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(and one wonders how much of this he everdid, and how much of what he reported would be put down today to youthful embellishment).
    How many young men in the province were aware of bonds in the year 1900? Less than 1 percent, probably. In fact, how many businessmen knew about them? Well, Max, just coming into manhood, did. That is, he was a businessman. In his life everything, including newspapers, was for profit. He would, like Lord Thomson of Fleet and Lord Black of Crossharbour (two other Canadian newspaper barons who, like Beaverbrook before them, made their controversial ways to the top of the newspaper world), look at the world of newspapers as an industry—one in which you had a duty to secure public opinion on your side, but a business nonetheless, like all his other enterprises. But in 1900, newspapers were in his future.
    He dined at small restaurants with ordinary folk, had grand ideas, and lived in rooming houses with other small businessmen. His life at this time was taken up not only with making money but with making the lifeblood of money: the right contacts. Slowly he met the right people. Some of them even showed an interest in this brash young wheeler-dealer from the Miramichi. This was the life outside the manse. He tells us that when he was a boy he had romantic visions of the world, drawn from the tales of King Arthur. Perhapsin some strange way he saw himself as a prince conquering the world. If he did, he was about to conquer more of it than most. Alexander the Great, when told that greatness would befall anyone who could unravel the Gordian knot, simply took his sword and cut it. Max Aitken, like Alexander the Great, had one weapon with which to cut through the same sort of Gordian knot—his brash self-confidence.

CHAPTER FIVE
Mr. Stairs of the
Union Bank of Halifax
    One day, while on a train to Halifax, Max sat down beside the owner of the Union Bank of Halifax, Mr. John Fitzwilliam Stairs, and tried to sell him a typewriter. There are other stories about how the two met, but I like this one best. Max, sitting there with a typewriter, that new-fangled gadget that would speed the process of writing tenfold. (Did he think it would make him a better writer? Of course he did; there was a crassness in his enthusiasm for newness.) Still, this must have been fascinating and ingenious, and anything new that was ingenious was glorious to him.
    It is not reported if Mr. Stairs bought the typewriter. Probably not. But he was a very astute businessman who recognized Max Aitken as being the real deal. Max sold himself on that train to Stairs, sold his ability and his abundant self-confidence.
    There is, however, another version of the story, in which Max, not being hired by Stairs, simply went to the Halifax office, sat down at a desk, and began to work. Stairs, at first angered, realized the potential of someone so daring and hired him. Either story—or a half-dozen others—will do.
    The Stairs family controlled many profitable businesses, such as Scotia Steel, financial companies such as Eastern Trust, and Maritime industrial companies as well. They also sold securities in utility companies in the West Indies. All of this was endlessly intriguing to Max, who was for the first time introduced to the real workaday world of corporate enterprise, seeing how political and business antagonists worked, squabbled, and then, for the sake of money, put squabbles aside.
    Max got on with Stairs, but not with others in the company hierarchy, who looked on him as an upstart and brash outsider. But this new world fit Max like a glove; he was aggressive and sure of himself and learned that he knew and could operate within the world of business. Max Aitken was more than willing to take chances the older generation would not.
    “Stealing a bank”—as Max described it himself in My Early Life —was the work Stairs put him to. That is, John Stairs wanted to consolidate his family’s Union Bank ofHalifax with a smaller bank