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

administration."
That careless approach to detail was hardly startling. When the burden
of a nation's future rests upon one's shoulders, who has time for
balance-sheet trifles? The notion of an individual personifying a
civilization now seems bizarre in any context outside an insane asylum.
Yet in Victorian times the idea was not that preposterous. Those who,
like Smith, subscribed to the efficacy of the British Empire-and it then
ruled a quarter of the world-saw the expanding arc of their authority as
a means of elevating mankind. Smith believed that immigrants hailing from
anywhere in the British Isles were endowed with a very special mission.
It was perhaps best described by the Earl of Carnarvon, a Secretary of
State for the Colonies, who mused that in the far reaches of the Empire
there were "races struggling to emerge into civilization.... To them it
is our part to give wise laws, good government, and a well-ordered
 12 LABRADOR SMITH

finance.... This is the true strength and meaning of imperialism."
The concepts of parliamentary government, the value of gentlemen's clubs,
fiscal stability, free trade, chivalry, Rudyard Kipling and the supremacy
of the Royal Navy were all part of Smiths gospel. Canadian reaction to
his imperi,ilistic sernions was divided into predictably opposing N
lewpoints. Canadian nationalists of the time-a minority, then as
now-believed this message was nonsense, that their burgeoning new country
could find strength and identity only by cutting its cross-Atlantic
apron-strings. The young nation's business and political Establishments
preached just as fiercely that the only way for Canada to attain interna-
tional stature was to expand the British link by gaining influence within
the empire's highest councils. Despite his Scottish origins and
Presbyterian roots, Smith was an acknowledged leader of the second
faction, behaving like a born-again Anglophile yet being fiercely (if
somewhat patronizingly) proud of his rarefied brand of Canadiamsru.
Constantly cultivating the reclusion of a great man in the service of an
all-consuming mission, Smith was stubbornly uncommunicative in an age
when business tycoons pranced across front pages, dispensing avuncular
advice and dropping marginally relevant comirients. Smith stayed inum.
He knew how to wait and he had a nose for power. Whatever nefarious
fiction (or truth) might be written or repeated about him, he realized
how valuable it was to allow legends to marinate undisturbed-that however
useful a reply might be, silence was even better. He destroyed nearly all
his early papers and was seldom interviewed. He managed almost always to
take the credit for his achievements without beat-] ng the burden of his
failures. "There were always others willing to accept the
responsibility,"
 THE MAN WHO BECAME A COUNTRY 13

noted WTR. Preston. "He developed his power in this direction into a
science. He never allowed himself to show resentment. So far as possible he
avoided arousing thoughts of reprisals in the hearts of his opponents.
However the end might justify the means, the reason for the means was not in
evidence-his hand was never visible."