"Newman, Peter C. - Company of Adventures 03 - Merchant Prince" - читать интересную книгу автора (Newman Peter C)

42 years with the Bank of Montreal 32 years with the CPR
2 3 years with the St Paul Railway
18 years as Canada's I ligh Conitnissioner in London 18 vears in the
Parliainent of Canada
15 years as president of Royal Trust
6 years as chairman of Burmah Oil and Anglo-Persian Oil 4 years in the
Manitoba Legislature.
Smith of course held most of these positions simultancously. He had the
knack of switching from one business to ,mother, from vet another
enterprise to politics and back again, wi&ut any derailment of con-
secutive thought or action. In 1905, for example, he was at one and the
same time Governor of the Hudson's Bay Company, president of the Bank of
Montreal, director and executive committee member of the Canadian Pacific
Railwoy, president of Royal Trust, Canada's High Commissioner to Britain,
chairman of Burmah Oil and the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, all the while
remaining a major influence in Canadian and British public affair,, and
masterminding recruiting efforts in Furope to populate the Prairies. Not
that 1905 was a particularly busy year-and he was eightyfive at the time.
Smith's compulsion to increase his wealth and expand his power when he
already possessed a surfeit of both baffled and disiurbed his supporters
and critics alike. His contemporaries shared a sense of disquieting
inevitabilit~ about Smith's amazing career. Considerable as they were,
his accomplishments seemed less man-made than imposed by a force of
nature. He was
 THE MAN WHO BECAME A COUNTRY 9

like the first rain of a monsoon season: nothing much could stop or pacify
him.
Thomas Wilson, one of his many political opponents, best summed up the
puzzle of Smith's obsession when he demanded, during a Manitoba by-election
campaign: "Who is Smith? "'hat is Smith? Is the palladium of our destinies
to be entrusted to a Smith? What has a Smith done that he should seek to
grasp the Ark of the Covenant with the one hand and with the other wrestle
for the sceptre of ihe Almighty? Smith! Why, Smith is not a name, but an
occupation!"

UNLIKE'rHE CHRONICLES of most public individuals, Donald Alexander Smith's
life and times were impossible to separate. He so frequently advanced his
career along with whatever historical forces he happened to be commanding or
diverting at the time that he eventually stopped differentiating between his
personal ambitions and the national Interest. In his mental calculations
these diverse objectives could be joined in a singular path: his own.
That intuitive leap had curious consequences. It meant that while at the
beginning of his career Smith was driven by the same devils that push anv
selfrespecting swashbuckler, he eventually came to see himself as an
instrument of the national will, convinced that his personal success and
the nation's destiny were inextricably linked. He failed to recognize any
conflict of interest between the public good and his private benefit.
According to this self-imposed credo, the consequences of his decisions
could flow either way, there seldom being any difference in the spelling of