bond issue; by 1906 they had collectively received, besides interest on their investment, about $300,000,000 in securities. From this success they, with others, turned to the Canadian Pacific. The liberal party's policy of national construction was abandoned when Macdonald came into power in 1878; in 1880 the Canadian Pacific Railway Company was organized under Stephen, and Smith, who owing to his quarrel with the conservatives did not figure openly at the beginning, soon became a director. The transcontinental line was pushed through despite great difficulties, Smith and his colleagues staking all their resources to get it completed. In November 1885 Smith drove the last spike. This made many regard him as the railway's chief builder; but, though one of the group, he was never its leader, and Stephen's was the directing brain.
In 1886 Smith was knighted, in 1897 created Baron Strathcona. In 1896 he became high commissioner for Canada; henceforward he made his home in Great Britain, and became something of an imperial figure. His great wealth allowed him to entertain more liberally than any previous occupant of the office. He gave freely to hospitals and education in Scotland, Canada, and the United States, in the last thirty years of his life distributing more than £1,300,000. He raised at his own expense a regiment of rough-riders for service in the South African War. But, though more prominent than he had been before, Strathcona had little direct influence on Canadian development during this last period of his life. He was not in sympathy or close touch with the younger liberal leaders who were in power at Ottawa after 1896, and the chief Canadian government activity in London, immigration, was not under his control. His splendid physique enabled him to remain in office long after the usual age for retirement. Till the end he attended personally to many details, and ran his office on rather autocratic lines. He showed a tendency to resent the success of other men's ideas, and largely for this reason opposed Earl Grey's plan of a central house for the offices of all the Dominions. He clung to his position when the Canadian government would not have regretted his resignation. In November 1913 Lady Strathcona died, and after a short illness his own death followed in London on 21 January 1914, at the age of ninety-three. In 1900 his patent had been modified so as to make the barony transmissible through the female line; this was done because his only child was a daughter, and in recognition of his raising of ‘Strathcona's Horse’. He was succeeded in the barony by his daughter, Margaret Charlotte, who married in 1888 Robert Jared Bliss Howard, F.R.C.S. She died in 1926, and the elder son of this marriage is the present holder of the title.
Lord Strathcona has been regarded as a great statesman and financier, of the same calibre as Cecil Rhodes, and also as the man chiefly responsible for the increased corruption of Canadian public life in the 'eighties: both estimates are excessive. The immense power of finance, and particularly of the Canadian Pacific Company, was not a beneficent force in Canadian politics; but Strathcona's personal responsibility for its exercise is unproven. That he had any far-reaching political views or any deep purpose is equally doubtful. He was led from fur-trading to politics and railway building by forces which he did not create and could hardly guide. The expansion of Canada westwards, following swiftly on federation, altered the tone of Canadian politics and the scale of Canadian business. Until he was approaching fifty years of age, Strathcona's activities had hardly reached beyond Labrador and the lower waters of the St. Lawrence; and save that he acquired manufacturing interests in Montreal he showed no realization of what was coming. A mistake of the Canadian government turned his attention to the west, and with his customary shrewdness he saw its importance. Through his whole life he was a strenuous worker, an able judge of men, apt to seize opportunity. Financially generous, he was also a good hater, but never let animosity interfere with business. Had he chosen a political career it is doubtful whether he would have succeeded in it, for he lacked the three qualities—eloquence, personal charm, and strength of conviction—one at least of which is needed in a national leader. Rhodes went into finance to achieve a political end, Strathcona into politics largely for the sake of business.
A portrait of Lord Strathcona by W. W. Ouless, painted in 1890, is in the possession of the family.
[Beckles Willson, Life of Lord Strathcona and Mount Royal, 1915; W. T. R. Preston, Strathcona and the Making of Canada, 1915; O. D. Skelton, The Railway Builders, 1916; J. Pope, Memoirs of Sir John Macdonald, 1894; Canadian House of Commons Debates.]
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