Montreal Quebec - To have one's activities in office or household likened to the alertness and foresight of the bee is equivalent to a pronounced compliment. From time immemorial the beehive has ever been regarded by the peoples of the Occident and Orient as the storehouse and base of the busiest little folks in the animal kingdom, as the distinctive emblem of concentrated industry, where laggards do not abound.

In Windsor Street, opposite the fine cathedral of St. Peter, Montreal, stands a spacious stone castle, the handsome, towering, Canadian Pacific Railway hive, and verily it is alive with endeavor, and swarms with the spirit of enterprise. Inhabited chiefly by king bees, and a few queens, this host of 2,000 flaunt no iron crosses for inefficiency and here drones have no place.

From the pinnacle position in the steeple, ably filled by a shrewd, democratic nobleman, down the scale through a labyrinth of departments to the youngster affixing postage and dreaming of the Vice-Presidency, every official and employee in that busy headquarters of the greatest transportation corporation within the world's ken, plays his part in the drama "making hay while the sun shines". Feeling that they are an integral part of a gigantic organization, they play tick tack toe with $153,000,000 in rolling stock, and participate with sincerity in the annual round-up of 30,000,000 tons of freight that require 95,000 cars of divers shapes to transport, in addition to moving 16,000,000 passengers for $30,000,000, necessitating a string of equipment that would reach forty miles from Toronto to Hamilton. 2,255 locomotives pull this traffic. When all hands and the cooks on the dining cars are intensely occupied in harvesting the golden honey, then is the management in clover.

Concealed in the brains of this directorate of specialists, or tabletted in the company's archives and records, repose secrets pertaining to matters, methods, and men, of crowned heads, governments, and undercurrents of commerce, finance, and future intention, which if given publicity, would make the listener gasp in wonderment, and likewise aid him to roll in riches.

Apart from an extensive, intermediate network, (totaling 15,000 miles) her unbroken chains of trains span an additional 3,600 miles of continent from the cod banks of the Atlantic to the salmon spawning beds along the Pacific Ocean, dovetailing there with some of the splendid units of a fleet of a hundred vessels valued to-day at $65,000,000, which circumvent the seven seas carrying "Canadian Pacific" prestige, influence, secret service, and international communications between all races and temperatures. There are no fields of production in any clime on the planet known to civilized man that this dynamo of energy, trade, and travel has not investigated, and if through development or encouragement, a modicum of reciprocal traffic is extracted, or the sweets of industrial success can be promised, rest assured that exploring bees will return to the hive with documentary proof or Marconigrams, cable, and mails will herald most recent results.

It is a marvelous modern reality, smacking of the magic of Bagdad caliph eras, that the Windsor Street cabinet of individually expert cosmopolitans, with their teeming clusters of resourceful understudies, command a metaphorical view of the surface of all hemispheres, like a submersible's captain seated beside the disk of camera obscura scanning the ocean's bosom. It is, however, only with the searchlights of peace, of barter and trade and commercial expansion, which spell security and comfort for mankind, that the "C.P.R." sweeps the horizons, feels the universe's pulse, and keeps in touch through the medium of the electric spark, with the aspirations of the world's brown, yellow, and Caucasian children. She underestimates no detail and quietly assumes any legitimate task of magnitude, transferring one unaccompanied child or 100,000 Orientals by sea and land from non-essential avocations in this place or that to other environment and back again without mishap, fuss, or feathers.
 

Canadian Pacific Railway Headquarters and Windsor Station - Date? Photographer?

Composed of forty-five acquired, leased, or controlled railways, this immense corporate body, holding the keys of access to almost any domain and caucus of the sons of Babel, this syndicate that has the entree to exclusive circles and "inside information", that is rich in agricultural lands and demonstration farms, in timber and tie reserves, rich in gas rights and petroleum areas, that controls coal collieries, smelters, and hotels and banks much specie of the realm, has a soul.

In her scattered, flourishing, family many are called but few are chosen to attain the exalted places, which are easily memorized. If her sway is uncongenial, or her pay seems not enough, you may withdraw and the ranks close up, but for those who remain, and they are 80,000, she offers standards of remuneration far from the foot of the column. Her pensions department, with a fund of $900,000 and a yearly contribution of $500,000 to the reserve, even now protecting 850 former employees, is generous, and I could cite you instances where employees resuming duty partly convalescent, have been relieved indefinitely for recovery, under salary. Several others, permanently incapacitated, have reason to be grateful to the Canadian Pacific Railway for gratuitous aid and acts of thoughtfulness seldom attributed to big interests.

Official Ottawa, Washington, and the Court of St. James, do not think it judicious to lay bare for public perusal at present, what the Canadian Pacific Railway Company may or may not have accomplished in the realm of finance and loans, apropos the great international struggle of humanity and democracy.
 

Windsor Station concorse - Circa 1930 Photographer? - McCord Museum MP-0000.25.1001.

The fruitfulness of the mission of a transportation company with $1,038,074,983.26 of assets, with a property investment of $538,510,563.24, and annual gross earnings of $152,389,334.95 must be well-nigh incalculable, especially to a democratic country, to the last great west, with so vast an area and promising though veiled future. The Canadian Pacific Railway is heavy with import and deeply interlaced with the potentialities of our own Canada.

Author unknown.