific Railway was, as in his view it had always been, insane.

The arguments, by this time, were familiar; they had not changed greatly since 1871; nevertheless, they were often telling. Blake, for instance, made a hash of Macdonald’s figures, which had been changing from year to year, showing the sums which the Government expected to receive from the sales of raw prairie land. Indeed, on almost every point Blake was convincing. The idea of the railway
was
insane, if you thought in terms of an undivided continent; it
was
perfect madness to try to punch it through that sea of mountains and across those rocky Precambrian wastes. Immigration would not come as swiftly as the Government implied, and events were to prove Blake right on that point. The land sales would not pay for the railway. It would be easier and cheaper for everybody to go west by way of the United States, at least in the foreseeable future. Logic, then, was on Blake’s side.

The key to Macdonald’s argument was emotion: the only way Canada could hold onto British Columbia – and, thus, the land in between – was to build the railway; that was the point he continued to hammer home. British Columbia would not wait, or at least that was what the British Columbians were saying; Walkem himself was in Ottawa in December making secessionist noises. Meanwhile, the reorganized Northern Pacific was creeping west again; with no parallel line on the other side of the border, this great artery would drain off all the commerce of British North America.

Blake’s speech was a model of earnest, logical argument. On a previous memorable occasion he had used earnestness accompanied by pitiless fact to bring Macdonald down. In this contest between logic and passion, would logic win again? Blake, the nineteenth-century liberal, was properly suspicious of the “big interests,” critical of business speculation, and committed, philosophically at least, to the one-world concept of free trade and all that it connoted. But the climate of the times was not conducive to this kind of idealism, especially in Canada where free trade could mean economic strangulation. Macdonald, the pragmatic politician and hard-nosed Conservative, was in tune with his era – an era which saw the commercial interests working hand in glove with the politicians to develop, exploit or consolidate the nation (one could use all those verbs) for personal profit, political power and (sometimes incidentally) the national interest. Given the political morality of the day and the prevailing public attitude, this traditional Conservative partnership with business was probably the only way in which the nation could be constructed in a hurry. To Blake, with his literal, legal mind, Macdonald was all bombast and humbug. He himself never stooped, in the House or out of it, to the kind of witty sallies, gossipy small talk or passionate declarations that were among the Prime Minister’s trademarks. Macdonald, though a cynic, was also an optimist and a gambler. Blake, though an idealist, was a pessimist by temperament as well as by conviction. He could see the pitfalls in Macdonald’s program – and they were real enough. He himself understood the value of a dollar: he had vowed to make one hundred thousand dollars so that he would have personal security (and moral security as well) before entering the political lists. The wild extravagance of the railway appalled him. But Macdonald had thrown aside all personal security and bankrupted himself in order to enter and remain in politics.

Blake, the man of ideals, had a strong political philosophy and little imagination. Macdonald, the practical politician, whose only real philosophy was expediency, was endowed with a lively imagination.
That, really, was where Blake foundered in the matter of the railway. He could not see the new Canada as Macdonald could see it; nor would he ever see it. Long after Blake had departed Canada for Ireland, expressing the gloomiest of forebodings about the future, the political analysts continued to discuss the mystery of why he had never quite fulfilled his early promise. But there was really no mystery. Canada in the seventies was an imaginative dream more than a nation. Blake lacked both the imagination and the daring (he thought of it as recklessness) to lead in the development of that dream. If Macdonald’s political gamble had failed, if, after all the passionate talk in the House, the railway had foundered, then Blake might have been hailed as a Cassandra and have gone on to become the leader of his country – the very epitome of a sober, sensible, frugal Canadian prime minister. But that was not to be.

7
The dawn of the new Canada

The long, exhausting drama was drawing to its close but it was not quite over. In Europe, where he had successfully talked the impatient French into waiting for their profits, Stephen was “literally disgusted” with the conduct of the Opposition. “I did not think it possible for political malignity to go so far as it has done in this discussion … a fair and unbiased consideration of the whole situation must result in the conviction that the interests of the country and the Company are identical.”

The “political malignity,” however, continued. The
Globe
asked: “Can the rumour that Sir Hugh Allan is really a silent partner in the Syndicate be true?” It added that Stephen and his colleagues would not scruple to spend lavishly in order to carry the contract and inquired, rhetorically, whether or not Canadian Tory politicians could stand the test. The Ottawa
Free Press
later reported that a member of the Syndicate (unnamed) had given seventy-five thousand dollars worth of stock to a Government member (unidentified). In the House on January 25, Joseph Rymal, the Grit from South Wentworth with the pinched face and billy-goat’s beard, delivered himself of a particularly vicious speech in which he called the Government members traitors and branded one of them, George Turner Orton of Wellington Centre, as a “pocket edition of Judas Iscariot.” In the rising uproar, Rymal charged that there had been
“two or three million dollars distributed by this Syndicate in order to consummate this swindle.” When the Government benches chorused their protest, Rymal cried that their skins were thin and that they themselves were “sharers in the ill-gotten gains.”

That night, the word spread about Ottawa that Parliament was to see the end of the longest debate in history. The galleries began to fill up with the wives of Senators and
M.P.S
as well as members of the general public. Macdonald meant to force a vote through even if he had to keep the House in session all night. The debate droned on while the Members, many of them grey with fatigue yet bolstered by the excitement of the evening, moved out into the corridors and smoking rooms in small buzzing clusters. From one smoking room came the faint strains of several Quebec members singing
La Marseillaise
while an Irish jingle rippled from the parliamentary restaurant. Several card games were in progress throughout the building.

As the night wore on the Members began to drift back to their seats but they were in no mood for speeches. They had been drenched with speeches since December. David Mills, clear-eyed, moustache bristling, was on his feet. He spoke for two hours and for all of that time the chamber resounded with catcalls, desk-hammering, whistling, squeaking, coughing and groaning. Mills continued unperturbed but, when he sat down, no other speaker would face the crowd.

It was time for a division on the first amendment to the resolution, offered by the Opposition leader. The amendment was typical of Blake, being the longest ever offered in Parliament to that moment. It covered three and a half pages of Hansard’s small type and raised fifty-three distinct objections to the proposed legislation.

This was the moment of truth. Macdonald had told his wavering supporters in the bluntest terms that if the bill was lost the Government would resign immediately and they would be forced to go to the country with all the opprobrium of a parliamentary defeat hanging over them. The threat was enough: the first amendment was defeated by a vote of 140 to 54. The House adjourned that morning just before six.