“The Gazette,” at the time of Mr. Meighen’s death, said in part: “Mr. Meighen was a self-made man and was proud to designate himself as such. From the day he entered business pursuits at Perth, many years ago, down to the time he became a director of the Canadian Pacific Railway, an institution he had championed from its inception, in commerce, in finance and in imperial politics, Robert Meighen was never at home except on the firing line. Although the fact is only perhaps known to the newspaper fraternity and to some of the leaders of tariff reform in England, he advocated closer relations between the mother country and the outlying dependencies of the empire even before Mr. Chamberlain took the platform in England as the champion of such a policy.
“Mr. Meighen was known in eastern Ontario as a clever business man, a follower of Sir John A. Macdonald, and as a man who had ideas and could fearlessly express them on the stump and at the fireside, many years before he came to Montreal. It was ere his removal to this city that he had secured, most successfully, the right of way for the Ontario & Quebec Railway, now the Montreal & Toronto section of the Canadian Pacific, and later on he was entrusted with the promotion of a bill which was of the utmost importance to that railway. Mr. Meighen was not a member of parliament, but he stated his case to the members outside and in the lobbies of the house with such forcefulness, such clarity of view and in so straightforward a manner that few could withstand his cogent arguments. It was a tribute to his power that Sir Richard Cartwright’s denunciation of him was quite as vehement as the thunderbolts which the chief antagonist of the great railway project used to launch against Sir John Macdonald, Sir Charles Tupper and the other parliamentary giants of the day.
“Mr. Meighen believed not only in the Canadian Pacific project itself, but also in the ultimate value of the great tracts of land lying for a thousand miles along to the north of where the line was being run away up to the Saskatchewan, and, if he died a rich man, it was due to abiding faith in the future of Canada’s western domain and in the ultimate development of the Dominion as a whole. It was in reply to a jocular observation from Mr. Choate, the then American ambassador at the court of St. James, who had asked Mr. Meighen when Canada was going to throw in her lot with the United States, that the Montreal imperialist declared that it was customary for the larger unit to absorb the smaller, and no doubt at her pleasure Canada would follow the established precedent.