Much to Van Horne's indignation, his benevolent view of corporations was not shared by everybody else, especially groups in the United States that traditionally resented state authority: labour, farmers, small businessmen, and the growing middle class. So strong was their objection to the dominion of big business they began turning to the government for protection in the opening years of the twentieth century. No president was better suited to take advantage of this political climate than the activist and moral crusader Teddy Roosevelt. As governor of New York he had advocated the regulation of big business, and after he ascended to the presidency in 1901 he moved fast. Taking direct aim at the United States's financial oligarchy - John D. Rockefeller, Edward H. Harriman, and James Jerome Hill, to name just some of the leading lights - the president prosecuted Morgan's Northern Securities Company under the Sherman Act as an illegal restraint of trade. Later, large railway systems bent on extending their territorial dominion became targets. They took a direct hit in 1906, when Congress passed the Hepburn Act. Designed to plug loopholes in the legislation that established the Interstate Commerce Commission in 1887, it gave the commission power to set maximum railway rates. Four years later, in 1910, the Mann-Elkins Act, which extended the jurisdiction of the Interstate Commerce Commission over means of communication as well as transportation, restored the long-haul shorthaul clause of the original act.

Van Horne, a capitalist par excellence, would have subscribed to the view of capitalism expounded by that great Napoleon of the West, Clifford Sifton, who contended, "The capitalistic system has grown up and it is in use because, and only because, the experience of mankind has proven it to be the best way of doing what has to be done." Van Horne not only venerated the business corporation, he regarded it as the very foundation of modern civilization. He once told his newspaper friend Sir John Willison that corporations "have souls - composite souls - larger and purer than any individual soul that ever was or ever will be." He added, "I have sat at the Directors' table in corporations for many years and have yet to hear the first deliberately mean suggestion on the part of a Director on any matter of policy, and have yet to see the first case in which, as between two lines of policy, the fair and liberal one was not adopted." Van Horne allowed that corporations should pay "their fair proportion of taxes," but he contended that they "should be taxed precisely the same as individuals are taxed." He saw no valid reason "for making them pay for the privilege of being a corporation for that privilege is a public necessity and a public good."

the opening years of the twentieth. These were the years in which Van Horne dedicated himself to making money and savouring the excitement that so often accompanies the discovery of new money-making opportunities; however, unlike his adroit and suave financier friend Thomas Ryan, he did not find joy in stuffing securities away in a safe. For Van Horne, money was a means to an end, a way to renovate a house, perhaps, or to purchase a coveted work of art. This in itself, of course, is not remarkable. What is striking is the staggering number of companies in which he became involved before he decided to relinquish many of his directorships. By some estimates he was a director of at least forty companies and invested in countless more. After he retired from the presidency of the CPR, he not only collected directorships he also played an active role in the management of several enterprises - the Cuba Company, of course, being the most conspicuous of these.

Chapter Fifteen: Chasing the Money
"Mackenzie thinks there are 'millions in it' if we can get it into reasonably secure shape. It has been a long hunt and we mustn't miss it," wrote a jubilant Van Horne to his friend General Alger in 1898. Van Horne was writing about a scheme to electrify Havana's tramway system, but the railway magnate could just as easily have been referring to one of numerous other overseas and Canadian projects in which he became involved at the close of the nineteenth century and