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

the name of their ultimate beneficiary.
At first glance, this monumentally self-centred view of the world appears
to collide with the fact that during
 10 LABRADOR SMITH

most of his life Smith ,ought to advance the estate and well-being of the
Hudson's Bay Company. Not necessarily. For many years Smith was the
largest individual shareholder of the Company, so there was in this, as
in his other endeavours, little absence ofcommon cause.
Not only (lid Smith hypnotize himself into following such dubious logic
but others began to believe it too. McGill historian John Macnaughton
wrote of Smith in his later years: "That old man was Canada. In him, the
whole history of our country, from the minktrap and birch-bark canoe,
down to the grain-elevator and ocean-liner, lived and breathed and moved
and walked about. ..."
Smith's egotistical approach was not unusual for his day. "C,od helps
those who help themselves" was less an anachronistic clich6 than an
eleventh commandmerit. The inyth, perpetuated in the simple-minded
Horatio Alger books of the late nineteenth century (reallv one book
rewritten a hundred times over), that thrift* and hard work secured
wealth, which in turn guaranteed virtue and godliness, had ignited the
jinbitions of a generation. Since it was clearly God's design that the
virtuous become wealthy, to gain riches meant gaining Divine Sanction.
Anything to be nearer, my God, to Thee.
Having thus created his own fiscal universe and -a selfsustaining ethic
to go with it, Smith seemed genuinely puzzled when he was accused of
bribery and corruption. He wished to be remembered as a man who had never
sinned and indeed had been intrinsically incapable of sinning. Yet he
virtually invented insider trading, and double-crossed both his political
allies and one-time HBC comrades in the field. He regarded his House of
Comnions seat as a patriotic trust and refused to accept his Member',,
salary. But lie was tossed out of Parliament for bribing voters, and the
success of his syndicates
 THE MAN WHO BECAME A COUNTRY 11

depended directly on bribing politicians. As the British social historian
Jan Morris noted, "All his life Smith was attended by a detectable aura
of double-dealing ... he was ... without many principles but admirably
resourceful."
Even in an age when the slightest evidence of business ethics was
considered a sign of dotage, Smith's juggling of loyalties was
breathtaking in its scope and audacity, outrageous in its absence of
accountability or sound auditing practices. "Apart from their
illegibility, Smith's letters reveal a man pre-occupied with politics,
railways, steamboats, furs, and lands-in that order," concluded Alan
Wilson, who studied Smith's surviving correspondence. "Many of his
reports would appall a modern business practitioner by their lack of
sufficient data, of attention to detail and sufficiently regular
review... For one who had close relations with some of Canada's leading
bankers, he had a curious distaste for accountancy in his own