Henceforth Brown could crowd still more into the Globe’s four large pages of nine columns each, yet still keep them legible and attractive. More notable still, he had bought a second big double-cylinder Taylor press. Each of them could print 3,000 sheets an hour; and he had the only two in the British provinces. To complement the presses he had installed a remarkable new folding machine from Philadelphia, as used in some of the larger American printing offices, that could fold the sheets as fast as the Taylor presses could throw them off. The Globe could now print, fold, and mail 3,000 papers an hour with only six employees in the press room, most of them boys. The new machinery, Brown calculated, should save enough to pay its cost within a year.13 He was really ushering in the age of the big mechanized press in Canada – although the conservative-minded printers’ trade would prove none too appreciative of his policy.14
In part the pressure of circulation, and in part the hope for more, had dictated this large investment in improvement. The Globe’s daily, tri-weekly, and weekly editions now sold well over 20,000 copies.15 Before the following year was out, they would claim more than 30,000.16 This, in a city of some 40,000 people and an Upper Canada of approximately a million and a quarter, was a significant figure indeed, especially when the newspaper “clubs” across the West passed each copy of the Globe from hand to hand among a devout body of the faithful. Moreover, the influence of the country’s largest newspaper was vital to George Brown’s political career. Hence politics as well as business impelled his new programme of expansion, venturesome as it might be in such dull times. Yet it had always worked before. Better facilities and faster publication would stimulate greater circulation, while greater circulation would bring more advertising revenue to meet the costs – and still wider public influence for the Globe.
In any case, the paper was still Brown’s first love, whatever he might do himself in politics as leader of Upper Canada’s Reform party. Of course, by this time his role on the Globe was far removed from the personal journalism of an earlier day. He was the newspaper publisher, the director of a major business enterprise, not the editor-proprietor who virtually produced a journal on his own, as he and his father, Peter, had done when the Globe first began, over a decade before. Now he employed a sizeable staff of editorial writers and reporters, all under the efficient supervision of his sensitive, keen-minded brother, Gordon. For some years past, in fact, it had been Gordon’s distinguished and dependable talents as an editor that had largely enabled George Brown to carry on his parliamentary career.17
Yet – as now – whenever George was home in Toronto, he was back again at the Globe office: up in the third-floor editorial rooms in shirt-sleeves, bristling with enthusiasms, full of expansive gestures, and frequently smudged with printer’s ink from the sheaves of sticky proofs he fingered. His parliamentary life still seemed a temporary avocation, however pressing it might grow at times. He stepped back easily and whole-heartedly into editorial writing and direction, and, above all, into the making of policy. Indeed, the major matters of policy and business management had never left his hands.18 The Globe’s present programme of expansion was decidedly his own.
It had been no light matter for Brown to undertake costly improvements in the paper at this moment, not merely because of the still-lingering depression, but because another of his loves, his estate at Both well in Kent County, also insistently demanded money. He had found it hard enough to hold on to his extensive property in Upper Canada’s far south-west. The lack of cash available in the bad times, and his inability to collect debts owed to him on his lands, had forced him to give some of it up. Only that January he advertised the cabinet factory at Bothwell for sale, and with it an assortment of completed furniture valued at $10,000.19 Still, he clung to his farm and village lots, his sawmills, and his timber interests there.
American lumber dealers, moreover, had promised him good prices for all the sawn hardwood his mills could deliver through the winter.20 Accordingly, in mid-December the “Laird of Bothwell” had made a brief trip to Montreal in order to arrange a bank credit of $20,000 to finance the season’s operations. There he had opened negotiations through Luther Holton, his old friend and fellow-Liberal prominent in Montreal business circles, and had finally obtained the necessary credit from Edmunstone, Allan and Company, a commercial house accustomed to these transactions in the lumber trade. Brown had to mortgage his Bothwell property and agree to pay back the funds advanced as the proceeds from his lumber sales came in.21 But he now could saw some four or five million feet of hardwood. And so his mills were steaming full blast as the winter wore on. It was a large undertaking, but the chance seemed good that he could sustain his Bothwell interests successfully.
He had quite a different sort of interest far to the north-west. Here lay that spacious inland empire beyond the Lakes which the Hudson’s Bay Company controlled, and which George Brown strenuously urged Canada to acquire. He and his journal had eagerly supported Toronto’s efforts to open effective communications with the North West, to extend Upper Canadian interests westward and to make the city the metropolis of a vast new hinterland. Brown still hoped for great things from the North West Transportation Company, founded in Toronto by a group of leading business men, including several of his Liberal associates. And though its promoters had so far had little return from their attempts to develop the transit trade across the Upper Lakes, the Globe in January of 1860 was confidently predicting imperial assistance for the company and declaring that these “pioneers of modern northwestern enterprise” would yet obtain a contract to carry the mails as far as the Pacific slopes of British Columbia.22
Be that as it may, another Toronto venture into the North West had apparently succeeded. At the Red River, the one pocket of settlement in the Hudson’s Bay territory, two young Toronto journalists, William Buckingham and William Coldwell, had recently established the first newspaper in the inland country. Their Nor’Wester would agitate for the annexation of the western lands to Canada, and it was not surprising that the Globe should run frequent excerpts from its pages. Buckingham, indeed, had been Brown’s prize parliamentary reporter before going west, and Coldwell would be received into the Globe staff on his return from distant Red River.23
The two had journeyed to the Hudson’s Bay territory the previous autumn, travelling overland from St. Paul, Minnesota, by Red River cart, their precious type and press in a wagon drawn by two yoke of oxen. The Globe fully reported all their adventures: the passages through river, swamp, and prairie fire, and the near-disaster at the outset, when their oxen ran away with the wagon and spent an entire day lumbering in a mad circuit around St. Paul before the men were able to catch them.24 But at length the pioneer printers had reached the Red River and set up shop. On January 26, 1860, when the north-western mails were in, the Globe proudly presented the contents of the first issue of the Nor’Wester.
The issue also provided a noteworthy disclosure, which came in a published letter from A. K. Isbister, the Red River’s expatriate son in England, who for years had been lobbying at the Colonial Office for the ending of Hudson’s Bay rule. Isbister reported gleanings from an interview he had had with Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, till lately the Colonial Secretary. It seemed that when George Etienne Cartier, the Liberal-Conservative premier of Canada, had recently visited England, he had persuaded Lytton that the annexation of the North West to Canada was inconceivable. “He told him very frankly that, as the head of the Lower Canada party, any proposal of the kind would meet with his determined opposition – as it would be putting a political extinguisher on the party and the province he represented.”25 Here was plain indication that Lower Canadian fears of being swamped by an expanding Upper Canada were preventing the acquisition of the North West – that Lower Canada most decidedly was directing the government of the United Province in its own sectional interest!
One might note, of course, that the report of what Cartier had said was at least third-hand, that Lytton would hardly have conveyed Cartier’s words direct to Isbister, and that even if this were the view of the Lower Canadian government leader, it was no more sectional than the belief among Upper Canadians
