CHAPTER IV.
Reviewing vanished practices, including ticket scalping and fast freight lines.
WHEN the Canadian Pacific Railway was built across the prairies there was no railway for a hundred miles south of parallel forty-nine. Red River carts, canoes and dog-sleds furnished all the transportation between it and the North Pole. Van Horne earned his first freight revenue from the Saskatchewan plains by shipping buffalo bones to Eastern fertilizer manufacturers. When he stopped at construction camps he would draw pictures on buffalo skulls for the men's amusement in the evening. To build a railway across empty plains and over mountain ranges was regarded as unmitigable folly by many people who believed themselves to be far-seeing.
While it was being done the state of Eastern Canada was not very encouraging. Half of the settled farm land of Ontario was uncleared bush. Farmers received little or nothing for their produce. The cities were small. Manufacturing was in a sickly, uncertain infancy. In average years the country was importing something more than a hundred million dollars' worth of goods and exporting something less. The interest on borrowed money, therefore, was being paid with more borrowed money. The revenue of the Dominion was about thirty million dollars. You could get good board in Montreal or Toronto for four dollars a week, and very good for six. Everybody was poor.
There isn't the same sort of plenty in Canada that there was forty years ago—I mean as to eats and drinks, the cost of fuel, and the simplicities of fun. But, on the whole, things are vastly better than they were. Those who discover a moral declension in the people are sorely mistaken.
But I am concerned with railway affairs, and am not delivering lectures on the history of Canadian morals. The railroad ethics of to-day are very much ahead of the railway ethics of forty years ago. That is true whether you compare railway standards with railway standards, or look cursorily over the field of commercial and social relationships. One wouldn't say that saintliness distinguishes the railway business more than it does any other. Indeed, it is commonly supposed that there is more freedom of speech, running into license, among knights of the rail than there is in any other walk of life.
It is still supposed by many otherwise excellent people that, of all corporations, a railway corporation most assuredly has neither body to be kicked, nor soul to be damned. Railwaymen are not a perfectionist crowd. They never set themselves up for paragons. But take them by and large, railwaymen are as worthy a segment of society as any other. In the last forty years there has been at least as notable a progression in the standards of railway behaviour as in other fields of human activity, including the Christian ministry.
Heaven knows there was room for improvement—not in the men, but in the standards which were considered appropriate to a business that was always weirdly competitive, was sometimes wonderfully prosperous, and at other times was woefully depressed. There is a changing orthodoxy in commerce as there is in religion and politics. The railway business is no exception to this rule. The change has been steadily for the better. Of this it will be easy to convince the elder, as I hope it will not be impossible to inform, the younger readers of these remarks.
How far we have travelled, how large have been the revolutions in commercial morality within the memory of people now living, can be indicated by a few facts. I have mentioned a lady now in England who has given sixty-Five descendants to Canada. She was eight years old when slavery became illegal in the British dominions. She was sixteen years old when, under the Ashburton treaty which gave to the United States territory that ought to have been part of Canada, the United States and Britain agreed to maintain squadrons off the coast of Africa to prevent further shipment of slaves to the New World. Scores of thousands of the present citizens of the United States were born as slaves. When I came to Montreal the American Civil War which freed the slaves wasn't as far back as the Boer War is now.
The old lady of whom I have spoken was six years old when the Reform Bill put an end to the system of rotten boroughs in the British Isles, which we still regard as having in all past centuries been in the forefront of moral and political progress. The political corruption of those times, so nauseating when we read about it, was regarded as a matter of course by men and women who were godliest among the good. Nowadays, when we are shocked by stories of buying votes in elections, we sometimes forget the recency of the society from which that form of bribery descends. Financial customs which are reprehensible to-day were respectable not so long ago in all walks of life.
One mentions these things in a railway retrospect, so that when a few facts as to old-time methods have been given it will not be supposed that in their practices of several decades ago some railway administrations were sinners above all other sinners. They practised the orthodoxies of their times, and were neither better nor worse than the practitioners of orthodoxy in a hundred ranges of human activity.
It may seem a queer question to young people—What would you think, supposing you wanted to go to Chicago on the Canadian National Railways—and, instead of going into the railway once at King and Yonge, and paying, say, sixteen dollars for the ticket, you slipped into a private ticket once up street, and bought your ticket for ten dollars? Or, supposing you were going to San Francisco, instead of buying a through ticket to your destination at the Canadian National or Canadian Pacific office downtown, or at the Union Station, you bought a ticket only for Chicago, at the little once up the street, and then, at Chicago, bought another for the rest of the journey from another privately-conducted office, and saved perhaps twenty-five dollars by doing that, instead of buying your ticket at the railway office in Chicago?
In 1924 it sounds very odd to mention such possibilities to men and women of thirty years of age, who suppose they really know something of the world's ways. But to older people the suggestion has all the familiarity of reminiscence it recalls the age of scalping in passenger travel, and of the so-called fast freight lines in the other branch of railway business, which were in full blast when I began to audit accounts in the Grand Trunk head office at Point St. Charles.
What is now told about our railways is not to their discredit, except so far as it would be to the discredit, for instance, of the Christian churches of to-day to remind them that it was not they who directly raised the tone of political morality, or abolished slavery. Canadian railway practice was like the railway practice of other countries mainly the United States. The Grand Trunk, with its English management and English ideas, had some peculiarities of its own; but, in the main, its relation to scalping and fast freight lines was forced upon it by the prevailing conditions on this continent. Those conditions could only be finally improved by the intervention of public authority, such as the Dominion Board of Railway Commissioners, or the Inter-State Commerce Commission, both of which bodies may be only stages in the evolution towards the public ownership of all railways, which, theoretically at least (though practically it is not se easy of accomplishment), is as sound as the public ownership of the post-office, the navy, or the geodetic survey.
In the old days, railways competed fiercely against one another, and were virtually a law unto themselves. Tariffs were Bled with Governments; but they were as often honoured in the breach as in the observance. The principle of the member of Parliament franking letters for himself, his family, and his friends, which has been a hoary accompaniment of the honesties of parliamentary government, was in full operation in the railway field. Because you were next a railway, you could get special privileges as naturally as you could get special privileges-in the mails if you were of a Parliamentarian's family. In politics you got a place with much pay and little work if you were closely related to a minister. In business you got better rates than your competitor if you were more happily related to the management than he.
It would be too devious a chase just now to ascertain exactly how the practice of scalping railway tickets came into vogue. At all events it was in vogue in Montreal and Toronto in the early eighties—as it was in the United States, its natural home. It was customary for railways to sell to scalpers quantities of tickets over their own systems at a reduced rate. There was always a bargain-counter for the scalper. The scalpers sold tickets to customers at a profit, which often depended on how the scalper sized up the customer when he came to buy.
The scalper also bought tickets from individuals—mostly the unused portions of return tickets. Return tickets were not as long-dated as they now are. You came to Toronto from Chicago with a return ticket; and found you could not go back within the time limit. You sold that half of the ticket to the scalper for, say, two or three dollars, and he took his chance of selling it, for, say, ten, to somebody who wanted a single.
Telling this to an astonished friend the other day, he at once asked how so singular a method of doing business affected the audit offices. Well, as I wasn't in a very responsible position at the Grand Trunk, during the two and a half years I remained in Montreal; (whence I moved to New York, in the spring of 1885) I do not profess to speak of how things were straightened out in Montreal; but, from knowledge gained, it can be said that there was a practice in many railways on this continent of putting aside earnings reserves when business was good, and using them when business was not so good. In a way, it was as if a storekeeper neglected to count the accumulations in his till, and then reckoned his count for the day when it was made.
The scalping practice made this manner of reporting receipts inevitable. For example, a big block of tickets was sold outright to a scalper—it might be at fifty, sixty or seventy per cent. of the rate charged at the railway's own counter. He paid for them. When they came back to head office there was nothing to differentiate the tickets sold to the scalpers and the tickets sold to the public. The conductor couldn't tell when he lifted a ticket that had been bought from a scalper. He had to turn it in as part of his report.
Say there were a thousand tickets from Montreal to Chicago, and the regular rate was thirty dollars, a total of thirty thousand dollars. But the railway's cash receipts were only twenty thousand dollars, because of the scalping. The proportion of scalped revenue, obviously, would vary from month to month. Adjustment was necessary; and in making adjustments it is equally obvious that it would be a convenience to even up from a reserve in hand, or to put part of an exceptionally good run of receipts into the reserve.
For the benefit of the juvenile generation it may be added that scalping became so large and pervasive an adjunct to transportation that its interests developed an organization of their own. If you wanted a through ticket to San Francisco, instead of taking chances of making a good bargain at a scalper's, between trains at Chicago, the scalper in Toronto would do all the needful business for you. He regarded himself as a broker, and to some he was a very present help in time of trouble. That he was not necessary—assuming proper relations between the railways and the public—is proved by his elimination as soon as public control. of railways arrived.
The anomaly of the fast freight line was another and more wonderful manifestation of the vicious principle which was behind the scalping. It also had its relation to two other transportation services which still exist, though they are not as liable to the same abuses that were inseparable from the fast freight lines—I mean the express service and the Pullman car. The express business to California was being done by ponies, for instance, before there was railway communication across the mountains. When railways were built the express companies brought their business to them, using cars, and paying the railways a percentage of, receipts for the entire service.
The Pullman car service was entirely a product of the railways. When trains did not afford the luxury of sleeping between sheets, Mr. Pullman came along, offered to furnish cars, collect tolls, and pay the railways for hauling them. This method is just about as old as the Canadian Confederation. One of the most curious sidelights on the origin of what is regarded as an entirely American innovation is furnished by the story of the Prince of Wales' tour in Canada in 1860. The first car to carry sleeping accommodation was built at Brantford for the Prince of Wales. From it Pullman got the ideas which he evolved into the Pullman system.
Pullman built his cars, charged the railways a rental for them, and himself took the special revenue earned by the sleeping accommodation. He obtained practically a monopoly on this continent, and the Grand Trunk remained like other roads, after the Canadian Pacific and the Canadian Northern owned and operated their own sleeping cars.
The practice of farming out certain services was the fruit of conditions. It is virtually the same as was followed by Lord Northcliffe in many of his secondary publications in London. He farmed their advertising out to advertising agents. The railways farmed out to express companies the swifter-than-freight carriage of goods; and to the Pullman Company the night comfort of passengers. But the fast freight line game was in a different category from these present-day services. It was regarded as legitimate business then; if a revival of it were attempted now it would be given another name.
It grew from the hoary notion that it was all right to give private favours at the public expense. If a concern brought a large amount of traffic, it got a better rate than its smaller competitor. That notion of the proprieties opened the door to the fast freight line, which wasn't a railway at all, but an inside track which had no honest business to be there.
A group of men who happened to be high-up railway officials organized a company called, say, the Minnehaha Fast Freight Line. The company got preferential rates on all the freight it turned in. The company labeled its cars and went out after business. It charged the shipper the same rates as the railways did, but promised him more rapid delivery. The railways gave preference to the so-called fast freight, though they got less revenue from it, pound for pound, than they received from the freight they pushed aside for it.
The complications that arose from this favouring of fast freight companies were many and were often amusing. On the Grand Trunk I was soon told off for special auditing, and in 1884 was sent to Detroit, with W. B. Pollock, of the New York, West Shore and Buffalo Railway, to audit the books of an agent of a fast freight line who had received more money than he accounted for, because of the system of collecting payment from shippers. Incidentally, straightening out the tangle led to my going into railway service across the line, and almost made me an American.
On this continent there was so much distrust of railways by railways that when a great business corporation sent, say, a trainload of sugar from New York by a fast freight line, to be distributed to different points in what was still regarded as the west Ohio, for instance the money for the whole service would be paid to some central agent of the fast freight line, who, in due time, paid their proportions to the railways which received parts of the track. Unraveling bookkeeping tangles was always a revel to me. Pollock and I discovered that the fast freight line agent at Detroit was a good many thousand dollars astray in his reckoning.
That piece of work procured for me the offer of a clerkship on the West Shore line, which runs down the western side of the Hudson river, and this involved a removal to New York.
After a year and a half, the West Shore was taken over by the New York Central group, and the office force was transferred from the old Stewart Building near Cortland street to the head office of the bigger system in the Grand Central Station at Forty-second Street, to make the necessary accounting adjustments. When this was finished salaries were reduced. I thought the offer to me was beneath my merits; and, having a promise that in pending changes on the Jersey Central I would be sure of a position, I returned to Montreal to await developments. They were much delayed, and, not loving idleness, I did some special work for Mr. Hawson.
At last the offer from the Jersey Central came. It was a good offer, which would probably have led to rapid promotion, for the man who was to have been my chief soon after died, and according to all custom I should have succeeded him as assistant auditor of freight receipts. Of my colleagues in New York a considerable proportion won high promotion—my fellow auditor of the Detroit fast freight agent's accounts, W. B. Pollock, is now the head of the whole marine department of the New York Central lines.
When the offer did come I had just arrived at Portage la Prairie, and had not begun work. I might have gone East again, had not Horace Greeley's advice been earnestly repeated to me, with results one sees no reason seriously to regret.
Anyway, it is no use speculating on what would have become of my family if, instead of finding them through a Portage la Prairie merchant's house—my father-in-law had the leading retail and wholesale store in the town—I had turned again east, before the wide streets of the Manitoba town had become familiar. My sister had kindly kept from me a letter which would probably have resulted in a life spent in producing Ceylon tea. Mr. Baker, my first chief in the West, induced me to answer unfavourably a telegram which almost certainly had within it the makings of an American citizen. So, it would seem, does Providence sometimes steer our barque.