122 PROCEEDINGS OF THE CANADIAN INSTITUTE. 



The Transportation Question. By J. S. Willison, Esq. 



(Read April i6, 1898.) 



A discussion of the transportation problem in the language of hysterical Popu- 

 lism unfits the public mind for a sane judgment and drives Legislatures and Parlia- 

 ments to attempt legislation so rash, extreme and impracticable that rational reform 

 is embarrassed, disastrous reaction invited and the public authority discredited. 

 Too often that class of vociferous patriots who move against the railway corpora- 

 tions with a fleet of froth and an army of adjectives accomplish no other result 

 than to inflame the public temper, disturb legitimate private investments and hurt 

 the national credit. Always in the field of economics the forces of order are " turn- 

 ing to scorn with lips divine the falsehood of extremes." Indiscriminate denunci- 

 ation is the vice of the press and the pastime of democracies. We in Canada, in 

 recent days, have had much hearty denunciation of railway monopoly, and corpora- 

 tion-baiting threatens to become the chief business of some of our influential journals 

 and of an active and aggressive wing of our politicians. It is beyond doubt that we 

 have made grave mistakes in railway policy. We have been cheated by the phantom 

 of railway competition. We have unwisely duplicated pioneer lines. We have 

 rashly vested great tracts of the public heritage in railway corporations. But we 

 are a young community, at least in range of settlement and in measure of develop- 

 ment, and we have had great problems to solve; and it was perhaps inevitable that 

 just as we gave noble forests of timber to the fire in clearing the virgin lands of 

 older Canada, so we should make a prodigal use of the resources of the west in 

 laying the lines of rail communication across the continent. Now, as to these 

 grave follies of statesmanship and grave errors of policy, we can perhaps do nothing 

 better than to say with Bacon : " That which is past is gone and irrevocable, and 

 wise men have enough to do with things present and to come; therefore they do 

 bttt trifle with themselves that labor in past matters." 



TT. I 



We should remember, too, that railway transportation has not been a pro- 

 fitable business in Canada, that millions of English capital have been sunk irre- 

 trievably in the Grand Trunk, that with the slow growth of settlement in the west 

 only exceptional resource and exceptional enterprise could have maintained the 

 Canadian Pacific as a going concern, and that both of our great through roads 

 have been heavily burdened with unprofitable branches. Canada's reputation in the 

 money markets of the world depends upon a few of its great enterprises. For half 

 a century the spectre of the Grand Trunk has stood at the elbow of the Canadian 

 financier and promoter on the London money market, and all over this country 

 there are idle mines, and untilled acres, and rich fields of natural wealth undeveloped 

 that would have been opened and occupied by the strong arm of British capital 

 if the melancholy story of the Grand Trunk had not been written in financial Lon- 

 don. If the Canadian Pacific had met a like fate, a blow would have been dealt 

 us from which we could not have recovered for a generation. We can imagine 

 what a blow would be dealt at the private and public credit of the United States 

 if half the railway system of the Republic were to be plunged into bankruptcy, and 

 when we face the fact that the Canadian Pacific system embraces half the railway 



