The National Dream: The Great Railway, 1871-1881 (19 page)

The story, which ran to several columns, took the form of a historical narrative by George McMullen, whose dubious presence had hung oyer the affair from the outset. McMullen, goaded by “the vilest slanders,” laid about him with a scythe as he gave his version, often highly coloured and inaccurate, of his role in the drama. He claimed that Allan had lent Macdonald and Hincks $4,000 and $4,500 respectively “with very good knowledge that it was never to be repaid.” He said that Allan had sounded out the finance minister regarding “the extent of his personal expectations” and that Hincks had asked for a flat fifty thousand dollars rather than a percentage of the ultimate profits plus a job for his son as secretary of the company for a minimum of two thousand dollars a year. He identified the newspapers, including
La Minerve
of Montreal, which Allan told him he had paid. He said that Allan had made an additional indefinite loan of ten thousand dollars to Hincks and had promised Langevin twenty-five thousand for election purposes, “on condition of his friendly assistance.”

This was strong meat, though not of itself conclusive since McMullen, branded in the public mind as a blackmailer, was himself suspect. But unlike most newspaper stories, the sting of this one was in its tail. Appended to McMullen’s narrative, deep inside the newspaper, was a series of letters and telegrams which contained political dynamite. They had been buried at the end by design in an attempt to divert suspicion from the source from which they had been obtained. They had been rifled from Abbott’s safe in the dark of the night, during the lawyer’s absence in England, copied by his confidential secretary, George Norris, Jr., and an assistant, and sold for hard cash to the Liberal Party.

Cartier to Abbott, Montreal, August 24, 1872:
“In the absence of Sir Hugh Allan, I shall be obliged by your supplying the Central Committee with a further sum of twenty thousand dollars upon the same conditions as the amount written by me at the foot of my letter to Sir Hugh Allan of the 30th ult.

George E. Cartier

“P.S. Please also send Sir John A. Macdonald ten thousand dollars more on the same terms.”

Terms? Conditions?
What price Allan’s sworn denials now?

Memorandum signed by three members of the Central Committee, J. L. Beaudry, Henry Starnes and P. S. Murphy:
“Received from Sir Hugh Allan by the hands of J. J. C. Abbott twenty thousand dollars for General Election purposes, to be arranged hereafter according to the terms of the letter of Sir George E. Cartier, of the date of 30th of July, and in accordance with the request contained in his letter of the 24th instant.”
Montreal, 26th Aug., 1872
.

Again, that damning word:
terms
. It was well for the Government that poor Cartier was dead.

Telegram: Macdonald to Abbott at St. Anne’s, Aug. 26, 1872, Toronto:
“I must have another ten thousand; will be the last time of calling; do not fail me; answer today.”

Reply: Abbott to Macdonald from Montreal, Aug. 26, 1872:
“Draw on me for ten thousand dollars.”

“Three more extraordinary documents than these … never saw the light of day,” Lord Dufferin wrote to the Colonial Secretary. There was, in addition, a final clincher: a statement from the discontented Senator Asa B. Foster, commenting on the McMullen revelations and corroborating them: “…  I was aware of the agreement with Mr. Langevin to which you refer as it was frequently discussed between us and Mr. Abbott. I was also aware from the first of Sir George E. Cartier’s opposition to Sir Hugh Allan, and of the means by which Sir George was forced to forego this opposition.

“In regard to the payment of money for election purposes I was informed of the arrangement with Sir George Cartier, and was also
shown a confirmatory telegram from Sir John A. Macdonald. I understand the affair to be substantially as you have related, and I have reason to believe that large sums of money were actually expended for election purposes under the arrangement.”

The effect on the public of these revelations was incalculable. Dufferin was later to refer, in his dramatic fashion, to “the terror and shame manifested by the people at large when the possibility first dawned upon them of their most trusted statesman having been guilty of such conduct.” The Pacific Scandal became the sole topic of conversation in those late July days and continued so into the fall. The carnage among the party faithful was devastating. Even schoolboys found themselves embroiled. Sir John Willison, who was to become editor of the
Globe
, was a youth at the time and remembered how his village school at Greenwood, Ontario, broke into factions. Those who clung to the Tory leader were denounced by their classmates as “Charter Sellers”; and Willison admitted, even though he had been reared in a Tory household and still clung desperately to the faith of his fathers, “I fear that I wavered as I found life-long Conservatives falling away from the standard.” Many a loyal Tory was transformed, during that tempestuous summer, into a working Liberal.

All other news and comment was subordinated as the newspapers now took up the great scandal with what
The Times
of London called “colonial vehemence.” The ministerial newspapers were badly shaken for they had been maintaining, day after day, that no money had been given Macdonald. The stooped and aging Hincks rushed into print to deny that he had ever asked or ever obtained anything from anybody, not even for his son, “though I did on one occasion casually say to Sir Hugh, as I had done to other friends, that if he ever happened to know of employment for my youngest son I would be glad if he would bear it in mind.” The
Globe
maliciously reminded its readers that this was not the first time Hincks’s name had been clouded by scandal. In his days as premier of the united Canadas he had, on more than one occasion, used his official knowledge for his personal profit, as a subsequent investigating committee discovered. Ironically, it had been John A. Macdonald who had attacked the Hincks ministry of that day as “steeped to the very lips in infamy” and “tainted with corruption.”

Now at Rivière du Loup the echoes of those words were dinning in Macdonald’s ears. In all his long career nothing hit Macdonald
so hard as the McMullen revelations. The news, which reached him in condensed form in a hurriedly scribbled letter from Langevin, “fairly staggered” him. It was, he later told Dufferin, “one of those overwhelming misfortunes that they say every man must meet once in his life.” He had expected trouble but nothing so cataclysmic as this. He had certainly sent the telegrams; but he had never expected to be found out.

Alexander Campbell, Macdonald’s old law partner and Senate leader, was in touch with his chief immediately with a call for a hurried conference with Langevin in Quebec City. It was “very necessary to consider immediately what action should be taken.” The strategy was clear: a royal commission was now an absolute necessity, preferably one that included “safe” judges. The indispensable Abbott was hurriedly called upon to assist in the negotiations. He reported a Montreal rumour that fresh revelations, in the form of more injudicious telegrams from Macdonald, were due to appear at any moment: “The sooner the Commission is appointed, the sooner these periodical galvanic shocks will cease.” He had written “very guardedly” to Charles Dewey Day, a retired Superior Court judge, who was Chancellor of McGill University. Abbott had every confidence “in his acting judiciously.” A sympathetic letter to Macdonald from the judge himself, two days later, made clear just what the cautious Abbott meant. Judge Day was squarely on Macdonald’s side, disturbed by the fact that the correspondence as published in the press was “in a shape which tells against you.” The judge wrote that “no time should be lost in endeavouring to change the current of public opinion. If you think I can be of service in helping to place the matter upon a true and just footing I willingly accept the duty.” Obviously, from Macdonald’s point of view, Charles Dewey Day was the proper choice to head the Royal Commission.

Abbott was indefatigable. He was in constant touch with Thomas White, the editor of the Montreal
Gazette
, practically dictating that paper’s editorial attitude on the scandal. He was searching around for two more royal commissioners, suggesting to Macdonald that Upper Canada judges “would be safest on our account,” since Lower Canada judges had a nasty habit of accepting all evidence and deciding on its admissibility at a later date, after it had been aired in the press. Then there were damaging papers to be destroyed (probably Cartier’s); Abbott wanted both Macdonald and Campbell on hand in Montreal to preside over this delicate matter. At the same time he was
dangling all sorts of “greatly attractive bait” in front of his former clerk, George Norris, in an attempt to publicize the full story of the theft of the documents. Norris wasn’t budging, and this led Abbott to believe that “he must have been greatly well paid to enable him to resist temptation.” Subsequently, Abbott and his men did succeed in rounding up Alfred Thomas Cooper, the man who had helped Norris copy out the letters, telegrams and notes from the shorthand book in Abbott’s office. Cooper swore in a deposition that Norris had been paid five thousand dollars and promised a government job when the Liberals took power by the prominent Liberal legal firm of Laflamme, Huntington and Laflamme. When news of Cooper’s defection leaked out, the Liberals tried to bribe Abbott’s bookkeeper to find out exactly what Cooper had revealed. The harried Conservative press made as much as it could of the burglary, countenanced as it was by a party whose leaders, Mackenzie and Blake, preached the highest standards of morality. But the public, sickened by scandal, could not be persuaded that two wrongs made a right.

Meanwhile the persistent McMullen was back in print with a new charge: John Hillyard Cameron, the chairman of the abortive investigating committee, himself bore investigation. After the elections, Cameron had applied to Allan for a five-thousand-dollar loan, which Allan, following a series of urgent wires and letters from Macdonald, reluctantly paid. The note was discounted a fortnight before Allan got his charter and renewed on April 23, after Cameron had been named committee chairman.

It was all too much. With the crisis swirling around him, Macdonald took to the bottle and vanished from sight. No member of his cabinet could reach him or learn of his plans or purpose. The press reported that he had disappeared from Rivière du Loup. His wife had no idea where he was. The frantic Governor General, in the midst of a state tour of the Maritimes, could get no answer to an urgent and confidential letter. He followed it with an equally urgent telegram; silence. On August 5, the Montreal
Daily Witness
published in its two o’clock edition a rumour that Macdonald had committed suicide by throwing himself into the St. Lawrence. The story, concocted by his political enemies, vanished from the next edition but was widely believed at the time; it seemed to confirm the Government’s guilt. Suicide or no, the fact was that for several days, in a moment of grave political crisis, the Prime Minister of Canada could not be found by anyone. Dufferin finally unravelled the mystery and put it delicately
in a private letter to the Colonial Secretary: “He had stolen away, as I subsequently found, from his seaside villa and was lying perdu with a friend in the neighbourhood of Quebec.”

3
The memorable August 13

The elegant Lord Dufferin was a sorely perplexed man. Prince Edward Island, the crucible of Confederation, had, rather tardily, made up its mind to become the sixth province and the Governor General was off on the kind of mission he loved best: official ceremonies, graceful off-the-cuff remarks, state dinners, carefully staged addresses punctuated by cheers and applause. As the Queen’s representative, His Excellency saw himself as a kind of walking flag, a unifying national force in a sea of petty provincialism. All this pomp and circumstance was rudely shattered by the McMullen revelations. “We are in a devil of a mess here and my position is not to be envied,” he wrote to Lord Kimberley, the Colonial Secretary, from Halifax. “The whole country is in a violent state of excitement from one end to the other and the language of the Newspaper Press is becoming perfectly rabid.”

The Governor General’s immediate problem was the reassembly of Parliament on August 13, just one week away. Originally all members had agreed that the sitting would be a mere token – a legal device to allow the investigating committee to meet, since it could not legally continue to sit if Parliament were prorogued. Macdonald had suggested that the House reassemble briefly in August, conduct no business and prorogue; presumably by the thirteenth the committee’s work would be complete. Indeed, he said – and there was no dissent – those members who did not live in Ottawa need not go to the trouble of returning; a quorum could be found in the immediate neighbourhood.

All this was agreeable to the House on May 23; but by the end of July the whole political complexion of the country had changed. The “Party of Punishment,” as some papers now called the Opposition, was out for blood. It wanted a
bona fide
session of Parliament to air the charges that had been made, and it was determined to get one. Mass meetings were being called in the major cities attacking the idea of prorogation. In Montreal, the Mayor himself addressed a crowd of
five thousand urging that the session be prolonged. Public sympathy was clearly with the Opposition.

Since it was he who must officially prorogue the House, the Governor General had become the key figure in the controversy. What would he do? Would he take the advice of his ministers, who certainly wanted the session to end without any discomfiting debate? Or would he follow another course?