at high wages and
rolled out vast quantities of material that had to be moved, when even
C.P.R. efficiency seemed to be just about obliterated from the chart of
the world's work.

This was no time for any man to pray that he might be made chief
executive of the greatest transportation system in the world; nor a
time for Lord Shaughnessy to continue in that office. The work was now
too heavy for the autocrat and for a man whose eyesight was bad. A
successor had to be found. The directors did it almost automatically.
There was but one man to consider; and he had no experience in any of
the mechanical departments.

Beatty was the man. The old autocrat himself had said so; and he knew.
Shaughnessy had taken the road from its wizard creator, and made it the
size and efficiency that it was. There was almost apostolic
succession. Stories that the Montreal directors favoured one man, the
Toronto directors another, and that Shaughnessy gave the casting vote,
were mere fabrications. Yet Beatty stated that never in his long years
of experience with the system had he a clear ambition to climb up its
ladder. He never wanted anything but a large day's work--and he got
many. But, when he was made Vice-President, he must have known that he
was the man. Vice-Presidents on the C.P.R. are not necessarily
presidents to be. One of Beatty's friends travelling with him up from
Three Rivers once bought him a picture postcard with the legend, "No
mother ever picks her son to be a Vice-President." Beatty smiled it
off. He probably knew. This was one of the rare bits of humour that
illustrated the Shaughnessy regime. His lordship, fond enough of Irish
jokes outside, was never humourous inside the system. All the humour
in Canadian Pacific was supposed to have died when Van Horne left it.

But now and again a gleam of human insight came from the grim
efficiency of the great system, and at least upon one occasion it
flashed from the legal department. When the Railway Commission was
almost a new thing under that remarkable square-deal chairman, Joseph
Pitt Mabee, the town of Trois Rivieres, Que., had a suit, through its
Board of Trade, against the C.P.R., involving discrimination in rates.
The counsel for the plaintiff was a French-Canadian who could read, but
not comfortably speak, English. The further he went the more
bewildered the chairman became, until he ventured to interrupt:

"I have a suggestion to make to my hon. frie