made huge fortunes
here. He created mergers here. He started consolidated companies here
that in time fought their way into the appreciated valuations of the
stock market. He became Canada's greatest adventurer in creating a sort
of "wealth" from the merging of small, sometimes decrepit, concerns under
a new name and new issues of stock; just as Mackenzie was our greatest
adventurer in creating wealth from borrowed money. Beaverbrook worked
mainly with small groups to whom he left the task of raising most of the
capital. Thus his personal gains came neither from the immediately
increased earnings of companies which he amalgamated, nor directly from
the pockets of the shareholders. Beaverbrook never made a dollar by
defrauding a director or luring unsuspicious dollars out of the pockets
of common people. That species of tactics so often practised by men who
are near criminals was quite beneath him. The laboratory where he got
his results was the stock market, which of course has its own codes of
ethics and plays its own remorseless game of making or breaking men.

His career here had most of the elements of romance. Son of a poor
parson born in a cross-roads Ontario hamlet, brilliant but erratic
student at Dalhousie University, down-at-the-heels insurance agent in
Halifax, youthful merger of two small banks at a time when he was unable
to pay for his own clothes--we have here symptoms of a career which might
have turned into a character of high value in Canadian politics, public
service or social reform.

But Nature thrives on migrations. Even a man sometimes takes better root
when he is transplanted. The Beaverbrook that England has is a more
unusual character than the Max Aitken that Canada lost. Canada to be
sure had lost enough brilliant men to other nations and imported enough
able men from abroad. It was time to produce and to keep our own. There
was national work for them all to do. Aitken came up in the boom time of
Canada. He fitted the time. A nation's financial adversity was no
occasion for him. He followed the wake and profited by the experiences
of builders of railways, industries, banks and provinces. Every move
forward of the country in commercial expansion was a nudge ahead for his
chariot of fortune. He was the most successful "bull" factor Canada ever
had. But in all probability, were he to be flung into one of the
demoralized nations of democratized Europe he could make money even