use it served the people, and the people
lived in a fertile country that needed a road to market. The whole
basic idea of the Mackenzie roads was to give more and more people a
road to market. The original idea of the Grand Trunk Pacific and the
National Transcontinental was to rival the Canadian Pacific monument to
John A. Macdonald by erecting a railway monument to Wilfrid Laurier.

The race of the railways just about broke the nation's neck. It was
not all the fault of Mackenzie that the race ever began, or that it was
carried on to insanity. He was a practical philosopher to perceive
that a Government is an elective corporation capable of manipulation in
the interest of an all-Canada enterprise needed and wanted by the
people. He was a master cynic to surmise that when the future came to
balance the accounts, Father Time would be a very bewildered assignee.

The war was very ill advised. Mackenzie had no use for war. He never
could see in the predicament of a nation any chance to profit for
himself. He wanted perpetual prosperity. It never occurred to him,
perhaps, that some day critics would arise to say that the country
called Canada had done more for William Mackenzie than he had ever done
for the country; and that when the parent utility of the cycle which he
had helped to create was declared bankrupt, he had no rights in the
case whatever and never should have been paid a dollar of indemnity for
the common stock.

But as the country had submitted to Mackenzie's system of building
railways, so it was compelled to be content with the Royal Commission
method of adjudicating what the builders should get out of the wreck.

Financiers and politicians and common citizens may wrangle till
doomsday about the ethics of this debacle. They will never get anybody
to understand it. The thing is an economic outlaw like its author.
Mackenzie as a common storekeeper would have been sold for taxes. As a
railway builder he staged the greatest pageant of industry ever known
in Canada, and when the show went off the road because it was no longer
able to pay its bills, took what he could salvage of the properties and
left other men to wrestle with the reconstruction.

We shall never have another Mackenzie. Bigger men may arise. More
unusual characters may stalk out of obscurity into places of eminence
and power. But there never again can be an era like the Mackenzie
epoch, because that kind of experience is suffer