ed and enjoyed but once
in a nation's lifetime. He still has big interests, some of them
gradually being taken over by governments and municipal corporations.
But he has shot his bolt, and it was a Jovian big one. No doubt he is
enormously rich. That does not matter. Canada no longer cares whether
he is rich or poor. Once a demigod in our national ledgers, he is now
a grizzled relique of his former energy. He used to be a despot feared
by those who had to work under him, admired for his superhuman audacity
and power to get what he wanted just because he knew why and when he
wanted it, and capable of inspiring an almost insane loyalty to a
man-made system that never was anything at all but an economic mirage.
He is now just William Mackenzie, more or less a citizen, now and then
interviewed laconically by a reporter who never can extract anything
but arid commonplaces from what he says to the public.

Because, to William Mackenzie there never was any real public. What he
cared about was the prosperous nation upon which he could build and
build without limit till he died. When the nation came to a crisis in
the war he did nothing to help it, except to let the Railway War Board
pool his lines for traffic and the Government commandeer his ships.
The man who years before had been regarded as the greatest doer in
Canada, when the country and all Mackenzie's works along with it came
to the great test, never so much as lifted a personal finger to help in
the work that had to be done. Mackenzie had done his work in
prosperity. In the great predicament he had no function. The nation
paid him his ducats and let him go.

This, if we are concerned about the man value of Canada, is a tragedy.
For there was in William Mackenzie somehow, with all his ruthlessness
and audacity and semi-piratical creed, the element of a kind of great
man. There is in his uncommon face the look of a man who with less
excess of one quality might have become a wonderful citizen. Nature
made him vastly selfish on a scale big enough to devise a totally new
scheme for over-capitalizing Canada. She denied him the commoner human
qualities that make a man a constructive citizen whether his country is
in weal or woe.

The epic which Mackenzie and his partner achieved in this country
out-bid in dimensions, variety and the use of practical imagination,
even the work of Rhodes in South Africa. It was a feat of economic and
financial engineering whic