ted more people, the people wanted the railways, the
Government needed the voters, and Mackenzie wanted settlers, people,
voters, Government and all. If a Government was obstreperous,
Mackenzie might lend a heavy hand to help turn it out at the next
election. It was not proper for a Government to obstruct him. He was
the over-man.

In no other nation has there ever been a man who could play such a
prodigious and prodigal game with the resources of the whole country.
Mackenzie mobilized the nation before the war. Millions of people in
Canada used to regard him as a sort of magnified Daniel Drew--the
father of Wall Street and watered stock and corrupt-contract railways.
But Mackenzie was a broader man than Drew, with a much higher sense of
honour. Drew admitted that he was a wonderful Methodist, that he had
been a profiteer of the Civil War, and that he had starved a railway of
rails so that it killed a large number of people in an accident.
Mackenzie was no Methodist; and he never was a profiteer from any
emergency of the people. He wanted Canada to prosper. All his profits
must come from greater wealth in Canada, which he did much to produce.

Mackenzie had more faith in Canada than most of the politicians had.
He wanted a great Canada, chief Dominion in a great Empire, The best
way to conserve a nation's wealth, he said once, is to develop its
resources. We never had such a developer. He never was a born
railwayman, any more than he was a pure financier. He was a colossal
exploiter of national resources by means of borrowed money. In the era
before Mackenzie we had Clergue at the Soo. Clergue was a pigmy
forerunner of Mackenzie. What Clergue did in Algoma the other man
aimed to do for the whole country, And he almost did it.

Asked once why he gave so much leeway to men like Mackenzie and Mann,
Sir Wilfrid Laurier is reported to have said:

"Well, what other kind of men could you have to do such remarkable
work?"

Beaverbrook said at a dinner in Canada not long ago:

"I never was a William Mackenzie. I created nothing as he did."

The debacle of Mackenzie railways was never contemplated by Mackenzie.
He did not even imagine that it was possible--except that he was
prophetically troubled by the ambition of Laurier to create a third
transcontinental. He had the right of way in this. He and Mann had
developed the Canadian Northern out of a little stub line in Dauphin,
Manitoba. The thing grew beca