Part 26

Such budgets as he gives us are not the work of a true Conservative. They bear no interesting bigotries of the party. They deal only secondarily with tariffs. I believe Sir Henry knows that most people regard a tariff as a very oblique way of reaching the pocket. People compute tariffs and argue about them. Only the farmers can make them into frightful realities. Nobody understands a tariff anyway when it comes to the schedule. Its chief use is for winning and losing elections.

But Sir Henry's admonishing finger goes up, and we are hushed to see what is the really cruel thing he intends to show us next, that will hurt just like a thumbscrew. He smiles and flips down a long scroll of--direct and drastic taxes quite shocking to contemplate.

"This is going to hurt you all, good people," he says. "But I may as well be honest about it. I am not a financial Christian Scientist. You will all feel better after you are properly hurt."

Thus far we remember chiefly how it hurt. We are still hoping to feel better.

Drayton had some grounding in practical finance long before he took any of the detail jobs that have had so much to do with computations and costs. We are reminded of a little episode of his early youth in Toronto.

Harry Drayton and Frank Baillie were schoolboys together. They lived on the same street. A neighbour was about to have an auction sale of his goods, but looking over the lot he made a present of a punching bag to Harry and Frank, no doubt because he foresaw that they would both have strenuous lives. The boys thanked him and took away the bag. On the way home Harry said to Frank:

"Do you really want a share in that punching bag?"

"Not so keen as I might be," said Frank. "Why?"

"Because he had something else I'd rather have. Remember that little printing press?"

"Oh, what he uses to print calling cards on?"

"How would you like to go snooks with me and get that, Frank?"

"Well, it certainly would be swell to print our own calling cards, Harry."

"He wants $6.50 for it, though."

"Oh! That's different. Here, let me sell the bag, anyhow. That'll be a start."

Frank, already budding into finance, sold the bag for one dollar and twenty-five cents.

"Well, we're still shy $5.25, Frank," said the coming Finance Minister of Canada.

"Yes, and it's your move, Harry."

"All right, I've got an idea. You wait."

Next day the sprouting financiers met, when Harry had a fine steel trout rod.

"See that, Frank? Got that from dad. Made me a present of it--at my own suggestion. What is she worth?"

"Don't you want to fish, Harry?"

"Not if you can sell the rod."

Frank took it and looked it over.

"Sure!" he said. "I'll sell that for the company."

There being no guile in either of these young men, the sequel is that Frank sold the trout rod for $5.25 and Harry proudly took the entire $6.50 to the neighbour, paid for the press and had it taken home to his attic, where it must be presumed the two of them spent rainy days printing calling cards for Draytons and Baillies.

Canada took very little interest in Drayton till he came to be Chairman of the Railway Commission. But by that time the said Commission was no longer the grand court it had been in the days of J. Pitt Mabee. It settled more disputes than ever and settled them as well as ever. Drayton had almost twice the mileage to cover that Mabee had in 1903. He did it with tireless exactitude. He was less concerned with the ethical issues at stake in decisions between railways and communities than with the unethical fact of such a prodigal lot of lines having been built at all to give trouble to the nation. We were just getting to the end of the race of the railroads, when thousands of foreigners had been dumped into the country with shovel and pick, and thousands of miles of new railway built that would shortly be a charge on the country.

An able writer a few years ago wrote a series of articles in a Canadian publication headed, "Is there a Railway Muddle?" Being himself a railwayman he seemed to think that the muddle, if any, was chargeable to conditions over which the railways had little or no control.

Mr. Drayton, shrewdly traversing the network of those prodigally built railways, felt no need of asking any such question. He carried on into the slump in business, and on into the war when the Railway War Board, practising a sort of church union by cutting out competition and re-routeing traffic for the sake of getting war haulage done as quickly as possible, left very little for the Drayton court to settle. But there was a bigger settlement to come later, and Drayton was to have a hand in it.