had creaked into through traffic from Yokohama to
Montreal as far aback as 1889; and the new lines built under Shaughnessy
were just branches of the old trunk. Shaughnessy took over bulging
receipts after he had spent years at painful expenditures. He took over
a despotism and made it an autocracy.

It was not in his practical, unromantic temperament to play the
Gargantuan role. He had not the mentality. Van Horne left the road when
the road threatened to become bigger than its creator. Shaughnessy began
to work on it when he knew that the bigger he made the system the greater
would be his own executive authority, and the bigger the dividends to the
holders of stock.

There was a radical contrast between these two men; and as much between
the road built by Van Horne and the system operated and magnified by
Shaughnessy. The former would not have his shadow dwarfed by the
dimensions of his own creation. The latter had created nothing: he would
have the shadow of the thing fling itself so vastly over the nation--and
the nations--that whenever men spoke of C.P. they thought of Shaughnessy,
and when they said his name they mentally took off their hats to the
headship of the greatest system of its kind in the world.

This may or may not have been Shaughnessy's intention. It was certainly
the effect. We have all gone through the era of profound respect for the
cold autocrat of the twentieth century, as some of us did that of awesome
veneration of the railway giants of the nineteenth. We have read
newspaper stories--some of them buncombe--about this man's all-seeing eye
as he travelled over the system, as we did of the peripatetic omniscience
of James J. Hill and the Gargantuan humours of Van Horne. We have
consented that the system perfected by Shaughnessy was the most
marvellous known of its kind, and therefore the man at its head must be a
phenomenal administrator.

Very likely we have been warped by our enthusiasm. Shaughnessy was no
miracle man. He was a wonderful _maestro_ of details, a clear-headed
organizer of systems and a man to provoke high respect in those who had
to deal with him at close range. But he had perhaps less sheer ability
for detail than Van Horne, who as a rule despised the botheration of it.
I have heard Van Horne dictating to his secretary a mass of intimate
instructions to a contractor about how to build a rotunda in a hotel in
Cuba, at the same time with his left hand on a drawer f