The National Dream: The Great Railway, 1871-1881 (25 page)

He stood now, as the cheering died, left hand sunk characteristically deep into his side pocket, totally immobile – Blake the Avenger. He had neither the time nor the inclination for humour. Instead he cut right to the bone, scooping up Macdonald’s closing plea and turning it against him: “It was not to these high and elevating sentiments that the right honourable gentleman appealed during the election, it was
not upon the intelligent judgement of the people he relied, but upon Sir Hugh Allan’s money!” This blunt beginning, James Young recalled, electrified the House. Blake kept on until 2.30 that morning, in his soft, resonant voice, and then for another four hours the following afternoon and evening, building his case, fact piled upon fact, every sentence deftly turned, the phrases all arranged in ringing parallels.

The ladies of the Dufferin household, who had slipped out immediately Macdonald took his seat the previous evening and returned the following afternoon to watch Blake worrying away at the evidence like a terrier, thought it all a bore. “Dull and uninteresting and not nearly so amusing and lively as Sir John’s,” was Dufferin’s verdict on the speech. Then he added: “But it reads well.” It read very well indeed in its pitiless logic – far better than Macdonald’s impassioned and lachrymose remarks. And, to the faltering Members, Blake’s very lack of histrionics – no arm-waving, no rising inflections – added weight to his words.

“I believe that this night or to-morrow night will be the end of twenty years of corruption.
(Cheers.)
This night or to-morrow night will see the dawn of a brighter and better day in the administration of public affairs in this country.…
(Continued cheering.)

“…  We are here to set up once again the standard of public virtue.
(Cheers.)
We are here to restore once again the fair face of the country which has been tarnished; we are here to brighten, if we may, that fame; we are here to purge this country of the great scandal and calamity which those who are entrusted with the conduct of its affairs have inflicted upon it.

“…  I do not understand that Spartan virtue which deems a theft no crime so long as it is undiscovered. I do not understand that morality which will permit a crime unseen, but is deeply shocked and alarmed for the credit of the country should the crime become known.… Sir, you will not heal the festering sore by healing the skin above it. You must lance it and cleanse it.

“…  Let us not be carried away by the absurd notion that there is a distinction between the standards of public and private virtue; let us not be carried away by the notion that that may be done in secret which it is a shame to be known in public; let our transactions be open, and as the shame exists, as it has been discovered, as it has been conclusively established, as it has been confessed, let us by our vote – regretfully, it may be – give the perpetrators of it their just reward.”

When Blake took his seat even some Government members rendered him the accolade of their applause as some Liberals had for Macdonald. Macdonald was not present. He lay upon a couch in a committee room, half conscious, ill with fatigue. Joseph Pope, who edited Macdonald’s papers, recalled the “sense of extreme uneasiness” in the ministerial ranks, the “sound of going on the tops of the mulberry trees … a feeling of impending change everywhere abroad.”

Yet still the vote was in doubt. How effective had Blake been? Had he managed to cancel out the morale-building effects of Macdonald’s passionate appeal? The Liberals had still not been able to force a vote; every man was in his place, waiting hour after hour for the division that would not come. “It is a dreadful strain,” James Edgar admitted in a letter to his wife, written at his desk in the Commons while speaker followed speaker in the debate.

After Blake was finished all eyes turned to the proud Scots face of David Laird, the leader of the new group of Islanders, founder of the Charlottetown
Patriot
and a man much respected for his moral and intellectual strength. Laird was a Liberal provincially but, in the past, many a provincial Liberal had followed the Conservative Party after his province entered Confederation. The Island leader rose timidly. It was the first time he had addressed such a gathering. “Was there ever a maiden speech so fraught with doom?” George Ross asked. Laird did not keep his listeners waiting long. In a calm voice, he declared his opposition to the Government and again the Liberal benches rang with cheers.

Now it was the turn of another independent member, Donald A. Smith of Selkirk riding, Manitoba, the tough former fur trader, who was becoming a power in the Hudson’s Bay Company and the Bank of Montreal. Smith normally supported the Government; moreover, he had been a member of Allan’s board of directors, but it was by no means certain how he would vote. Macdonald’s supporters were hesitant about approaching this frosty and imperious man who managed, throughout his career, to remain constantly in the limelight without ever appearing to seek it. Finally, the Prime Minister was himself persuaded to talk to Smith. The meeting was not a success; when the Member was taken to Macdonald’s office he found him drunk and belligerent. Smith was received with more curses than flattery. Nonetheless the feeling in the Government ranks was that Smith was on their side.

It was 1 a.m. when Smith rose to an expectant chamber. The future
Lord Strathcona was not unaware of the drama. His speech was brief but he managed to squeeze from it every possible ounce of suspense. His tone was bland, his manner inoffensive: he did not consider that the first minister took Allan’s money with any corrupt motive. In fact he knew personally that Allan at one time had thought of giving up the charter. In every instance he knew the provisions were made more and more stringent against Sir Hugh.

The Government benches began to cheer. W. T. R. Preston, a long-time Liberal organizer, later claimed that some twenty Tories rushed to the parliamentary restaurant, popped open bottles of champagne, prepared to drink Smith’s health and sang “Rule, Britannia!”

But Smith was not finished: he felt the leader of the Government was incapable of taking money from Allan for corrupt purposes. He would be most willing to vote for the Government – the cheers from the ministerial benches were now gleeful –
could he do so conscientiously.…

Consternation on the Conservative side! Cheers and laughter from the Opposition.

 … It was with great regret, Smith said, that he could not do so: there was no corruption but “a very grave impropriety.”

In the parliamentary restaurant the champagne was left untasted. The Members skulked back to their seats as Smith sat down and the Speaker, with only the slightest tremor in his voice, adjourned the House. As the Commons broke up, there was a storm around Smith. The Members rushed towards him, cheering, hand-shaking, reviling, threatening. Smith remained, as always, totally imperturbable. He had been Macdonald’s choice – a good one – to deal with the ticklish problem of Riel, during the Red River uprising; the Prime Minister had always admired him. Now he felt betrayed, for he had always held to the concept that party must come before principle. For most of the decade the name of Donald A. Smith was anathema to the Conservatives.

It was, of course, all over. In the Opposition smoking room, the handsome and dapper George Elliott Casey, at twenty-three the youngest member in the House, carolled to the tune of “Clementine” that “Sir John is dead and gone forever.” In the lobbies and the downstairs restaurant there was a buzz of activity. Suddenly the atmosphere had changed; the vanquished took their defeat in good part, the conquerors refrained from being overjubilant.

Macdonald did not wait for the ignominy of a vote. He resigned the following day and went, remarkably cheerfully, into opposition. “I can only say that an awful sense of relief has come over me,” the weary but triumphant Edgar scribbled to his wife as soon as the news broke. His colleagues showered him with applause for his exertions to the point where he felt “perfectly unnerved & ready to weep.” The same feeling of relief spread among politicians of both parties as the country simmered down. “As is the case with this somewhat volatile people, the excitement … has disappeared,” Lord Dufferin reported to England.

It was painful to lose his first minister. “It cut me to the heart,” he wrote, “that a career so creditable to himself, and so serviceable to his country … should have ended in such humiliation.”

Macdonald was not a man to wear his heart on his sleeve for long. After he announced his resignation, he moved the adjournment of the House and then went to his office to ask his secretary to pack up his papers.

When he arrived home, he went straight to his upstairs bedroom.

“Well, that’s gone along with,” he remarked casually to his wife.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“Why, the Government has resigned,” he replied. He slipped into his dressing gown and slippers, picked up two or three books from a nearby table and stretched out on the bed.

“It’s a relief to be out of it,” he said. Then he opened a volume and began to read. Characteristically, he never again alluded to the subject; it was as if, to preserve his equilibrium, he had dismissed it from his mind.

The new leaders of the country did not. For most of the decade they would, on every possible occasion, taunt their opponents with the memory of the Pacific Scandal. It would influence their policies and their actions as it would influence those of the Conservatives. When, years later, a contract was finally signed for the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway, the terms of the agreement and the choice of the principals and, indeed, their later relations with the Government, would, in some degree, be affected by the events of 1873.

Macdonald’s own role in these events was ambiguous. It is clear that an agreement was made between Cartier and Allan on July 30 and that this agreement remained in force in spite of Macdonald’s telegram repudiating it. Allan thought he had bought and paid for the presidency of the Canadian Pacific railway; Cartier was certainly
party to that belief. Did Macdonald realize it? Perhaps; but he was, as Tupper had told Dufferin, “on the drink” at the time and could not be certain of exactly what had or had not been written or telegraphed. Some time later he told Dufferin that he was quite unaware of the extent to which Cartier had drawn on Allan and shocked when Cartier confirmed it.

On the other hand, Macdonald’s curiously stubborn and continuing espousal of Allan as the only possible president of the new syndicate is harder to understand. He made a strong case before the Royal Commission of Allan’s obvious qualifications for the job; but a month before negotiations with Macpherson were broken off, Macdonald had every reason to have his doubts about the Montrealer. Allan’s deception regarding the American interest in his company ought to have been one warning signal. Allan’s verbal indiscretions about his agreement with Cartier ought to have been another. By spring Macdonald himself was referring to Allan as a terrible negotiator. Did no tiny doubt ever cross his mind before that revealing New Year’s Eve meeting with George McMullen? Could Macdonald, in his own mind, explain away Allan’s enormous and unprecedented contributions to the Conservative campaign chest as he tried to explain them away to the Royal Commission?

It is true that he had made a promise to Allan in July; but it was not a promise that had to be kept unless it were tied, explicitly or implicitly, to Allan’s cheque-book. It is more logical to suppose that Macdonald, suspecting both Allan and Cartier, but not knowing the details – and not wanting to know – rationalized to himself, and later to the country, his own actions. On being found out, he engaged in as much political manoeuvre as he dared, first to delay revelation and then to mute it. It did no good. In the end he was forced to admit that he had taken Allan’s money and spent it illegally. It meant little that he was innocent of Huntington’s other charges; the captive Royal Commissioners did not render a verdict but Parliament and, subsequently, the voters did. When Mackenzie went to the country early in 1874, he was returned in a landslide.

It was generally agreed that Macdonald was finished and that he would quickly resign and vanish from the political scene. The railway, it seemed, had been his nemesis. It had ruined his health, stained his honour and wrecked his career. George Ross remembered thinking that a Macdonald revival would be a greater miracle than the passage of the Israelites through the Red Sea.

As for Macdonald’s
bête noire
, George W. McMullen, he never
again had anything to do with politicians. He outlived all the major figures in the Pacific Scandal, his active mind leaping from project to project, many of them promising but few of them profitable. His interests ran the gamut from woven-wire fences (he developed and manufactured them) to railroad ties (he invented a method of preserving them). Growing things seemed to fascinate him. He tried growing celery in a concrete building on top of a peat bog; it did not work out. He tried turning hard maple chips into maple syrup; that did not work out either. He farmed ginseng, which grew wild around Picton, and shipped it off to China where it was prized as an aphrodisiac; not much came of that. He experimented with sugar beets and then with Cuban sugar cane, forming a company to use the waste in the paper-making process; that, too, came to nothing. He backed a Chicago inventor in the development of a long-distance, high-powered gun; the U.S. army showed initial interest but abandoned it. He experimented in the attic of his rambling Picton home with a machine for evaporating fruit, vegetables and eggs; the machine was still there in 1970. For a time he and his brothers owned the Central Ontario Railway which they bought to connect with some iron mines they were developing. Everybody assumed that George McMullen was wealthy – after all, he was involved in so much – but when he died, aboard a railway train to Chicago in 1915, he left very little behind him except the memory of his role in the Pacific Scandal, several progeny (including one university professor and one artist) and several not too complimentary anecdotes. Old timers in the Picton area still talk of the time McMullen tumbled off the ferry from Belleville to Prince Edward County. He was hauled out by a fellow passenger whom he thanked profusely. “Good God,” was the reply, “if I’d known it was you I’d have left you in.” Nonetheless, when McMullen died, all business in his home town came to a stop to mark his passing.