The National Dream: The Great Railway, 1871-1881 (24 page)

It was only at the end of the week that the truth began to dawn upon him that, for once, he had been shamelessly outmanoeuvred. Blake was holding back on purpose, calculating that Macdonald’s
physical condition would deteriorate to the point where he could not speak at all. There would be no fresh revelations; the Liberals were waging a war of attrition.

It was dangerously late. Edgar, the Liberal whip, sat in his place in the House and tried to figure how a division would go. Without the new members from Prince Edward Island he could count, he thought, on 99 votes. He expected four more from the new province. That would give the Opposition 103 votes out of 206 – exactly fifty per cent. Three others were wavering; if they thought the Government would be defeated they would change sides. Edgar had been working mightily, buttonholing members, talking, cajoling and promising. At night, when the session ended, he sat on the edge of Mackenzie’s bed, going over the day’s strategy with his weary leader. His most recent trophy was David Glass, a black-bearded Irish criminal lawyer, who defected with a ringing speech in which he proclaimed that he had always treated the charges against Macdonald with contempt until the McMullen revelations hit him with full force. He drew cheers when he declared that it was better that “all who stand in the pathway of the country’s honour be removed rather than that the country’s honour should be removed.” The speech cut deep. Glass was a highly respected public figure with a colourful background who had crossed the continent on horseback, flirted with death in Mexico and prospected for gold in California before returning to Canada to become mayor of London, Ontario. Later, he would be rewarded for his defection.

By this time, the public could not help but agree with the leonine E. B. Wood, “Big Thunder,” who roared that “before many days the Government will have fallen like Lucifer, never to hope again.”

“But we
shall
rise again,” cried the imperturbable Tupper from across the floor.

“Rise again!” boomed Wood, “but that resurrection shall not be until the last trump shall sound – when the graves shall give up their dead and death and hell shall give up the dead that are in them!”

Macdonald resolved to enter the arena on Monday night. The preliminaries were not propitious. That very afternoon, Lord Dufferin noted that he was tipsy. And Robert Cunningham, the Manitoba journalist who represented Marquette, rose on a question of order to declare that an Ottawa alderman had offered him a government job in the North West and a bribe of up to five thousand pounds if he would cast his vote for the Government. At this point the Prime
Minister had to be dragged to his feet before he could reply. Yet in just three hours he would have to make the speech of a lifetime.

6
Macdonald versus Blake

Nine o’clock, Monday, November 3, 1873. On Parliament Hill the corridors are choked, for the report has been abroad since early afternoon that Macdonald will speak at last. Scores have forgone their dinners in order to hold their places in the packed galleries. Even the sacrosanct back-benches have been invaded by strangers. Hundreds more, holding useless tickets, stand outside, straining for a whisper of the proceedings within. People have poured into the capital anticipating the coming verbal duel between John A. Macdonald and his dour adversary, Edward Blake
.

In the parliamentary restaurant, a few stragglers are finishing their coffee. Suddenly the word comes: “Sir John is up!” The cups scatter as the stragglers race to the floor
.

Now every member is in his seat, save the exiled Louis Riel. The buzz of conversation has been cut off as cleanly as if a muffler were placed over the House. Macdonald has risen slowly to his feet, pale, nervous and haggard, “looking as if a feather would knock him down.” Then, for the next five hours, he proceeds to electrify the House
.

Those who were there would never forget it. Many felt it was the greatest speech Macdonald had ever made; some said it was the greatest they had ever heard. Even the vituperative
Globe
called it “extraordinary.” Sick, dispirited and weary he might be; but somewhere within himself this homely, errant and strangely attractive political animal had tapped a hidden well of energy. Some said it was the straight gin, which Peter Mitchell insisted that alternate pageboys poured at regular intervals into the waterglasses at his elbow (each thought the other was pouring water); but Macdonald was driven by another, more powerful stimulation. He was fighting, with his back to the wall, for his career; only he could salvage it.

He began very slowly and in a low voice, but, bit by bit, he warmed to his audience. Gradually, tone and manner changed, the voice became louder, more strident: Macdonald began to fight. He Struck savagely at Huntington: the object of his resolution, he said, was “to kill the charter in England and to destroy it.”
(Cheers and catcalls.)
He kept on. Huntington’s course, cried Macdonald, was governed from behind the scenes by a “foreign and alien power.” The Yankee-lover sat in the House “not only by alien money but by alien railway influence.” Here, all of Macdonald’s inbred distrust of the Americans was coming to the fore – the same dark apprehensions that would one day force a railway across a seven-hundred-mile ocean of rocky desert rather than see it diverted through a foreign land.

As the clock ticked its way past midnight, Macdonald continued to goad the Opposition: “They have spies and thieves and men of espionage who would pick your lock and steal your notebook.” Why, Huntington had paid McMullen seventeen thousand dollars for the famous documents! Huntington was on his feet, in an instant, with a denial, amid cheers from the Opposition and calls of “Order!” from the Government benches.

“I challenge the Honourable gentleman to combat!” cried Huntington. “I dare him, Sir, on his responsibility to take a committee … I challenge him to stand up and take a committee!”

More cheering, more cries of “Order!”

“I dare him to do it!” Huntington kept shouting.

“It is very evident,” said Macdonald, “I hit a sore spot.”

Yes, he said; he would call a committee to investigate the whole matter of election expenses. He knew of one gentleman opposite who had spent twenty-six thousand dollars getting elected. Another had spent thirty thousand dollars. Others had spent from five to ten thousand dollars.

“Hear! Hear!” called a puckish voice from the opposite side of the House. It belonged to David Blain, a Scottish-born lawyer from West York who had married the sister of a wealthy and prominent Toronto hardware merchant.

Macdonald picked up the cry and turned it against his taunter. He would, he said, prove the payment of money to an elector to vote for Blain.

“Not a cent went out of my pocket!” cried the outraged Blain.

“Well, you know, if a man has not a pocket, his wife has,” retorted Macdonald wickedly.

By now he had the Opposition benches in an uproar.

“How dare you make such a statement?” the aggrieved Blain was shouting above the cries of “Shame!” and “Order!” Macdonald’s supporters were cheering him on. Blain was crying: “You ought to be ashamed of yourself!” The Speaker stepped in and the Prime Minister moved on to other subjects, reiterating, again and again, that there was no bargain, no contract, between his Government and Allan – and that Allan’s contribution was merely an election subscription.

It was past 1.30. Not a soul had left the House. From her seat in the Speaker’s Gallery, Lady Dufferin gazed down with admiration. What a tale she would have to tell at Rideau Hall! (It would take her at least two hours, with many gestures, to satisfy her husband’s hunger for the details.)

Macdonald, roused now to a kind of fever pitch, intoxicated as much by the crowds and the cheers as by the glass in his hand, was reaching the climax of his address. No illegal expenditure had yet been proved before any legal tribunal against any Member of Parliament, he declared. He challenged the House, he challenged the country, he challenged the world to read the charter – to read it line by line and word by word to see if there was in it anything that derogated from the rights of Canada
(loud cheers)
or if there was in it “any preponderance of any one man of these thirteen [directors] over another”
(more cheers)
.

“Sir, I commit myself, the Government commits itself, to the hands of this House, and far beyond this House, it commits itself to the country at large.
(Loud cheers.)
We have faithfully done our duty. We have fought the battle of Union. We have had Party strife setting Province against Province, and more than all, we have had in the greatest Province, the preponderating Province of the Dominion, every prejudice and sectional feeling that could be arrayed against us.

“I have been the victim of that conduct to a great extent; but I have fought the battle of Confederation, the battle of Union, the battle of the Dominion of Canada. I throw myself upon this House; I throw myself upon this country; I throw myself upon posterity, and I believe that I know, that, notwithstanding the many failings in my life, I shall have the voice of this country, and this House rallying round me.
(Cheers.)
And, Sir, if I am mistaken in that, I can confidently appeal to a higher Court, to the court of my own conscience, and to the court of posterity.
(Cheers.)

“I leave it with this House with every confidence. I am equal to either fortune. I can see past the decision of this House either for or
against me, but whether it be against me or for me, I know, and it is no vain boast to say so, for even my enemies will admit that I am no boaster, that there does not exist in Canada a man who has given more of his time, more of his heart, more of his wealth, or more of his intellect and power, such as it may be, for the good of this Dominion of Canada.”

It was over. He sat down, utterly exhausted, while his supporters, and even some of the Opposition, cheered him to the roof. Lady Dufferin, who had brought along Lord Rosebery, a future prime minister of England, as her guest, was already scurrying off to Rideau Hall. There, until five that morning, she would regale her husband with a spirited account of the proceedings and pen a graceful note to Lady Macdonald, congratulating her on the “splendid speech [which] grows upon one as one thinks over its various points.” Maudlin it might have been, but it was, by all odds, a personal triumph for the Prime Minister, producing at Rideau Hall, as Dufferin reported to him, “a continuous chorus of admiration from all my English friends.” More important, the speech had solidified Macdonald’s hold upon his own party, a hold which had become increasingly weak and aimless. Without it he could scarcely have continued as leader.

In spite of the late hour, the House continued to sit. Now Edward Blake hoisted his big frame from his chair and stood, erect and commanding, peering sombrely through his small, silver-rimmed spectacles at his enemies across the floor. To this tousled and scholarly looking lawyer with the powerful build and the strange pallor the Liberal Party had entrusted its final volley. Blake was a nemesis to many, a friend to few and an enigma to all, a kind of political Hamlet who, seething inwardly with personal ambition, showed a strange distaste for those laurels that were dangled before him. Generally considered by his colleagues as the man most likely to succeed, he never quite succeeded. He had been Premier of Ontario for scarcely a year when he quit to enter the federal arena. He could have led the Liberal Party, instead of Mackenzie (Mackenzie had once served under him in Ontario), but he declined the opportunity. All his life he would dally over similar honours.

The key to this diffidence lay in Blake’s extraordinary sensitivity; an imagined slight could cause him to burst into tears in public. He once astonished the Governor General by crying in his presence over
a remark Macdonald had made about him. As a brilliant lawyer – perhaps the most brilliant of the century – he had been used to the deference of his judges and his peers. He could not accustom himself to the coarse invective and bitter imputations of personal motive that were a feature of the politics of his day. And this was singular because Blake himself, when in full voice, was perfectly capable of reducing an opponent to jelly. “I have seen men turn pale and press their knees with their hands as if restraining themselves from running away from that merciless shower of incisive invective,” the Ottawa correspondent of the
Canadian Illustrated News
wrote that same year. The irony did not escape that perceptive observer John Willison, who wrote of Blake: “This man of whom giants might well be afraid let his soul be harried by insects and to gnats gave victories which belonged to the Gods.”

The Liberal Party, seeking to cap the debate with climactic oratory, had chosen well. The speech that Blake was about to give was exactly the kind the situation called for and exactly the kind at which he excelled. It was Blake’s strength that he built his speeches, brick by brick, on solid fact and hard evidence – and his weakness that he generally gave his listeners too much of both. He kept on talking until there was absolutely nothing left to be said, a quality that did not endear him to his associates; after all, they had speeches of their own to make. Blake took nothing for granted. He verified every statement by reference to the original documents and, long after he had proved his case conclusively, he kept piling it on and on, until, as a colleague remarked ruefully, “everyone became dizzy scaling the heights to which he was being lifted.” No wonder Blake constantly appeared pale, nervous and exhausted. While others were relaxing in the smoking room, the Hamlet of the House was grubbing away in the parliamentary library.

The two speeches, Macdonald’s and Blake’s, laid side by side are mirrors of the two totally disparate men who made them. Where Macdonald had been hotly emotional, Blake was icily dispassionate. Where Macdonald had been witty, Blake was earnest. Where Macdonald had been personal and subjective, Blake was aloofly analytical.