travelling tariff commission taking evidence in almost every village
with a smokestack from coast to coast must have had some real object.
But Sir Henry had cleaned up most of the possibilities in direct
taxation; it was time he tackled the tariff, even though he knew it was
largely a show to satisfy the people that the most patient investigator
in the world at the head of a small court had taken evidence on what
every Tom and Dick had to say for and against in any part of the
country outside of the Yukon. Had it been practicable to hold a
session on Great Bear Lake, to determine the trade relations between
the copper-kniving Eskimos and the meat-swapping Yellow Knife Indians,
Sir Henry would have done it.

Such vast patience is phenomenal even in Drayton. One almost fears
that he is becoming interested in a Federal election. If so, the end
is in sight. The day we partyize Sir Henry we shall lose one of the
oddest and rarest personal identities we ever had. But we can better
afford to lose his personal identity in his party service than to lose
both in putting into the Finance Department in 1922 some idealistic
experimenter in the efficacy of Free Trade.

THE PERSONAL EQUATION IN RAILROADING

EDWARD WENTWORTH BEATTY, K.C.

The main thing that E. W. Beatty, K.C., did to help win the war was to
become President of the C.P.R. And he did it well. A glance at this
polished pony engine of a chief executive suggests that he has never
done anything but well, and that he is the kind of man likely without
preachments to stimulate well-doing in other people.

I first met this self-controlled master of executives not long after he
became President. He was most cordial; as Shaughnessy had been
austere. Under such a direct impression it seemed that I had at last
found a man who would make the inexorable old C.P.R. become a golden
door to humanity. Of course I was mistaken. That kind of man is born
often enough, but he seldom stays with his birthright. I knew that the
railway of railways was no school for the humanities; but this
university graduate, Chancellor of Queen's, distinguished counsel and
potential eminent judge, bachelor, Canadian born, every inch an athlete
and as rugged as Carpentier, seemed to my aroused imagination one who
would be as much bigger than the stodgy C.P.R. as that system was
greater than others of its kind.

Beatty has not been at his new job long enough yet to prove what I
suspec