Practically every man of political, financial or industrial prominence
in Canada to-day came up by the shirt-sleeve route in one generation.
If there is an exception to this statement--and I know every part of
Canada almost as well as I know my own home--I do not know it. Sifton,
Van Horne, MacKenzie, Mann, Laurier, Borden, Foster, the late Sir John
Macdonald--all came up from penniless boyhood through their own efforts
to what Canadians rate as success. I said "what Canadians rate as
success." I did not say to affluence, for Canadians do not rate
affluence by itself as success. Laurier, Foster, Sir John
Macdonald--each began as a poor man. Sifton began life as a penniless
lawyer. Van Horne got his foot on the first rung of the ladder
hustling cars for troops in the Civil War. MacKenzie of Canada
Northern fame began with a trowel; Dan Mann with an ax in the lumber
woods at a period when wages were a dollar and twenty-five cents a day;
Laurier with a lawyer's parchment and not a thing else in the world.
Foster, the wizard of finance, taught his first finance in a
schoolroom. And so one might go on down the list of Canada's great.
Unless I am gravely mistaken the richest industrial leader of Ontario
began life in a little bake shop, where his wife cooked and he sold the
wares; and the richest man in the Canadian West began with a pick in a
mine. I doubt if there is a single instance in Canada of a public man
whose family's security from want traces back prior to 1867.

But the richest are not rated the most successful in Canada. There is
an untold and untellable tragedy here. There is many a city in Canada
which has a Mr. Rich-Man's-Folly in the shape of a palatial house or
castellated residence which failed to force open the portals of respect
and recognition for himself. Folly Castle has been occupied in an
isolation that was almost quarantine. Why? Because its foundations
were laid in some financial mud, which Canada never forgets and never