The masques of Ottawa

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
AT LOS ANGELES

THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

MARIA
CHAPDELAINE

BY

W. H. BLAKE

From the original French of Louis Hemon

Cloth 12mo. : $1 .50 net.

The Macmillans in Canada count it a high
privilege to sponsor the very able translation
by W. H. Blake of "Maria Chapdelaine."

It is not too much to say that Louis Hemon 's
intimate view of the moods and manners and
moments of the dwellers in French Canada is
indeed an immortelle flowering in the some-
what straggling garden of Canadian literature.
It may well be that "Maria Chapdelaine" will
take its place in the undulating landscape of
the literature of all time beside such classic
stories as "The Vicar of Wakefield" and "Paul
et Virginie."

TORONTO: THE MACMILLAN

COMPANY OF CANADA, LIMITED

THE
MASQUES OF OTTAWA

BY

"DOMINO"

"Wherefore are these things hid ?

We will draw the curtain and show you the picture."
—SHAKESPEARE.

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TORONTO: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

OF CANADA, LTD., AT ST. MARTIN'S HOUSE.

MCMXXI.

COPYRIGHT, CANADA, 1921.
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY OF CANADA, LIMITED.

THE PLAY-HOUSE CALLED OTTAWA.

Do not imagine that I spend much time at once in Ottawa.
I have never liked the kind of play-house that politicians
have made on that glorious plateau in a valley of wonder -
land with a river of dreams rolling past to the sea. Where
under heaven is any other Capital so favoured by the great
scenic artist ? On what promontory do parliamentary
towers and gables so colossally arise to enchant the vision ?
The Thames draws the ships of the world and crawls
muddily and lazily out to sea wondering what haphazard
of history ever concentrated so much commerce, politics
and human splendour on the banks of one large ditch.
Ottawa's house of political drama overlooks one of the
noblest rivers in the world, that takes its rise in everlasting
hills of granite and pines.

One, Laurier, used to dream that he would devote his
declining days to making Ottawa beautiful as a city as she
is for the site of a capital. To him as to others, Rome,
London, Paris, Vienna, Washington, should all in time be
rivalled by Ottawa the magnificent. But the saw-mill
surveyors of Ottawa spoiled that when they made no
approach to Parliament Hill to compare to the vista seen
from the river. Ottawa was built for convenience : for
opportunity : for expediency.

Parliament is its great show. Politicians are the actors-
Time has seen some interesting, almost baffling, dramas on
that hill. No other Parliament stands midway of so vast
a country. But there are people who prefer Hull, P.Q.,
to Ottawa, Ont. We have had some mild Mephistps of
strategy up there : some prophets of eloquence : some

212147

8 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

dreamers of imagination : giants of creative energy schem-
ing how to draw a young, vast country together into
nationhood so that the show-men on Parliament Hill
might have an audience.

But the Ottawa of to-day is a strange spectacle for the
prophets. The great new Opera House is all but finished,
when, no seer can tell whether the plays to be put on there
by the parties of the future will be as epical and worth-
while as those staged by the actors of the past. Imagination
was not absent when Ottawa was created. But it needs
more than common imagination to foresee whether these
political playboys of the northern world are going to be
worthy of the great audience soon to arise in the country
that converges upon Ottawa.

Sometimes in Parliament you catch the vibration of
big momentums in a nation's progress. Voices now and
then arise in speech that reflect some greatness of vision.
More often the actors are sitting indolently, hearing the
clack of worn-out principals whose struts and grimaces and
cadences are those of men whose cues should lead them to
the dressing rooms, or to the wings, or somewhere into the
maze of the back drop where nobody takes part in the
show. Or they listen to men whose big informing idea
constantly is that all we need to make economic happiness
for everybody is to turn out the company now in and get
another from the furrows. These latter believe that a
nation is a condition of free trade — mainly on behalf of
the farmer whose average idea of industry is a blacksmith
shop on a farm.

One's head inclines to ache by reason of listening to the
three-cornered claque on the Tariff as it was in the begin-
ning, is now and ever shall be. Now and again we are
inclined to study the men who are elected to Parliament
and some of those who gravitate towards Ottawa without
the bother of elections. They stimulate interest and
challenge criticism, not less because the interest and the

THE PLAYHOUSE CALLED OTTAWA 9

criticism come from a seat in the audience rather than from
"behind the scenes" — which is not always a disadvantage.
While the parliamentarians perform "Promises and Pie
Crusts", the wives have their own play — "Petticoats and
Power". The stage here is a triangle — Rideau Hall,
Chateau Laurier, the Parliamentary Restaurant. At the cafe
tables women from all the counties and electoral districts
of Canada — many of them French — chatter about the
great masquerade up at the Castle, the little-king show
which at its best is worth more to Canada than the Senate.
The homes of Ottawa are little shows whose players imitate
the manners and the accents of the fine people in the Castle,
the Restaurant and the Chateau.

"Nothing but a prinked-up panorama !" says the
rugged Radical in a coonskin coat, member of a deputation
with a railway ticket as long as his pocket. "Poor show !
What we want down here is more plain farmers' wives "

He pauses. This man's first cousin broke away from
the farm a generation ago because farmers' wives were too
plain, and farmers did so little reading, and the big
thinkers and doers all seemed to live in town. As he
talks, up dashes a sleigh, jangling its bells and dangling
its robes, and from behind the bearskinned driver alights
a company that makes his coonskin coat feel clumsy and
uncomfortable. He glances up at the great pile of walls
on the hill. The hill is alive with fine people. In one of
the sleighs a lady bows and smiles — at him ! He touches
his cap and takes his pipe from his mouth.

"That lady ?" he replies to his sleeping-car mate.
"Oh, that is the wife of a Senator, used to live in our town.
Clever little woman she is, too. They tell me she's writing
a novel and that Lady Byng is taking her up. Lady Byng
— oh, yes, she writes novels. Good idea. Likely her
books won't be quite so rough as some of our Canadian
novels are. I like style in a book, all that fine manners
stuff ; takes your mind off the humdrum of everyday life.

10 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

Byng — say, that was a wise appointment if ever there was
one. My way of thinking, Lord Byng has 'em all beaten
since Dufferin. Kings' and queens' uncles and cousins and
brothers don't suit this democratic nation like a man
who got acquainted with this country before ever he set
eyes on it, through the boys he commanded out yonder.
Great man ! Fit to be Governor-General of a great
country, and I won't deny it. No snobbery. Seventh son
of an earl, all his life a soldier and a worker. A real man,
such as any of us could present to our constituents with
pleasure and pride. Tell you what — listen !"

His sleeping-car mate feels a heavy clutch on his arm.

"Remember the old debate we used to have about 'The
pen is mightier than the sword' ? Well, say — when you
get the pen and the sword united in one outfit — what about
it ? Oh, it's a great show, sure enough. I used to think
government was a plain, plugshot business of trade stat-
istics, card indexes and ledgers. But I've come to the
conclusion that this old town has to make it a good bit of
a social compromise and a show, or it can't be carried on,
no matter who does it."

CONTENTS

THE UNELECTED PREMIER OF CANADA—

RT. HON. ARTHUR MEIGHEN - 13

THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN PREMIER—

RT. HON. SIR ROBERT BORDEN - -27

A POLITICAL SOLAR SYSTEM—

RT. HON. SIR WILFRID LAURIER - 39

THE GRANDSON OF A PATRIOT—

HON. WILLIAM LYON MACKENZIE KING 52

NUMBER ONE HARD—

Hour. T. A. CRERAR W

THE PREMIER WHO MOWED FENCE CORNERS—

HON. E. C. DRURY - 77

EZEKIEL AT A LEDGER—

RT. HON. SIR GEORGE FOSTER - 91

A HALO OF BILLIONS—

RT. HON. SIR THOMAS WHITE .... 104

CALLED TO THE POLITICAL PULPIT—

HON. NEWTON WESLEY ROWELL - Hi

AN AUTOCRAT FOR DIVIDENDS—

BARON SHAUGHNESSY - • 127

THE PUBLIC SERVICE HOBBYIST—

SIR HERBERT AMES 136

THE SHADOW AND THE MAN—

HON. SIR SAM HUGHES - 141

THE STEREOPTICON AND THE SLIDE—

LIEUT.-GENERAL SIR ARTHUR CVRRIE - - • 153

A COAT OF MANY COLOURS—

Snt JOHN WILLISON .... 186

11

12 CONTENTS

WHATSOEVER THY HAND FINDETH—

SIR JOSEPH FLAVELLE, BART. 173

NO FATTED CALVES FOR PRODIGAL SONS—

HON. SIR HENRY DRAYTON 185

THE PERSONAL EQUATION IN RAILROADING—

EDWARD WENTWORTH BEATTY 194

A BOURGEOIS MASTER OF QUEBEC—

HON. SIR LOMER GOUIN ------ 204

A POLITICAL MATTAWA OF THE WEST—

JOHN WESLEY DAPOE 215

HEADMASTER OF THE MANCHESTER SCHOOL—

MICHAEL CLARK, M.P. 225

THE SPHINX FROM SASKATCHEWAN—

HON. J. A. CALDER 235

A TRUE VOICE OF LABOUR—
• TOM MOORE - - - 246

THE MAN WITHOUT A PUBLIC—

SIR WILLIAM MACKENZIE 253

THE IMPERIAL BRAINSTORM-
BARON BEAVERBROOK 263

CONCLUSION 276

THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

THE UNELECTED PREMIER OF CANADA
RT. HON. ARTHUR MEIGHEN

ONCE only have I encountered Rt. Hon. Arthur Meighen,
Premier of Canada by divine right, not as yet by election.
I was the 347th person with whom he shook hands and
whom he tried to recognize that afternoon. His weary
but peculiarly winning smile had scarcely flickered to rest
for a moment in an hour. For the eleven seconds that it
was my privilege to be individually sociable with him, he
did his best to say what might suit the case. He seemed
much like a worn-out precocious boy, of great wisdom
and much experience, suddenly prodded into an eminence
which as yet he scarcely understood.

I was introduced as — say, Mr. Smith.

"Oh ?" he said, wearily. "Yes, I've read your articles.
Er— Tom Smith, isn't it ?"

But Tom was not the name, I had scarcely time to say,
and it made no difference. I should like to have shoo'd
away the crowd and let him call me Jake just for a few
minutes to get the point of feeling of this young man —
though he is nearly 50 — on how it feels to be Premier with-
out a general election.

There may not be as much finality, but there is some-
times as much wisdom, in the choice of a leader by a small
group as in his election by the people. Majorities fre-
quently rule without wisdom. In accepting the gift of an
almost worn-out Premiership and a year later entering the
most significant general election ever held in Canada, at

13

U THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

least since 1878, Arthur Meighen falls back upon his courage
without much comfort from ordinary ambition. He faces
a battle whose armies are new, pledged to hold what he has
against two enemy groups, and to hold more than John A.
Macdonald fought to get, without the sense of one great
party against another such as Macdonald had. No
Premier ever went into a general election with so little
intimate support from "the old party", with such a cer-
tainty that whichever party wins as against the others
cannot win a working majority without coalition, and with
the sensation that the party he leads is already what
remains of a coalition.

Whenever I see Meighen I feel like hastening home to
"cram" on citizenship for an examination. I behold in
him picnics neglected and even feminine society deferred
for the sake of toiling up a political Parnassus. In his
veneration for constituted authority I can comprehend
something of the Jap's banzais to the Mikado before he
commits harikari.

Whatever there is, or is not, in the character of Arthur
Meighen, he has a draw upon other men. Any public
task that he has in hand looks like a load that challenges
other men to help him lift. A really intelligent camera
would show in his face a mixture of wholesome pugnacity,
concentration of thought and feminine tenderness. He
feels like a big intellectual boy who unless mother looks
after him will get indigestion or neurasthenia. Sometimes
men pity their leaders. Meighen, with his intensity and
his thought before action looks such a frail wisp of a man.
The last time I saw him in public he was bare-headed on an
open-air stage, a dusky, lean silhouette against a vast flare
of water and sky. On the same spot less than two hundred
years ago, that singular, overbuilt top head and sharply
tapering, elongated oval of a face might have been that of
some aristocratic red man, deeply serious on the eve of a
tribal war.

RT. HON. ARTHUR MEIGHEN IS

The little blank spots in Meighen's temperament are
things that people like to talk aboub ; when the same idioms
in an average man would be set down as mild insanity.
Rumour says for instance that every now and then he
must be watched for fear he go to Parliament without a
hat. Why not ? It is only a British custom to wear a
hat in the Commons except when making a speech. A
bareheaded, even a bald-headed, Premier may be a great
man. Meighen's negligence in the matter of a hat perhaps
comes of the bother of finding the clothes-brush at the
same time. Since Mackenzie Bowell, Canada has never
had a Premier so naturally oblivious of sartorial style ;
though his later appearances suggest that even he has fallen
into the mode of well-dressed Premiers. In his early law
days at Portage it is said that one evening when Mrs.
Meighen was at a concert, he was given the first baby to
nn'nd, that when the baby cried he marked a paragraph in
a law book he was reading, stole into the bedroom and took
the baby over to a neighbour's house ; that when he was
asked later where the infant was he gradually remembered
that he had put the child somewhere — now where was it ?
There is some other half forgotten tale of the strange garb
in which he turned up at a friend's wedding, even before
he was famous enough to be able to do that sort of thing
with any degree of contempt for the conventional forms.

If Meighen remains Premier of Canada long enough,
no doubt some really apocryphal yarns will arise out of
these little idiosyncracies, just as legends wove themselves
about John A. Macdonald, and Laurier. I remember that
the clothes Meighen wore the day I shook hands with him
were dingy brown that made him look like a moulting
bobolink ; that he had not taken the trouble to shav«
because a sleeping car is such an awkward place for a razor,
and it is much better for a Premier to wear bristles than
court-plaster. Some one will be sure to remark that the
Premier travels in a private car. Arthur Meighen nerer

16 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

seems like that sort of Premier. One would almost expect
him to choose an upper berth because some less lean and
agile person might need the lower.

No doubt much of Meighen's democratic gaucherie
about garments was abandoned at the Imperial Conference.
He never could have worn a dingy brown suit when he got
the freedom of London Upon some State occasion the
Premier may have worn the Windsor uniform. Not with-
out scruples. That uniform may not misbecome con-
stricted Mr. Meighen more than it did the spare Mr. Foster,
or the lean Mr. Rowell. But the Windsor uniform spells
conformity, colonialism, Empire — not commonwealth. And
Mr. Meighen went to London to represent the Common-
wealth of Canada.

We were told by cable that the Premier took part in
most of the sports on board ship, and of course lost most
of the events. Well, there is no harm in a Premier
beginning to be whimsically athletic near fifty. But,
unless now and then he could manage to win something it
was obviously only an attempt to make him interesting to
the cables, on the principle that a polar bear is prodded in
a cage to make him perform for the "lidy".

Weeks before he went the Premier foreshadowed the
attitude he would take at the Conference. Again and
again it was repeated as he slowly left the country, even
pausing at Quebec to say it again ; and thereafter the
cables took it up, repeating it over and over, until the
people of Canada began to suspect that the correspondents
were almost as hard up for news as some of them were during
the war. Mr. Grattan O'Leary knew he had a difficult
character to popularize on the cable ; a man who until
he became Premier, outside of Parliament was as diffident
as the hero in "She Stoops to Conquer"; at High School
in the little stone town of St. Mary's, Ont., so studious
that he never could catch a baseball that wanted to drop
into his pocket ; at college immersed in mathematics, at

RT. HON. ARTHUR MEIGHEN 17

s

Osgoode in law ; as a young man opening a forlorn office
in Portage, still a sort of lariat town, when Meighen was
shy of even a family saddle-horse.

In Portage Meighen lived in a weather-boarded frame
house, during the time when in bigger Western towns other
politicians were putting up little palaces, causing their
electoral enemies to wonder where they got the money.
In Ottawa when he became Premier he lived in one of the
plainest houses, with no decorative fads, no celebrated
pictures, not much music, but plenty of room for the
juveniles ; described by a political writer who was there
the evening of the appointment as "just comfortable."
He was at home that evening, discussing simply a number
of public matters, but not a word about the Premiership,
till as the visitor was rising to go and said, "Oh, by the
way — permit me to congratulate you," Meighen broke
into his bewildered smile and said bluntly, "Thanks!"
He was not outwardly impressed by the least impressive
Premiership that ever happened. The nation had nothing
to do with it. Meighen had not been elected. He had
drafted no platform before he became Premier. He did it
afterwards. All that happened was a change of captains
on a ship.

Meighen had been spiritual adviser to Borden in other
remakings of his Cabinet. This time he was not consulted.
Sir Robert never had such a predicament. In the words
of the old song, "There were three crows sat on a tree."
The names of the crows were — White, Meighen, Rowell.
Their common name was Barkis. Which should it be ?
White echoed — Which ? So did they all. Great affairs
are sometimes so childlike. Meighen was willing to
accept White as Premier. White had been for years in
the spotlight. Did he hope, or expect, that Sir Thomas
would refuse ? We are not told. But he must have sur-
mised. In any case White was off the ship.

The choice came down to two. Here again it was a

18 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

spotlight man — or Meighen. Rowell had become famous
when Meighen had not ; but he was a converted Liberal,
and of only three years' experience. The necessity was
obvious. Sir Thomas, declining the leadership, must have
recommended Meighen, much to the Premier's joy.

Yes, it was time for a leader. Mr. Rowell was out —
and off the ship. Happily there were no more crows on
the tree, or Meighen would have been forced to hold an
election in order to get a Cabinet.

However, the three of them consented to remain in the
crew, until further notice. Thus much was settled.
Meighen should lead, — but what ? As yet little more
than a hyphenated and quite stupid name, which had
never yet resolved inself into a platform. But the name
and the platform were both as clear as the constitution of
the party, in which, under the political microscope, there
was clearly discernible a Unionist Centre, a Tory Right
and a Liberal left.

"Lacks solidarity," mutters Meighen. "Looks like
tick-tack-toe. But wait."

The third disturbing feature was the condition of the
country. From his wheel-house Meighen could see many
clouds. The Reds, whom he had ruthlessly handled in
the Winnipeg Strike ; the rather pink-looking Agrarians ;
the Drury Lane coalition of farmers and labourites in
Ontario ; Quebec almost solid Liberal behind Lapointe ;
Liberals angling for alliance with Agrarians ; Lenin
poisoning the Empire wells of India with Bolshevism ;
League of Nations every now and then sending out an
S.O.S., interrupted in transit by Lord Cecil or Sir Herbert
Ames ; and — not least threatening of storms but if properly
negotiated favourable to this country on the Pacific issue —
Mr. Harding busy on a "just-as-good" substitute for the
League of Nations with Washington as a new-world centre
when Mr. Meighen had hitherto neglected to acryOCftte a
Canadian envoy to that Capital.

RT. HON. ARTHUR MEIGHEN 19

Having scanned all these weather signals, Mr. Meighen
decided that diplomacy for the present was dangerous and
that boldness was better. In his programme speech at
Stirling he divided the nation into two groups — that of
authority and order to which he belonged, and the hetero-
geneous group of incipient anarchism to which belonged
all those who did not agree with him.

Having done this with such further definition of his
programme as might be necessary, the Premier took a trip
to the West to prepare the way for Sir Henry Drayton's
tariff tour. He went to that land of minor revolutions as a
representative of government by authority, high tariff,
conscription during the war, the Wartime Elections Act,
and a minimum of centrality in the Empire as opposed to
a maximum of autonomy. It was a disquieting outlook.
But Westerners love to hear a man hit hard when he talks.
Meighen has often been bold both in speech and action. In
the Commons last session he paid his respects to Mr.
Crerar by calling the National Progressives "a dilapidated
annex to the Liberal party." Which adroit play to the
gallery with a paradox came back in the shape of a boomer-
ang from a Westerner who called the Government party
"an exploded blister." On a previous occasion talking
to the boot manufacturers in convention at Quebec he
took a leap into the Agrarian trench with this pack of
muddled metaphors. "I see the Agrarians a full-fledged
army on the march to submarine our fiscal system."

Epigrams like these do not make great Premiers. But
they are the kind of schooling that Meighen had. In his
young parliament days he was an outrageously tiresome
speaker. He heaped up metaphors and hyperboles,
paraded lumbering predicates and hurled out epithets,
foaming and floundering. He had started so many things
in a speech that he scarce knew when or how to stop.
Commons, both sides, rather liked to hear him struggle
with his verbiage. Later he developed the rapier thrust,

20 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

some snatches of humor, a trifle of contempt. He learned
the value of playing with a rhetorical period that he might
later leap upon a climax. Frank B. Carvell was periodi-
cally egged on to bait the member of Portage. He did it
well. I recall once when the member for Carleton was
spluttering vitriolic abuse at the member for Portage that
Meighen muttered, " Oh, you wait. I'll get you." Which
he did — immediately. Young Cicero had his Catiline.

One of Meighen' s best speeches now will rank with the
best in any country where dignity has not quite deserted
the art of parliamentary oration. But he is rather too
fond of picturesque language to make a really great speech.
He has a strong intellectual grasp of what he wants to say
and a high moral measure of its significance to the nation ;
but for a Premier he is too prone to lapse into the lingo of
partisan debate which in Canada — since the battering days
of the giants that followed Confederation — has not been
on a very high level. Meighen's best speeches are tem-
peramentally big, but he has yet made no great speech
which will live, either in whole or in part, as a glorification of
his country. It takes a Lincoln or a Roosevelt to be in
high office and say things that palpitate in the heart of a
crowd. Wilson did ; but he was dangerous. You judge
a man in high office by words and deeds. Lincoln was
great in both. Lloyd George is great in either, but not
always in both at once. Macdonald could thrill a crowd
with a homely epigram and turn his hand to a vastly
national piece of work. We have yet to be sure that Meighen
can be as big in action as he has sometimes been in speech.
Unless one is too easily mistaken, the Imperial Con-
ference imparted a steady sense of responsibility to Arthur
Meighen that he rather lacked when he took office. He
found himself in a very uncomfortable spotlight. He had
not been used to measuring his words to suit such momen-
tous occasions ; nor accustomed to realizing how, small the
greatest men and the most impressive human arrangements

RT. HON. ARTHUR MEIGHEN 21

are when you get to the centre and no longer have the
perspective. He represented the oldest self-governing
Dominion. A word misplaced might make a vast difference.
He realized the significance of the event — especially before
an election. Hr was never able to keep out of his mind
what might be happening at home in such places as Medicine
Hat. The issues which he discussed were big. He handled
them worthily, with a due admixture of boldness and
caution.

It was no time for mere sentiment, but for careful
deliberation of matters that lay beyond Canada, beyond
the Empire, in the danger zones of world politics, more
especially of the Orient. The status of Canada as a nation
north of the United States depended in that case vastly
more upon a definition of Japanese and Pacific policy than
upon any heroic allusion to the Great War. No man could
have traversed this precarious business with more insight
into the probable effect of what he had to say upon the
Empire, the United States, and his own electoral prospect
in Canada. The day after his announcement of a general
election this year the Premier spoke to an open-air crowd
at the Canadian National Exhibition. He chose the
Imperial Conference, and mainly the Pacific issue, as his
theme. In twenty minutes of unrelieved, almost solemn
seriousness, he made that weighty business interesting to a
crowd not too friendly in politics, with scarcely a gesture,
speaking direct to the people instead of using the amplifier
tube, making himself heard and understood with the clarity
of studious conviction and straight mastery of all the
links in his logic.

And Meighen knows how to lead. His bewildered
smile is a prelude often to a strong move in action. Older
and wiser men learn to love this lean wildcat who knows
the strategic spots in the anatomy of the foe ; who can
spit scorn at the Agrarians and venomous contempt at
the Liberals ; who dares to glorify a government of authority.

22

and of force as though it were a democracy ; who can hold
the allegiance of some Liberals and lose that of few old
Tories. He has earned that allegiance. He carried his
load in the war. Long enough he lay up as the handy
instrument of a clumsy Coalition, as before that he had
been dog-whip for the Tories. When Premier Borden
wanted a hard job well done he gave it to Meighen, who
seldom wanted to go to Europe when he could be slaving
at home.

Fortunately for Meighen he had been but a year in
office when Opportunity came to him with a large blank
scroll upon which he might write for the consideration of
other people his views about, "What I Think of Canada
as a Part of the Empire."

No law examiner at Osgoode ever offered him such a
chance to say the right thing wrongly or the wrong thing
first. It was a fascinating topic. Other Premiers had
done such things off-hand, almost impromptu as it seemed,
and inspired by merely patriotic sentiment. This was a
notice that the Premier of Canada could speak his mind
in advance, or if he so preferred, wait till the Conference
of Premiers opened and spring a surprise. Meighen lost
no time in deciding to prepare for the N.L.C. party a brief
on Imperial relations. Here was a thing out of which he
could make capital — for Canada and the party and the
coming elections. And if ever Meighen had delved for
material he did it now. He was going to the Imperial
Conference of Premiers with a mandate — to help define
Canada's position in the great Commonwealth about
which Mr. Lionel Curtis had written two large books and
the Round Table had published forty-four numbers since
1910 ; when nobody had as yet issued the one clear call
for Canada. Foster, Borden, Rowell — since Laurier and
Macdonald — had all taken a hand in this. But there was
some new way to state the case that would — or might —
seem as large and strong for Canada at the Imperial Con-

RT. HON. ARTHUR MEIGHEN 23

ference as the voice of either Borden or Rowell had been
at the Peace Conference or the Geneva Assembly.

The Premier could picture Sir Robert scanning his
manifesto to the British press ; Sir George, his old mentor
of speechmaking in the House, comparing it to what he
used to say for Joe Chamberlain ; more clearly than all,
Mr. Rowell himself, who for two years in the Cabinet had a
monoply of that great subject to which he had devoted
clear thinking, concise language, and some diplomacy.

The author of "Polly Masson" might have drawn
from the new Premier on this subject some such confessions
as are suggested in the following imaginary, but not improb-
able interview.

Mr. Meighen, intensely revising his manifesto for the
cables looks up and says :

"Er — what did you remark ?"

"That you were about to say "

"Was I ? Oh, yes— about the Round Table. On three
legs. Hasn't even as much stability as the Canada First
minority — most of whom are not in Quebec. These are
the negligible but uncomfortable extremists."

"Ah ! Then you are of the moderate majority ?"

"You mean I used not to be. Well, events move fast.
Men change with them. I have been called a Tory."

"Yes, a tariff Tory."

"A moderately high tariff — sufficient unto the day."

"Quite so. But not a tariffite in sentiment."

"Tariffs are not properly sentiment. They are busi-
ness."

"But Joe Chamberlain sentimentalized the tariff . He
was even willing to have free trade in the Empire to get an
Imperial zollverein against the rest of the world."

' ' Why mention Chamberlain ? Are you — twitting me ?' '

"Because he afterwards wanted an Imperial Cabinet.
And if I'm not mistaken you began to learn parliamentary

24 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

speeches from one George Eulas Foster only a few years
after he stumped England for the Chamberlain idea."

Meighen smiles ; that wan but wholesome illumination
of a thought-harassed face.

"Hasn't the old flag been some sort of issue in every
Federal election since Confederation ?" he is asked.

"Of course. No Federal election can be held in this
nation, except by virtue of the B.N.A. Act, and every
election carries with it an inferential challenge to amend
the Act. Macdonald settled that — by a grand compromise
with Quebec."

"But — as a Canadian first."

"Granted. But he also said in 1891 — mm — now what
did he say ?"

"A British subject I was born "

"And a British subject I will die. In his day — well
said."

"You will not say that in 1922 ?"

"Probably not. Subjects do not vote in true demo-
cracies. Events change men "

"And parties. Even Premiers ?"

He turns his spindling anatomy about in the chair,
suddenly rises and darts to a bookshelf, seizes a book
and flicks over the pages.

"After all," with a yawn, "we have now and then to go
back to Laurier, the biggest if not the greatest autonomist
of all Premiers — though Sir Robert Borden years ago spoke
at Peterborough quite as broadly, if less eloquently. Here
it is — spoken during the war by Laurier. 'We are a free
people, absolutely free. The charter under which we live
has put it into our power to say whether we should take
part in such a war or not. It is for the Canadian people,
the Canadian Parliament and the Canadian Government
alone to decide. This freedom is at once the glory and the
honour of Britain which granted it and of Canada which

RT. HON. ARTHUR MEIGHEN

used it to assist Britain. Freedom is the keynote of all
British institutions ?' '

The clock ticks louder. It is, time to go.

"Tell me, Mr. Meighen, i it not after all the mandate of
Canada's part in the war that stands behind the attitude
you are bound to take at this Conference ?"

"You mean that if Canada had not gone to war magni-
ficently as she did, the war — might have been lost ?"

"Essentially that. Hence the new nationhood of
Canada born of the war. You, or any other leader, even
as Tory or as clear Grit, would not foist upon this free
nation any issue which does not do justice to the sense
of nationhood begotten by the war. Would you ?"

"I will say — no."

"Then as to the Anglo- Japanese Alliance ?"

"Canada must be free, because she has a vital interest
in the American aspect of such an Alliance that even
Britain has not. This nation is the electric transmission
transformer between Britain and the United States There
is a Pacific zone of policy in which Canada has a big stake."

"I see. Now as to the next election ?"

The Premier rises : now thinner and more intense
than ever.

"My friend— just this. The solidarity of the British
Commonwealth League of Nations is at the root of the
welfare of the civilized world. In every nation of this.
League, no matter by what party label the Unionist cause
is identified in the baggage room, it is a matter of vital
importance to the solidarity of the League that such party
should remain or go into power. So — I hope to get from
the Conference such a reasonable endorsation of Canada's
stand on the main issues that our party here "

He pauses and gazes fixedly at a large map of Western
Canada. The visitor imagines that he is looking at Portage,
his home town.

"Er — you were saying, Mr. Meighen ?"

26 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

"Medicine Hat," he answered vacantly. "Somehow,
you know — I wish Kipling had never made that remark
about Medicine Hat, — 'all hell for a basement.' '

"You don't worry about the Hat just because there's
going to be a bye-election while you're away ?"

"No, — for I know pretty well that I won't hold that
seat. What worries me is the fool use that some people
will make of a freak election as a forerunner of doom.
However, as I was saying about the Conference — I hope
to get such a reasonable endorsation of Canada's stand on
the main issues that our party here can work to victory
advantage in the next election. I may as well be honest.
Arthur Meighen, Premier, has not yet been elected. But
he intends to be, because he ought to be, because the party
he leads can do this country more good for the next few
years than anything else in sight ; because the party which
carried the war and the re-establishment has been given a
new lease of life, at least some vision, and a vast deal of
experience which Canada is going to need from now on more
than she can ever need the wholesale patent nostrums of
millennial doctors who think the plough-handles are a sign
manual of a new efficiency in government. We all know
what is happening to Russia. I'll be perfectly frank, and
say that I fear this young nation may be induced to scrap
experience for experiment — which above all times would at
present be the inauguration of an economic system for
which the nation is not prepared, for which it has not been
educated, and because of which it cannot afford to take for
its education the bitter experience which too often succeeds
glittering experiment. What the world needs to-day is
economic justice, not economic revolution. No nation in
the world has a better chance than Canada for sound
economic justice to all that makes her the world's young
leading democracy. But economics isn't everything.
Good-night."

THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN PREMIER
RT. HON. SIR ROBERT BORDEN

HERE is a modest, honourable man who saw his duty to
the nation and the emergency never more clearly than he
knew his own defects. Canada never before had a medio-
crity of such eminence ; a man who without a spark of
genius devoted a high talent to a nation's work so well
that he just about wins a niche in our Valhalla — if we
have one. It was the war that almost finished Borden ;
and it was the war that made him.

Canada has been governed by strategy, imagination,
and common sense. We have had Macdonald, Laurier,
and Borden. The first finished his work, the second
wanted to, and the third had finished his work two years
before he resigned office.

Sir Robert Borden was the only man in the world
Premier both when the war began and when it ended. Of
all Premiers of Canada he was the least like a Canadian,
and he achieved European fame with less title to personal
greatness than either Laurier or Macdonald. For the
crowd there never was an inspired moment in Sir Robert's
life, nor ever one when he did not try to do his whole duty.
He never interested the people and did not always hold
the profound allegiance of his party. Yet there never was
a public man in Canada to whom the average politician
would as soon take off his hat in absolute respect for his
moral purpose, integrity, fair-mindedness and sense of
honour. There was enough morality wasted in the equip-
ment of R. I/. Borden to have supplied the lack of it in
some of his heterogeneous followers. But it was morality

27

28 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

that he could not transmit except by silent influence.

Other celebrated Premiers had governed by the personal
method. The moral law was written all over Borden. He
was a walking decalogue. He worked for the good of the
country without detriment to the Conservative party.
But there never was any Borden Mount of Transfiguration.
He never could lead except when he was considered by
the Majority to be right. In the war he took refuge in
the nation, and its patriotism. But for the war one doubts
that Sir Robert would ever have won any title to fame.

The man's whole makeup is a sort of righteousness.
He had no use for the mirror more than to adjust his neck-
tie and his hair, of which a woman writer said :

"That wonderful hair of his must have brought the
unctuous fingers of many masters, spiritual and otherwise,

down upon it in commendatory pats I daresay that

it was his mother's pleasure in it and the way she enjoyed
running her fingers through it that made him realize — sub-
consciously at least — that his hair was a very magnificent
asset." The writer also described the garden of the Premier
— his wonderful roses ; how he talked about the personali-
ties of the wild flowers so dear to his soul, and the perver-
sities of the wild cucumber — but amiably declined to say
a word about the destinies of nations.

Laurier had his flute. Borden should not be denied
his wild garden. I used to think, watching the Premier
in the House, that he would make a splendid bronze bust
of an Egyptian god.

But the man never could dress for the part of leader.
He needed too much grooming. He must always be
immaculate. A trifle of neglige would have ruined his
career.

We never heard of his "iron hand within the velvet
glove." He had neither the hand nor the glove. He was
an influence ; never a power. Even when the stage was
all set for a show Sir Robert could not take the spot-light.

RT. HON. SIR ROBERT BORDEN 29

He did not abhor the calcium ; he merely did not know
what to do when it was on. During the tour which pre-
ceded the triumphal election of 1911 he was strong enough
to win the country and weak enough to pose for oratorical
photographs of Sir Robert swaying a crowd — on the roof
of a Toronto hotel. Those photographs were published as
authentic pictures of the Premier in action.

But real action seldom happened to Premier Borden.
He never could invent occasions. He had no craft to play
the game, no intuition to penetrate into the conscience of
a lukewarm supporter or of a man whose policies and pro-
grammes might bedevil the union of the party. On his
tour in 1915 when, after seeing and hearing more of the
realism of war than any other man in the country, he
undertook to translate his emotions to crowds of people
here, he was compelled to use the tomtom-on-the-Midway
performances of R. B. Bennett, at a time when dominating
men of both parties put their political makeups into their
pockets in order to do honour to the tragic cause of which
on behalf of the nation he was the spokesman.

Political history is very largely a chronicle of stupendous
noises, of pageants and tumults and shoutings, of strategies
and manoeuvres, secret conclaves and cabals, of sinister
intrigues and specious platitudes in parliament to cover
them up, and of occasional great episodes when the leader
feels called to vindicate himself and his followers. Most
of these emotional experiences seem to have been denied
to Sir Robert.

I daresay it was mainly his lack of imagination. Borden
must, "work for the night is coming." The d°y's work
was often bigger than the man.

His advent to the leadership was a moral makeshift.
His defeat of Laurier in 1911 was not a triumph for any-
thing that might be called Bordenism. His conduct of
the political side of the war was creditable, at times splendid,
never consummately wise, never heroic. His exit was as

30 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

uneventful as his advent. Sir Robert had more than
finished his work.

The Conservative party as such carries no indelible
imprint from the man who for nearly a quarter of a century
led it. He led it by going alongside. He was not a great
partisan. He had no overwhelming and audacious bigotries.

Borden was the first Conservative leader of note who
never could play the ace of Quebec. The Laurier Cabinet
knew how to play politics by imagination. Borden had
nothing but a demoralized remnant, which the Liberals
pillaged when they discarded Free Trade, helped themselves
to a high, virtually protective, tariff for revenue only, took
a reef out of the Tory "old flag" monopoly by establishing
the British Preference and sent a contingent to the South
African War in the name of Empire. Laurier was master
in Quebec, in the new West whose two new Provinces he
created, in immigration, in great railways, in a deeper St.
Lawrence, in flamboyant adventures with great harbours,
in the Quebec Bridge. Borden as yet was master of nothing.
Such brilliance and success had never been confronted by
such a demoralized party and so much drab common sense
in a leader.

Sir Robert's Premiership was a desperate inheritance.
The direct plunge into the Naval Aid Bill was a badly
staged attempt to capitalize the reaction against restricted
reciprocity. That first session of the Borden Parliament
goes on record as the most complete one-act farce ever
inflicted upon a patient country. The Imperial issue was
a play to the gallery, and it is the one clear issue that seems
to remain of all the Borden idea.

Sir Robert in his whole life never constructed an epi-
gram. His two great predecessors had made several.
Epigrams sometimes outlive policies. He never delivered
a great passionate speech. He had opportunities but could
not meet them. Fine speeches enough, to be sure ; many

RT. HON. SIR ROBERT BORDEN 31

of them instinct with a sort of ethical nobility ; but a great
palpitating speech, never.

It is not likely that if left to the logic of ordinary evo-
lution Sir Robert ever would have recreated his party even
on Imperial issues ; or convinced the West that Conserva-
tism was not merely anti-agrarian ; or shewn Quebec that
Conservatives in the second decade of the twentieth
century are better Laurcntians than the Liberals by pre-
serving better the anti-continental idea. Such things call
for leadership by imagination and a Cabinet of strong men.
Sir Robert had neither. Even in the House he was not the
party leader. Conservatism established by Macdonald as
a great system of damnation to the Grits, was on the low
road to extinction. It was not in the power of Robert
Borden to save it. The country was swept by a new
Liberalism that by astute manipulation had kept sympa-
thetic both manufacturers and radicals.

Long before the war came, Canada recognized in Mr.
Borden a Premier who knew the meaning of moral caution
so well that he knew not boldness at all except that his cause
was right. Borden had the ethical stolidity of Asquith
without the latter's personal weaknesses or his powers of
oratory. He needed somebody with him as stage manager
and makeup artist. Even his virtues might have been
advertised with effect — though as a rule, except in charac-
ters like Lincoln, it takes the perspective of time to put
those into a poster. So eminently respectable ; so high
in honour ; so fair in judgment ; so irresolute in action ;
so defective in imagination ; so content to be overshadowed
by lesser men in his own party even though he never was
intimidated by bigger men in the Opposition : such, so far
as we could see him before the war, was Sir Robert Borden.

Platitudes lay in wait for the Premier to utter them.
Only by an effort of will could he lift them to a plane of
high interest. He could sketch great issues with the solemn
hand of a great preacher pronouncing a benediction ; but

32 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

he never could utter an aside, or crack a joke, or tell a story,
or forget that once upon a time Fate had picked him to be
a leader and so help him he would go through the motions
of shepherding while the other men were the real collie
dogs of the flock. If only Borden could have broken some
bucking broncho, or worn some new kind of bouquet, or
invented some imitation of a brazen serpent to hold up,
the people and the party might have got hold of him and
followed him.

Such was Premier Borden before the war, and so he
remained, but under a magnifying glass, afterwards. The
war was a godsend to the Government. It drove out
alleged dissension in the Cabinet and gave the party which
had met defeat in the Naval Aid Bill a chance to per-
petrate something which no Parliament would dare try
to defeat. Sometimes I almost think Borden was for
short periods in the war a truly great man — in the eyes of
the angels. He had known the war was coming ; he had
said so. There was a secret plan of action on file in the
Archives months before it came. Not his to exult in
I-told-you-sos to the leader opposite who had mitigated
the menace. He rose to his programme of duty. He did
not even wait till Britain declared war, but cabled assur-
ances of aid on August 2nd, 1914. Special Parliament was
assembled. The hour had struck. A Halifax writer
present at the Khaki Parliament says :

"Sir Wilfrid easily bore off the honours in oratory. It

was a great occasion and he rose to it Sir Robert is

no orator, but he spoke in straight man-fashion of the
great crisis. The climax of his speech was a solemn warn-
ing of the dark days to come 'when our endurance will
be tried.' "

Had the Premier issued a referendum in that first
month of Canada's going to war he would have wept at
the amazing number of Noes from the Province in which
Laurier was born, and the provinces in the Far West which

RT. HON. SIR ROBERT BORDEN 33

he had created ; in the one, obvious indifference whatever
the cause ; in the other enmity from the Nationals whom
Laurier had imported to make Liberal voters. Even in
the rural areas, traditionally the stronghold of Liberalism,
indifferentism was the rule ; and in the city of Kitchener
where Laurier had politically baptized Mackenzie King,
his successor, there was almost a state of civil war.

But the fervour of the Hughes programme prevented
the Premier from taking stock of the nation. He per-
mitted Hughes to treat Quebec as an automatic part of
Canada at war — which it was not ; and he failed to use
even the Machiavellian energies of Bob Rogers in getting
a line on the psychology of the West, supposed to be useful
only in elections. Sir Robert had long known of the
menace of Germany, and his Naval Aid Bill was one proof
that he knew. But he did not understand the menace of
disunited Canada. There never was in Ottawa any inform-
ing vision of Canada at war. Canada, in fact, was not at
war. Political feuds were indeed forgotten ; thanks to
a noble-minded Premier that was natural enough. But
had there been a national poet then big enough to translate
into great verse the true spiritual state of Canada, he
would have written with poignant sadness about Quebec ;
perhaps a few verses on the overwhelming British-born
majority in the First Contingent. He would have ex-
plained that being a native son of Canada, whether you
were English or French by extraction, did not of itself
lead to enlistment in the ranks. The Premier should have
known whether Sam Hughes was awarding patronage by
making officers from the Conservative party or whether
according to his own statement he was doing just the
opposite. In fact it was the Premier's business to see that
the Minister of War pursued neither policy.

But with the Hughes flares all about him it was hard
for the Premier to see the nation ; most of all Quebec. In
this matter of the two Canadas, Sam Hughes saw his

34 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

opportune duty and he did it. Sir Robert saw his and
shrank from it, not weakly but blindly. Quebec should
have been the instant objective of all the wisdom in Canada's
Cabinet. Except for one or two grand battalions and a
minority of broad-minded French-Canadians, Quebec was
not at war, as part of united Canada. Banging the drum
and blowing the bugle in Quebec was as wrong in strategy
as to send Bob Rogers down to exorcise, as he did in 1915,
the phantom of conscription. Sir Robert knew that even
in civil times his Government was electorally ignored
on the St. Lawrence. How much more in a time of
unpopular war ? Was it not clear that every hurrah
for the Empire in Ontario, every fresh battalion mustered
and drilled in Toronto, every troopship down the St.
Lawrence, was a nail in the coffin of Quebec's potentiality
in the war ?

Yes, Sir Robert Borden knew that. He knew that
Laurier was sulking like Cassius in his tent ; that he was
gnawing himself over the failure of his own predictions
about the peace welfare of the world as well as for his own
defeat in the election of 1911 ; that the man of the "sunny
ways" was becoming a reactionary and a cynic, an old
leader of great power, which he was willing to use to the
utmost for the prosecution of the war had he been in office,
but in opposition was manacled by a sense of futility against
forces in Quebec which he understood and feared far more
than did the Premier.

No doubt the Premier traversed all this, many a time
and in great concern. And it may be that he saw so
sharply into the sad hopelessness of it all that he decided
not to ask Laurier for advice, or even suggestion. Such
is lack of imagination.

Laurier had his day in the grand expansion of the
country. Borden would have his, in the sacrifices and
moral energies of the dark days to come. It was a greater
thing to be Premier in war than ever it had been in peace.

RT. HON. SIR ROBERT BORDEN 35

Canada was a greater land in action on the West front
than ever she had been stringing railways, settling farms
and building towns on the frontiers. The more Canada
went to the front of her own free will, the greater she seemed
abroad. The credit of this nation at war went up in
London and Paris much faster than its investment credit
had ever gone on the exchanges. The further one got
from Ottawa the greater the country seemed. A Canadian
Cabinet Minister meeting a British Minister in London
could talk for an hour on the wonderful war character of
this country. London was the centre of gravity of the
west front, and of Canadian Ministers. The Premier
spent almost half his time in or near London, whenever
summoned, or whenever politic to go — to a place where
the rancours of Ottawa were all buried in the grand cause.
The Premier of Canada sometimes went to London when
he would rather have stayed at home ; more often when he
felt that it was emotionally bigger to be Premier in London
than in Ottawa. He was more honoured in war than
Laurier had been in peace. He would have been a better
Canadian had he stayed in Ottawa more. But there were
many Canadians who were more concerned about how to
help Foch and Lloyd George win the war in Europe than
about how to knuckle down to common business at home.
The trek to England and to Europe became a fad. The
nations went world crazy. Premiers neglected to "saw
wood." It was a matter for gratitude that they did not
parade in khaki.

Premier Borden's lingering objection to Coalition here,
even after it was established in London, didrhim no credit.
He was displeased when the Chairman of the Imperial
Munitions Board, back from a business conference in
London, asked if the Premier had any objection to his
stating the case for the need of Coalition at a public dinner.
Of course the Chairman was out of order. But he was
talking business, not politics.

36 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

The war was not going well. The British part of it
was badly enough bedevilled by distance and differences
of opinion between various Dominions without the dis-
traction of party politics.

But for the great services of win-the-war Liberals the
Military Service Act might have disrupted the Coalition
even when it came. It was an extreme measure ; much
more hazardous here than in Britain — except for Ireland,
of which we wanted no imitation in Quebec. There were
times when Sir Robert longed for the wings of a dove. His
offer of Coalition came at a time when he knew Laurier
would refuse it. Conscription he carried out as a necessity.
He never wanted it. No Premier of a free-will nation
would. There were bigoted anti-Quebeckers who would
have had compulsion from the first to show the French that
Canada was greater than Quebec. But if Canada had sent
conscripts in 1915 what would have become of the glory
of the Canadian army ? The argument that it was the
best men who were killed, thereby robbing the nation of
its flower, is thoroughly ignoble. Canada has never
regretted that her best men died first, or that the Premier
delayed conscription until it was inevitable. Canada does
regret that the Government did not until too late, attempt
to make any national register of the strength of this nation
as had been done in England before conscription came as
the final result. To have applied conscription before the
United States went to war would have driven thousands
of slackers across the border. Enough went as it was in
the fear that conscription was coming.

The bilingual bungle in the Commons was even worse
than the bad feeling over conscription. In this debate
the angry French element in the House were a bad com-
mentary on the still hopeful minority of broadminded
French-Canadians who wanted to carry on the honour of
Courcellette. The controversy over titles was no feather
in the cap of the Premier, who made a bad fist of defending

RT. HON. SIR ROBERT BORDEN 37

a practice the most glaring instance of which was the
creation of hereditary titles in a democratic country.

Canada's "dark days" were fast coming. The resigna-
tion of Hughes was due before it came. The Premier's
patience was scarcely any longer a virtue in this case, when
four months after the declaration of war he had been com-
pelled to make a diplomatic visit to Toronto's war camp
in order to smooth out the troubles created by his "Chief
of Staff."

From that time on to the end of his career we had the
spectacle of a Premier overburdened and weary in his office,
bewildered by the insistent advices of other men and sad
over the failure of even conscription, in the face of such
wastage, to get Canada's 5th Division into the field without
weakening the four divisions we had. The Union Govern-
ment was too heavy a load for so weary a man to carry.
It had done its work, most of it well, some of it too late.
The head of it was worn out. He was away much for his
health, more for service in Europe, coming back to recon-
struct his Cabinet, with the aid of Meighen, then away
again. He had lost Hughes, Rogers, Crerar, Cochrane.

The strong men he had left, except Meighen, White
and Foster, were Union Liberals.

Why did the Premier not himself resign ? His work
was done. His Union Government had finished the work
which the nation gave it a mandate to do.

The answer must be in Sir Robert's own conviction
that as a Premier of Canada he still had a great work to
do in Europe in the settlement of peace. That work he
did, some of it much more ably than much he had done at
home. We had to read the headlines diligently to see
where next Canada's mobile Premier would be needed in
the adjustments of peace. More of the answer might be
found in the doubt as to whether any man in Canada
clearly knew what the Government's work, and therefore
its mandate, would be. It was a time of upheavals when

212147

38 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

any nation with a Government carrying on its work con-
structively according to programme might have been glad
to escape the further upheaval of a general election. But
political parties have usually been profiteers in the emer-
gency of a nation. Did the Premier fear that his resig-
nation would force an election before the new party
was ready ? We are not told. Under pressure he called
a caucus in 1919 to determine the programme of whatever
party he had in the Union. The caucus determined nothing.
Did he hope to carry on until the legal expiry of his term
in 1922, thereby evening up with the Liberals who wanted
to bring on an election in 1916 ?

This also we do not know. Sir Robert was a weary
and baffled Premier. He did not know how to let go.
Once even his faltering hand was off, who was to succeed
him ? There were three men to consider.

The man's work was done. He knew it. Much of
it had been nobly done. He knew that the nation was
sure of this. And he now understands that even with the
failures and the weaknesses of his administration, both as
Conservative and Unionist Premier, we cordially concede
to this high mediocrity a place in our critical affairs only
second to the credit that he gained in England and in
Europe as the head of a nation that had gloriously fought
and magnificently won — in the war.

Canada never had as great and noble a servant, who
failed so conspicuously on personal grounds to be the
nation's master. But there were elements in the patriotic
servant-hood of R. L. Borden, higher than the political
masteries of more brilliant men.

A POLITICAL SOLAR SYSTEM
RT. HON. SIR WILFRID LAURIER

FIFTY years from now some Canadian Drinkwater, charmed
by the eloquent perspectives of time, may write an ' ' Abra-
ham Lincoln" string of personal scenes from the lives of
Wilfrid Laurier and John A. Macdonald. The narrative
will thus begin in the very year that the story of Lincoln
ends, and it will carry on down just fifty years in our
national history to the time when Wilfrid Laurier, pas-
sionate student of the Civil War, reached the end of his
climax in the affairs of Canada and the Empire. But
the poet who does this must be inspired ; because no
young country at that period of time in the world had had
two such remarkable men as contemporaries, and political
foes, and lucky is the nation which at any period has
such a man as Laurier.

Outwardly Laurier 's political career was complex
where Macdonald's was simple. John A. was as great a
Canadian as Laurier ; but in the simpler times in which
he lived he had less cause to be puzzled by the web of fate
and of political cross-currents at home and abroad, even
though he was immensely more baffled by politicians and
party emergencies.

Laurier swung in a great romantic orbit of political
sentiment, vaster than that of any other statesman we
ever had. For the fifteen years up till about 1906, he
seemed like the greatest man ever born a citizen of Canada.
Before that period he was a romance. After it he was a
national hallucination. The last three years of his life
he was a tragedy.

39

40 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

Yet the tragedy kept on smiling. Half a century of
smiles. We never had a statesman who could smile so
potently. Never one with such mellifluous music in his
voice, such easy grace in his style, such a cardinal's hauteur
when he wanted to be alone, and such a fascinating urbanity
when he wanted to impress a company, a caucus or a crowd.
The Romist whom Orangemen admired, the Frenchman
who made an intellectual hobby of British democracy, the
poetic statesman who read Dickens and re-read in two
languages Uncle Tom's Cabin and sometimes played the
flute, and the Premier of a bilingual country who had a
passion for the study of the war which emancipated the
negro, was the kaleidoscopic enigma of Canadian public
life.

Laurier was nearly all things to all men. He was some-
times many things to himself. He idolized himself and
laughed at himself. He venerated British institutions
and passionately loved Quebec. He came to his flowering
period in a party of Free Trade and went to seed in a party
committed to a species of protection. He spoke English
as fluently as Bach wrote fugues, and with more passion
and beauty of utterance than any of our English-Canadian
orators. One moment he could be as debonair as Beau
Brummel, the next as forbidding and repellent as a modern
Caesar. He was consistently the best-dressed public man
in Canada. A misfitting coat to him was as grievous as
a misplaced verb in a peroration. He superficially loved
many things. Life was to him, even apart from politics,
a gracious delight. He knew how to pose, to feign affability
and to be sincere. With more culture Laurier would have
been the most exquisite dilettante of his age. But he
cared little for poetry in verse, not much for fine music,
had small taste for objets d'art or the precious in anything.
His greatest affection was in his home, his greatest charm
in fine manners, his master passion in speech, and in manag-
ing Cabinets to win elections for the party which to him

. RT. HON. SIR WILFRID LAURIER 41

meant a greater and more inspiring Canada. We have
had better debaters ; but never a man except himself who
in the House could make a sort of grand music out of an
apologetic oration on National Transcontinental grades.

A writer who at various periods of time was very
intimate with Laurier thinks he was a man of deep emotions.
This may be doubted. A man who talked so easily and
was so exquisitely conscious of himself could scarcely be
considered spiritually profound. Other men and events
played upon him like the wind on an Aeolian harp. He
was tremendously impressionable ; and by turns grandly
impressive. A personal friend relates how a man with
some experience as a critic of drama — probably himself —
went to see Laurier by request for a talk on the political
situation ; how Laurier invited him to a chair and im-
mediately took one beside him an inch or two lower so that
his own face was on a level with the visitor's ; how for
some minutes he sat feeling the power of this actor who
tried to persuade him to run as a Liberal candidate, and
when he rose again seemed taller and more aloof than ever.

That is acting. Some other man might have done
the same thing and made no impression. Laurier could
perform obvious tricks with a consummate grace. And
he performed many. There never was a moment of his
waking life when he could not have been lifted into a play.
His movements, his words, his accent, his clothes, his
facial lineaments were never commonplace, even when his
motives often may have been. He was Debussy's After-
noon of a Faun ; poetry and charm all the days of his life.

During the ridiculous deadlock on the Naval Aid Bill,
when his supporters went so grotesquely far as to read the
Bible to talk out the Bill, he was away from the House for
a week, reported as quite ill, in reality having a very
delicious time at home reading light literature. The day
he came back the news of his coming was heralded to the
Commons. The benches were packed. Not till they

42 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

were all full, every Minister in his place, every page at
attention and the House like a pent-up Sabbath congre-
gation, did the then leader of the Opposition make his
grand, swift entry, bowing with courtly dignity to the
Speaker and taking his seat amid a claque from his sup-
porters, in which even the Tories felt like joining.

Sir Wilfrid I/aurier had the infallible knack of adjusting
his makeup, not always himself — to any occasion from
which he could extract profitable publicity, or upon which
he could do some charming thing for somebody else. He
is reputed once to have worn overalls among a gang of
timber-jammers, but he felt rather ridiculous and soon
took them off. Interviewed abed in his private car at a
railway station by a .political friend, he suddenly became
conscious of his pyjamas and rolled back into the bed-
clothes with a smile. He was not happy in deshabille.
Entertained at an arts luncheon in 1913, he made the
most of a very Spartan meal, consented with much dignity
to exchange his plate of cold beef for another man's cold
mutton, listened with great gravity to a short pro-
gramme of music, asked the names of the composers
and the players and spent most of his brief speech
denying that he was anything but a philistine in art,
and pledging himself if ever he was Premier again to do
more for Canadian art than had ever been done before.
In conversation at a friend's house with a stranger he
claimed that at college he was always a "lazy dog." Visited
once by an agent who tried to sell him a phonograph, he
consented to play the flute for a record ; after listening to
the record and being assured that it was a faithful replica
of his own performance and asked if now he would not buy
the machine, he answered gravely, "No, I think I will sell
the flute." This story may be apocryphal, but it is delight-
fully true to character.

On one of the thousands of "occasions" in a career that
was almost perpetual drama he was buttonholed in his

RT. HON. SIR WILFRID LAURIER 43

office by an American reporter who, having been warned
that the Premier of Canada never gave interviews, boasted
that he would break the rule. After half an hour the
American reporter came out to his confreres of the press
gallery, sat down at a typewriter, lighted three or four
cigarettes, nervously aware that he was being watched for
the forthcoming article, and after spoiling a number of
sheets and tearing them all up he confessed, "Well, boys,
I thought I was pumping Laurier, but it's a cinch he
spent most of my time pumping me."

To the Liberal press gallery men he was as much a
captain as he was to his followers in the House. He gave
them daily audience during the Session, very often in a
group, and at such times he usually asked, "Well, boys,
what's the news ?" He wanted good news ; and many
a reporter tricked up the truth now and then to give it to
him. Informed once that "Bob" Rogers had vehemently
in his office denied any cabal in the Cabinet against the
Premier he swiftly replied, with that splendid, satirical
smile, "Well, the fact that Bob Rogers says there is none
would convince me that there probably is."

Laurier was the kind of man to whom other people
naturally happened. He was a human solar system in
which many kinds of people wanted to gravitate, even to
the ragged little girl on the prairie who picked him the
wild flowers that he wore in his coat as far as she could see
him on the train platform. He discovered early in life
that he could interest other people much as some men
find out they can juggle or sing. It was a fatal gift.
Laurier was far too long in this country, much too interest-
ing. Women in Ottawa could make delirious conversation
out of how this man at 72 got into a taxi. He was more
phenomenal to English than to French. He never culti-
vated Paris and would not have been at home there. At
Imperial Conferences and Coronations he was an Imperial
matinee idol in London. In Ontario he was regarded

44 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

with much the same awe as the small boy views the long-
haired medicine man. To the Quebecker he was the
grand magic ; until Bourassa came, irresistible, incom-
parable on stage. But Laurier had no great intensity ;
no Savonarola gift to sway a crowd ; he just charmed
them ; when they came to remember his song — what was
it ? Earlier in life he was a sort of Ulysses, led by magic.
He loved the petit mile of Lin where he was born. But it
was too small for him. He was lured into studies, to
college, to the bilingual university McGill, to law, to dis-
course with learned Anglo-Saxons, to the study of British
Government by democracy, to the translation of himself
into English. The translation, which was almost a master-
piece, made him the first and perhaps the last French
Premier of Canada, and in many respects the greatest
Premier we ever had.

This alone was something. Speaking their own tongue,
Laurier could impress the English. He could tour Ontario
and feel grandly at home in the Liberal shires, among the
men of the Maple Leaf. He could follow one of his two
transcontinentals up the Saskatchewan, and to multitudes
of many nations led from Europe by his own immigration
policy conduct a Pentecost for the two new Provinces.
He could fling magic over Manitoba, and on the Pacific
he had power. But in Nova Scotia he could never equal
the memory of Joseph Howe, a greater orator than Laurier.

What this man's sensations were as he studied himself
in the art of politics may be compared to what an English
Canadian of similar temperament would feel like if he
could fling a spell over Quebec. Laurier made a second
conquest of Canada. He took a great Cobden party from
Edward Blake and made it almost protectionist, Imperial
and his own. He grafted a sort of Liberalism on to poly-
glot nationalities. In about the same tenure of power he
created a personal ascendancy the equal of Macdonald's,
in a nation almost twice as big and much more complex.

RT. HON SIR WILFRID LAURIER 45

In ten years he changed the face of Canada as no Premier
had ever done before or ever can do again. He was looked
at in Imperial London as though he were the joint pic-
turesque descendant of Wolfe and Montcalm, with a
mandate to make Canadian Liberalism an instrument of
Empire, a bi-racial Government a final proof of the eternal
wisdom of the British North America Act, and a measure
of reciprocity a safeguard of Anglo- American entente

So the son of the village surveyor from the tin-spired
parish of St. Lin had made himself very nearly monarch
of all he surveyed, with the notion that his right there was
none to dispute Sprung from the most backward pro-
vince in Confederation, he pushed Canada forward with
hectic speed, not counting the cost, nor caring what the
end might be, so long as he died Premier of a prosperous
nation and therefore happy.

At about the age of sixty a reaction came over Laurier ;
first noticeable in less enthusiasm and more reticence at
the Imperial Conferences. The French-Canadian who
had lost a segment of his idolatrous following in Quebec
because of clashes with the clergy and the sending of a
contingent to the South African War, began to resist the
cold machinations of the Chamberlain group. He began
to see Empire, not as a commonwealth of democracies,
but as domination from Downing Street. At home he
was shrewd to observe that the Canada of his own domina-
tion was a complex of many "nationals," only a few of
which were historically rooted in the Anglo-Saxon idea.
He saw that the bigger half of this Canada was arising in
the West, which he believed he had truly because politically
created ; and the West had but a slender minority of
people to whom the Maple Leaf meant anything.

If the party which he also had recreated into a Laurier
Liberal party was to continue dominating Canada until
white-plumed Laurier had finished his work, it must be
by a stronger leverage than Imperialism. He had managed

46 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

to hold Quebec, which now thanks to himself and Lomer
Gouin, was almost solidly Liberal. The prairie farmers
he must not lose. And the grain growers were not keen
about an England which bought their wheat at open
world prices in competition with cheap wheat countries
like Russia, and their cattle at prices dictated by the
Argentine ; when both cattle and wheat were cheapened
to the producer by the long-haul railways which Laurier
and the Tories had built.

And although the "Old Man" had scant knowledge of
business, he had the wisdom of the serpent to translate the
signs of the times ; yet lacking somehow the vision to
foresee that a play for the western vote by a measure of
reciprocity would resolve itself into a boomerang at the
polls. Laurier had a wonderful Canadian vision. In
1904 he refused a Liberal M.P. from the Pacific Federal
interference in the Oriental problem, saying, "The day
will come when we shall be glad of Japanese warships on
our Pacific coast." Yet in 1912, in a letter to a friend, he
gravely minimized the German menace. He understood
America and Asia better than Europe. His vision was
keener in power than in defeat.

And then the war, which in a few strokes finished the
almost complete picture of Laurier. His support of the
Government in going to the aid of Britain was at first a
flash of the old generously impulsive Laurier who loved
England. That love he never lost. He expressed it in
the House down near to the end of the war. He loved
England a thousand times better than some Englishmen
do. For the Empire it is doubtful if he was ever profoundly
enthusiastic except as he saw in it the glorious evolution
of self-governing democracies such as Canada, his first love.
He understood this country. It is not remarkable that he
did. Any public man of Canada should. But Laurier's
love for his own country was of an especially intense charac-
ter, because it was for a long while so deeply romantic.

RT. HON. SIR WILFRID LAURIER 47

i

As he grew older the original veneration he had for
England as the mother of democracy was more and more
transferred to Canada as an experiment in that form of
government. The more he won elections, the greater grew
his passion for democracy and for interpreting his native
land. The pity is that a man cannot go on winning and
losing elections without suffering some damage to his clear
love of country. The highest patriot is he who knows
best how to lose himself and his election, all but his con-
science and his cause, for the sake of the land he loves.
Laurier did not remain till the end of his life the highest
patriot. Weary as he is said to have been of public life
as far back as 1905, he was lured into winning more elections
by the adulation of his followers and his own love of swaying
men as a master, until elections with him became a habit and
the loss of one a tragedy.

?. And even the war which shook so many men's love of
country to the depths — some of them over the precipice
of profits, others to the passionate heights of sacrifice — did
not obliterate in Laurier the fatal desire to win elections.
One has almost to cease thinking to remember that
Wilfrid Laurier did hope that an election would yet be held
during the war that would return him to power. The
failure of the Government in the war would be largely the
fault of Quebec which he still in large measure controlled.
He held that ace. And when the time came he would
play it. The Premier wanted no advice from him. Laurier
offered him none.

When the bilingual dispute was transferred to the
Commons, Laurier took the only side consistent with his
character and his career. He avowed his belief, as always,
in Provincial rights, but he asked Ontario to use its strength
with clemency. Even with an element of bitterness he
did not lose his dignity. But the fine sparkle of the Laurier
we all knew was gone. He was beset with complexities
and contradictions. The one simple thing about him was

48 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

his hope to finish his work by winning another election.
In the debate on the Nickle motion for the abolition of
any further king-made aristocracy in Canada, he was an
acidulous old cynic, offering to go and burn his title in the
market place if certain others would do likewise. Those
photographs of Laurier in the Windsor Uniform, making
him look like a refulgent relique of the court of Louis XIV.
were no longer prized in the family album. Away with them !

Poor, splendid old man ! Even in his crotchets and
quavers he was charming. To the very last he could rise
in the Commons and with a voice as thick as wool make
members opposite fancy they were hearing great music.

In 1916 an artist painted a portrait of Laurier to hang
in the Legislative halls of Quebec, where the sound of his
magic voice had first been heard in parliamentary speech.
The artist began to paint the Laurier of "the sunny ways."
The old man corrected him. "No, if you please," he said
gravely, "paint me as a ruler of men."

It was the Cardinal speaking ; the man who had dis-
ciplined more Cabinet politicians than even Macdonald,
the master of Cabinets ; the old man who remembered
the power of an earlier day.

Early in 1917 he was offered coalition by the Premier.
He refused. Laurier knew that coalition meant con-
scription, and conscription meant dragooning Quebec.

It came home vividly to the old leader in Opposition,
whatever it may have done had he been in power, that to
advocate conscription would drive Quebec into the camp
of Bourassa from which he and Lomer Gouin had between
them managed to save a large majority of French-Cnadians.
The struggle of Bourassa to oust Laurier began with the
Boer War. It was fated not to end until either leader or
the other should quit. Before the war Bourassa was
flamboyant and defiant. After it began he was openly and
brazenly disloyal, when the doctrines he preached were
inflammably acceptable to people uneducated to citizen-

RT. HON. SIR WILFRID LAURIER 49

ship in so conglomerate a thing as Empire. The easiest
thing in the world is for a high wind to sweep a prairie fire.
The war and Bourassa together had the power to sweep
Quebec, had Laurier and Gouin shown signs of yielding to
the demand for conscription. I am told that Laurier per-
sonally believed in conscription but saw this terrible
danger of disrupting the nation over Quebec. The war
only had staved off the Irish question, a conference on
which was in session when war was declared. Laurier
dreaded the spectre of a second Ireland in Quebec. He
knew all the forces and how they would operate. By his
own methods, mistaken or otherwise, he had spent most
of his life to achieve unity. He dreaded to see that unity
imperilled. I think he would have been glad to see Quebec
enlist as Ontario and other Provinces had done. That was
impossible. Conscription was a menace in Quebec to the
man who had failed to estimate the jack-boot menace in Ger-
many, but who had not failed to oppose the idea that
navalism in England was as bad as militarism anywhere.

No judgment of Laurier, when it comes to be adequately
made by the historian, can fail to take account of this
sentiment in an old leader to whom the unity of Canada
had become an obsession far transcending his original
passion for the solidarity of Empire.

The Winnipeg convention of 1917 was a piece of almost
calculated cruelty on the part of men who should have
known that the old chief's day was politically done. His
party which for years he had penetrated with his personality
was slipping into disunion. Vaguely he knew that the
western wing of it was almost gone over to Radicalism
such as he could not control. But in Ottawa there was an
even more direct split. There, conscriptionist Liberals
called the Convention for the purpose of proclaiming win-
the-war independence of Laurier and considering Coalition
on its merits. But the western Liberal machine captured
it by a fluke. For a few days the old chief dreamed that

50 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

the West had rallied to his standards. Then he awoke to
the reality that even in the east he was head of a divided
house.

The man who in 1916 had been painted as a ruler of
men found in that summer of 1917 the Win-the-War
Liberals deserting him, some of them with sobs. They
loved him well. He was the old king. Conscription was
now the issue. The Government had decided upon it late
in 1916. In 1917 the Military Service Act was brought
down in the House. Laurier knew at what it was most
directly aimed — Quebec. He fell back on the ruse of
invoking the Militia Act whch called for defence only.
There was no defence. He knew it. He moved for a
Referendum, knowing that in the West, sore over the
Wartime Elections Act, and in Quebec, and in the absence
of the soldier vote it might carry by a majority sufficient
to defeat the Government, to force an election and send
him back to power. He was beaten. Conscription be-
came the law. To enforce it came the Coalition. The
election was held. The Liberals were again beaten —
partly by men from their own ranks.

Still the old king hung on. He was now too old to let
go. Even the Coalition might fail. Or the war might be

ended And then ? The last fighting act of his life

was to call the Ottawa Liberal Convention, of the men who
had not abandoned his colours ; the men for whom he
was not still holding the open door. But a few months
before he died here he was "up on his toes," as George
Graham said of him, sending out battle calls for some
election that must come now. The war was over ; the
army coming home. The Coalition's day was "done."
Those stalwarts must return to the fold.

But most of them came not. There was still work for
them to do, and surely no haste for an election.

What ? No more elections for Laurier ? Not one
more chance, after all the waiting, for him to finish, hi.Sj

RT. RON SIR WILFRID LAURIER 51

work ? Poor old infatuate ! splendid even in his illusions.
There was no work for Laurier to do now. There was no
room for him to do it if there had been. There were few
to follow him except in Quebec — for in his dotage he would
not believe that the West had so forsaken him.

In a few months he was dead. And when dead, once
again men forgot their political opinions and for a brief
while somehow worshipped the memory of the man whose
life was almost the coming true of a dream, whose work
was never done, whose evening of life was a tragedy. And
case-hardened politicians who had borne the burden and
the heat of the day with Laurier, wept.

But the power of Laurier is not dead. In the long
perspective of history the figure of this great Canadian,
with his "sunny ways" and his bewildering Atlas load,
will stand out vividly when many of his successors will be
scarcely visible in the haze.

THE GRANDSON OF A PATRIOT
HON. WILLIAM LYON MACKENZIE KING

IN December, 1913, there was a Literary Society dinner in
the University of Toronto at which Sir Wilfrid Laurier was
the guest of honour and speaker on "Democracy." My
own seat at a table was next to a restless, thick-bodied,
sparse-haired man who seemed younger than his years and
to whom I had not been introduced. During the hour
that Laurier spoke this man continued to lean over the
table so as to catch a view of his fascinating face. He
interested me almost as much as did the speaker. I had
never sat beside such an irrepressible vitality. Like a bird
to a succession of swinging boughs, he hung upon the
golden utterances of his old chieftain and political mentor
concerning a subject so poignantly dear to the experiences
of one and the imagination of the other.

First impressions are sometimes reversed on closer
acquaintance. I was uncomfortable beside Mackenzie
King, but interested. On a latter occasion I was still more
interested, and rather more uncomfortable. The early
impression remained, that he had very little faculty of
restraint — what scientists call inhibition.

That occasion will not soon fade from memory. Often I
can hear in imagination a thousand students singing "Vive
le roi ! vive le compagnie !" before the fine old leader
spoke, and that earnest, hectic disciple joining in. When
I discovered who he was I ran back in fancy to the time
when Mackenzie King was a student at that same univer-
sity. At that time William Mulock was Vice-Chancellor
and became keenly interested in the brilliant young student
of economics with whose father he had attended law school.

52

HON. WM. LYON MACKENZIE KING 53

King entered the University the year that the chief author
of the National Policy died. He graduated one year before
Laurier became Premier, in the golden age of Liberalism
triumphant, when "freer" trade was emerging as a symbol
of that brand of democracy in opposition to free trade in a
minority. How we have fallen upon evil days ! Farmers'
sons at college no longer regard free trade as the forerunner
of political absorption by the United States, but as the
vindication of the farmer as a group in government.

Mackenzie King is a man about whom nobody ever
could have a lukewarm conviction. He is either cordially
liked or disliked. More than most other men in public life
he has become the victim of violent opinions. For this he
is temperamentally responsible. People consistently de-
cline to reason about him. They speak of him vehemently.
His dominant note of character is rampant enthusiasm.
King is always intensely in love with whatever interests
him. His enthusiasms are not so much on the surface for
many people, as underneath for causes — and for a few men.
Gifted with an uncommon capacity for absorbing impres-
sions and collecting data for research, he has made himself
a sort of pathological study to other people. In mastering
economics he has himself been enthralled by his own
enthusiasm.

At the time of Laurier's speech on democracy King was
peculiarly enthusiastic about John D. Rockefeller, Jr.,
head of the Rockefeller Foundation. But he had lost no
jot of his fervent admiration for Laurier in Ottawa and
was still passionately devoted — as he remains — to Sir
William Mulock, his political godfather. Nobody has ever
criticized him for his ardent discipleship to the two older
Canadians. There is an old-fashioned spontaneity about
this mutual regard much above the common commercial
admiration of one man for another in business. Many have
blamed King for his attachment to Rockefeller, and have
used that connection to his detriment as Liberal leader.

54 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

In April, 1920, he was flatly accused of having been an
absentee from Canada during the war, employed by the
Rockefeller interests and so" entangled in the octopus" that
as leader of the Liberal party he would become a menace
to Canada. It was the old bogey of continentalism in a
new setting, and it took Mackenzie King twelve pages of
Hansard to make his defence in the House. The incident
forms a hinge to a career which is worth a brief survey.

King was born in Berlin, Ontario, son of a subsequent
lecturer in law at Osgoode Hall and of a daughter of William
Lyon Mackenzie. At the University of Toronto he was one
of the '95 group that included also Hamar Greenwood,
Arthur Stringer, and the late Norman Duncan and James
Tucker. There was a rebellion during that period in which
there is no record of the grandson of a glorious rebel having
taken part. At college he displayed a passion for pardon-
able egotism in which there were elements of a desire for
public service. The Family Compact at Ottawa must have
interested him. Liberalism, as understood by the Laurier
group, was emerging from the disreputable mess known as
continentalism, fathered by Goldwin Smith, who was begin-
ning to be estimated for what he really was, a brilliant
philosophical pamphleteer bent upon the obliteration of
Canadian nationality.

After graduation King went for a brief term on the
staff of the Toronto Globe. In that year the Liberals came
into power. King was engaged by Sir William Mulock,
Postmaster-General, to inquire into sweatshop methods in
contracts for postoffice uniforms. No man could have
done it better. He had a native appetite for that sort of
investigation, and he was helping to establish the new
Liberalism.

For the next four years King was out of the country.
Had he followed the academic fashion of that period he
would have been in training to become a citizen of the

HON. WM. LYON MACKENZIE KING 55

United States. Chicago University, built by John D.
Rockefeller, attracted him first; Harvard next. He was
still studying economics. No other Canadian had ever
spent so much time and talent on this subject. At Harvard
he became a Lecturer, and was sent to Europe to investigate
economic conditions. While there he got a cable from the
Postmaster-General of Canada, who had created the
Department of Labour as an adjunct to the postal depart-
ment, and established the Labour Gazette, and wanted a
deputy who should edit the Gazette and look after the
details of the office. King courteously declined, saying
that he could not accept until the expiry of his contract
with Harvard. The salary of the Deputy-Minister of
Labour was $2,500 under a man whom he tremendously
admired, and as yet with no clear ambition to become a
member of the House led by the man whom he was after-
wards to worship, and to succeed.

There is no proof that Laurier took any uncommon
interest at this time, as he afterwards did, in the Deputy-
Minister of Labour, though he noticed that the young man
was making a great success of his work. Much if not most
of King's tuition in politics at this stage came from William
Mulock, who as a member of the Commons in Opposition,
had fathered the fair trade resolution in Convention and
did much to convert the Liberal party from free to "freer"
trade.

In the eight years up till 1908, by experience with
conditions,, King made himself master of the subject which
was later to appear in his book, "Industry and Humanity."
He was repeatedly made chairman of this or that
mission, board, and commission at home or abroad, to get
the true facts about labour, immigration and employment.
By a sort of genius for conciliating groups, even when he
antagonized individuals, he became for a time the world's
most successful mediator in labour disputes. Industrial
warfare had not as yet adopted the trench system. Direct

56 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

action, the One Big Union, the sympathetic strike and
collective bargaining were scarcely dreamed of, though
anticipated in the philosophy of Karl Marx, as yet not
transplanted to America. Socialism, as expressed by
Henry George, whose "Progress and Poverty" was a
classic in King's college days, was the most radical element
with which the young Deputy had to deal. But the
Government's policy of foreign labour nationals being
gradually absorbed into labour unions made Canada, in
proportion to population, a very difficult country in which
to act as conciliator.

During his eight years as Deputy, King was made two
offers, each of which illuminates the criticism that in the
war he was only a nominal citizen of Canada. A group of
Canadian employers, recognizing his success as a mediator,
offered him $8,000 a year to act on their behalf with the
heads of labour. Without consulting his chief, King
declined the offer. He said that he preferred the $2,500
from the Labour Department, where he could be indepen-
dent of either one side or the other. Later President
Eliot, of Harvard, on the death of the man who occupied
the chair of political economy, offered King the post,
pointing out that his duties would keep him but six months
a year in Boston. The salary was at least twice what he
was getting in Ottawa. Again without consulting his
chief, King declined, on the pretext that he had no desire
to leave the useful work he was doing for the Ottawa
Government to become a citizen, even of eminence, in the
United States. During the same period he was asked to
act as conciliator in a great mining strike in Colorado,
when violence and murder were the law, and when the
result of his action led to the enactment of a successful
arbitration measure by the Government of Colorado.

All this was prior to King's election as member of the
House of Commons. Eight years as Deputy in the Depart-
ment of Labour, he stepped into the Commons and the

HON. WM. LYON MACKENZIE KING 57

Ministry of Labour with exceptional qualities to succeed.
His record as Minister was the natural but uncommon
sequel to his experience as Deputy. King was so long the
one man whose whole time was spent in the effort to recon-
cile industry and humanity in Canada that it seems hard to
recollect that he spent but three years as Minister. During
that time, as well as before it, he became the ardent disciple
of Laurier. While there was great advantage in having
spent so many years as Deputy, it is a pity for the sake of
the young leader's subsequent elevation that he did not
come under the spell of the old chieftain as a candidate
before Laurier had begun to grow cynical in office. In
1908 Laurier had been at least three years tired of public
life when there was no man to succeed him, and when, as
often as he expressed his weariness of trying to govern a
nation so temperamentally difficult as Canada, he was
tempted by the adulation of his supporters to try again,
until winning elections for the sake of remaining in power
became a habit.

Admiration such as King felt for Laurier made criticism
impossible. He worshipped Laurier. In this he was not
alone. Older men than King, among his colleagues, shared
the same spell-binding sentiment. And there was no
member of the Cabinet who grieved more than King at the
defeat of Laurier in 1911.

Here begins the Standard Oil story. The Montreal
Gazette, in a report of two speeches made at a certain club,
published an accusation that King had "deserted Canada
in her hour of crisis in search of Standard Oil fmillions."

As similar statements may be made during the election
campaign, it is fair to know the facts. King was employed
by the Rockefeller Foundation, not by Standard Oil. The
connection is merely one of cause and effect. The Founda-
tion spends on the wholesale betterment of humanity the
multi-millions which Standard Oil accumulated from the
people. The theory of justification here is that the people

58

would have spent these millions foolishly, whereas the
Foundation spends them well. There is some truth in the
theory. King was engaged solely upon the industrial
relations programme of the Foundation, with special
reference later to industries of war, and with permission
according to his own stipulation to conduct his researches
in Ottawa from which in the ten years between 1911 and
1921 he has been absent only upon special occasions. He
was in the unusual position of working in Canada and
being paid in the United States, for researches of benefit
to the cause of American industrial relations during the
war. His book, Industry and Humanity, which is the
literary form of those researches, was all written in Ottawa.

These are respectable facts ; the only objection to
which is that the full statement of the apologia occupies
twelve pages of Hansard and must have taken at least two
hours of Parliamentary time. The original accusation
was a malicious stupidity. The vindication was a con-
fessional in which the Liberal leader told the House every
iten that he knew. Half the number of words would have
been twice as effective.

This introduces my second impression of the Liberal
leader, two years after the outbreak of war, at midnight
in a baronial farmhouse in North York, Ont. He had
been addressing a political meeting in a school-house some
miles away. There was a golden harvest moon and the
scene from the spacious piazza overlooking the hills of
York was a dream of pastoral poetry. Suddenly motor
headlights flared out of the avenue and from the car alighted
the same restless man whom 'I had met three years before
at the dinner to democracy. In a very little while we both
became so interested in what he had to say that neither of
us cared to go to bed.

Next day I found him still more interesting. He spoke
with bubbling frankness and uncontrolled fervour about
many things and certain people, chief among whom

HON. WM. LYON MACKENZIE KING 59

was John D. Rockefeller, Jr. He described the young
magnate's trip into Colorado during a recent great strike,
an itinerary planned on purpose that the son of John D.
Rockefeller might get a first-hand knowledge of what con-
ditions actually were, what the labour leaders thought, and
what sort of people they might be. With graphic interest
he described the young financier's reception by the miners,
the speech he made, the big dance in which he took part,
the camps and mines he visited ; a picture of capital con-
ciliating labour such as seldom comes to notice outside the
pages of a novel. He made no effort to eulogize himself.
He was absorbed in generous admiration for the other man
and with enthusiasm for the glorious chance that Rocke-
feller seemed to have to make a new Magna Charta of
brotherhood between Capital and Labour. In this he was
a tremendous idealist. In many respects one was forced
to regret that the world somehow did not seem quite so
full of brotherly intention as Mr. King said that it was.

"The common ground of both capital and labour is
humanity," he said over and over in various form. "The
antagonism of each will be forgotten when both unite in an
effort to forward the interests of the whole community
without which neither can prosper."

"Right !" I felt like screaming, had there been a
moment to do so. "Bravo !"

The idea found expression in his book which he was
then engaged in writing. And it is doubtful if any book
on the subject of political economy was ever the source of
greater happiness to its author than "Industry and Hu-
manity" was to Mackenzie King. On the merits of demo-
cratic statesmanship as revealed in that book, Mackenzie
King should be Premier of Canada in 1922. Alas ! men
are often greater in what rhey say than in much they are
able to do. Mackenzie King is a species of rather emo-
tional idealist. He has studied economic humanity some-
what at the expense of his perception of human nature.

60 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

During the evening King talked with equal gusto upon
his intimate knowledge of a certain popular song writer in
Chicago, the story of whose life he told with vivid strokes
of descriptive pathos ; and upon his still more intimate
acquaintance with the late William Wilfred Campbell,
poet, whom he had seen in the same moment feed his pigs
in a near suburb of Ottawa, and create a line of poetry —
which King quoted — "The wild witchery of the winter
woods." He was seized with the idea that a Foundation
such as the Rockefeller should subsidize poets and song-
writers. The pity of it always is that the world is far too
desperately cynical in high places to accommodate such
generous impulses. Mackenzie King's fervent advocacy
of a reform sometimes creates more antagonism than the
cold attacks of an adversary. His passion for the better-
ment of humanity often outruns his judgment. His
statements smack of exaggeration even when they are
absolutely true. He lacks a sense of proportion and a
capacity for restraint. "Better is he that ruleth his spirit
than he that taketh a city." But a political leader must
do both.

Had he expected the Liberal leadership, the close of the
war and almost the end of Laurier should have found the
member for Prince ready for action or advice. But
there is no record that, at this time, his counsels were
sought by the Liberal party, or that he thrust himself into
the limelight. Three months after the Armistice, Laurier
was dead. Even then King was not mentioned as his
successor. Four months later he was chosen, when not
even he quite understood how it was done. King did
nothing to reform his party along new lines, or publicly to
state what he considered its reasonable position to be as
between the Union party and the Agrarians. A broad
manifesto from the new leader at such a time would have
been useful. Never had a political leader in Canada such
a duty of broad revision within his party. King neglected

HON. WM. LYON MACKENZIE KING 61

the opportunity. The Toronto Globe realizes what a
squeezed lemon the Liberal party has become between the
other two groups and calls for a working alliance between
the Liberals and Agrarians to upset the Government. The
Mail and Empire paternally points out that it is the duty of
Liberals to enlist, Quebec included, under the hegemony of
the party which has already incorporated Liberals and is
ready to save that party from obliteration by the free-
trade group.

Beneath the conventional assurance displayed in each
of these organs of public opinion one detects an under-
current of uneasiness, by no means mitigated by the farmer
victory for the Commons in Medicine Hat, which the
Globe construed as a triumph on parade, and the Agrarian
turnover in Alberta which the Mail and Empire with all its
sturdy protestations cannot honestly interpret as other
than a calamity. Each of the historic parties feels itself
confronted by a new sort of menace comparable to nothing
in the history of Canadian politics. Two parties which
ten years ago were in opposition are now flung together by
the fear of a common danger and refuse to admit it. The
Globe's hope is that Farmerism will become the new Liberal-
ism. The Globe is right. But the captains may not be of
The Globe's choosing and the planks in its platform are not
those which The Globe in its days of sanity would have
accepted for the good of the people. It is the intention of
Farmerism to absorb all there is of Liberalism. Mackenzie
King knows it. He knows that the Liberals will suffer
more than the Government from the plough movement.
Yet he is invited by T}ie Globe to try the trick of the bird
swallowing the snake !

The essence of Liberalism has always been liberation ;
emancipation. But the farmers are out to smite all the
shackles from all of us. They intend to stop short only
of Bolshevism. An ex-Cabinet Minister of Alberta pre-
dicts that the farmers will sweep the country at the next

62 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

election and steer it down the rapids of economic ruin.
He cites Drury and Co. as examples of a certain sort of
cunning whereby they did not at first show their real hand,
in order to get people to feel that Agrarianism is not half
so bad as painted and then — the broadening out into the
People's party. The farmers are not notorious for sheer
cunning ; neither for stupidity. They are naturally
hesitant about being as radical in office as they were on
the stump. As an economic group they are no different
from the old Free Trade Liberals, except that they seek
to govern as a class on behalf of that particular group.
Meanwhile the nation more or less opposed to farmerism
is disintegrating itself into more groups. Labour is out
for a species of self-determination ; a Labour Party. A
veteran Liberal statesman recently asked me this question :

"Suppose that in industrial centres like Montreal,
Toronto, Hamilton and Winnipeg, Labour puts a candidate
into every constituency ; that in smaller factory centres
which dominate essentially rural ridings they do the same.
In each of these more or less labour-dominated fields suppose
we have the possible four candidates. Is the Labour-
Unionist in doubt over his own candidate going to vote
Liberal, Liberal-Conservative, or Farmer ?"

"As a man of long experience in elections — suppose
you answer that ?" I suggested.

He did not, but went on :

"I know what I should say to a labour elector under
such circumstances. I should say to him • 'You had
better not touch the farmer candidate with a ten-foot pole
because — the farmer wants dear food and you want cheap
food ; he wants long hours and you want short hours ; he
wants imported manufactures and you want employment
in your home town ; he wants free trade and you depend
upon a measure of protection.' '

Nobody has ever more pithily stated the case. There is
no basic mutualitv between the farm and the labour

HON. WM. LYON MACKENZIE KING 63

union. The farmer is as much a capitalist as he is a
labourer.

I asked the Liberal statesman bluntly :

"Don't you think that in order to avoid political
devastation by splitting the vote into three opposition
groups each fighting the other, it is the immediate business
of the two historic parties to unite against all parties of
experiment, especially against the emancipating farmer ?"

He gave this evasive but shrewd reply :

"I am a lifelong Liberal. I have been in the habit of
reading newspapers on both sides of politics. I am now
driven to take the Conservative organ for my daily political
food."

I commend that answer to Hon. Mackenzie King. If
the Liberal leader is now as anxious to serve the nation of
his birth as he was when he twice refused large salaries and
comparative ease for the sake of continuing to do Canada's
work, would it be high treason either to himself or to his
party to call a Liberal convention out of which he would
father a resolution of federation of historic parties based
upon such a compromise as Macdonald created in the
federation of provinces ?

The answer is obvious : ' ' Fantastic ! Absurd ! Impos-
sible !"

Mackenzie King will put up a smoke screen to hide the
defection of the West from historic Liberalism. He will
insist that the Liberals want only a reasonable tariff for
revenue while the Government want protection — when
Heaven knows each of them wants substantially the same
thing in opposition to the farmer who wants everything.
He will point with confident pride to the solid Liberal bloc
Quebec, when he knows Quebec is dominated by Lapointe
who can demand from him just what he wants as the price
of Quebec's solidarity ; and he knows equally well that
Quebec is as much opposed to continentalism as the
Liberal-Conservative Government can ever be. The man

64 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

who wears the mantle of Laurier without his Orphean
magic cannot lead Quebec.

However, Mackenzie King was put where he is to lead,
and he intends to keep on doing it. If he can regulate
a few of his enthusiasms and so adjust his personality as to
make Liberalism as led by him powerful enough to be the
dog that wags the Agrarian tail, he should be set down as
one of the most remarkable men in the history of Canadian
politics. He legitimately chuckles over Quebec. One can
fancy him matching that race-group against the Agrarian
bloc and the Government industrial centres group, and
saying to himself :

' ' Labour may lop a few from the Government ; Michael
Clark a few from the farmers — enough to make my friend
Mr. Crerar a most excellent colleague in my Coalition.
Excellent fellow, Crerar !"

A low-tariff group, of whom 75 per cent, are Quebeckers,
amalgamated with a no-tariff group who are near-Continen-
talists, is at least entitled to serious regard as a fantastic
experiment in administration. But we may trust Hon.
Mackenzie King to simulate a vast moving-picture smile
of high benevolence and great sagacity as he contemplates
such a fantasia — with himself as the chief tight-rope per-
former and Niagara roaring below.

NUMBER ONE HARD
HON. T. A. CRERAR

SOME Frank Norris such as wrote "The Pit" and "The
Octopus" should arise in Canada and write a Wheat-
Politics novel about T. A. Crerar. This man's photograph
was once published squatting Big-Chief-wise in the front
row of 300 farmers on a raid to Ottawa — I think early in
the war about prices. It was a second to the last delegation
which the farmers intend to send to Ottawa. The next
one was in 1918, when the farmers went to protest against
conscription. If you ask T. A. Crerar to-day, he will
predict that in days not far to come manufacturers will
petition a farmer government in Ottawa. Because the
farmers in the West regard Crerar as almost a geological
process, which sometimes results in a volcano.

Crerar was projected into, public affairs by 50-cent
wheat, monopolistic elevator companies, discriminating
railways and protected manufacturers ; all of which, while
he was still a young man who should have been going to
dances and arguing about the genesis of sin, he concluded
were into a dark conspiracy to make a downtrodden helot
of the prairie farmer. To-day Crerar is at the apex of a
movement. He embodies the politically and commercially
organized campaign of the biggest interest in Canada
against all other merely "big" interests. He is willing to
let himself be talked about as the next Premier of indus-
trial and agricultural Canada on behalf of all the farmers
whom he can persuade to elect him a majority minority
in the next Parliament. And the prospect does not even

65 B

66 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

dazzle him, or awe his colleagues of the coonskin coats and
the truculent whiskers.

Crerar began responsible life as a farm boy in Manitoba,
taught school, and managed a small elevator company ; he
became President of the United Grain Growers and of the
Canadian Council of Agriculture — and the next obvious
thing to say is that he entered politics as Minister of Agri-
culture in the Union Government. But T. A. Crerar had
been in politics a long while before that, though he had
never even run for Parliament or legislature. Unusual,
unprofessional politics. Hear what the present Secretary
of the Canadian Council of Agriculture has to say about
the parliaments of the Grain-Growers in 1916 :

"Their annual conventions are parliaments of the Middle Western
Provinces. Resolutions and recommendations of all sorts and descrip-
tion are debated and decided upon. Questions of far-reaching influence,
socially and morally, have their beginning, so far as Western Canada is
concerned, in the Grain Growers' Conventions. Records of these
Associations show that besides recommending the establishment of
co-operative elevators, co-operative banks, co-operative dairies, free
trade, single tax and a dozen other economics reform, the Grain Growers
in convention fathered Prohibition long before it was adopted, advised
and urged woman suffrage many years before that measure was gener-
ally favoured, and were the first sponsors of the idea of direct legislation.
The Grain Growers' Association and their annual conventions are the
source and inspiration of all the commercial activities, and social and
political reforms with which one finds the name of Grain Grower con-
nected so often in Western Canada !"

This is the reforming political school that has trained
the man now openly discussed as the next Premier of
Canada. And for the benefit of any Canadian Norris who
dreams of writing a problem novel about Crerar, it may be
said that he is the most drab and unpicturesque personality
that ever stood in line for any such office in this country.
In the triangle of leaders at Ottawa he is the angle of
lowest personal, though by no means lowest human, interest.
Meighen is impressive ; King brilliant. Crerar — is busi-
ness. He would be a hard nut for a novelist to crack. A

HON. T. A. CRERAR 67

man like Smillie impresses the imagination. Crerar, who
is to the Canadian farmer what Smillie was to the British
miner, invites only judgment. /

The first time I met Crerar — at lunch in a small eastern
club — he impressed me as a man enormously capable in
business, tersely direct in his judgments, somewhat satirical
and inordinately sensitive. He seemed wary, almost
cryptic in his remarks. Recently sworn in as Unionist
Minister of Agriculture, he had turned his back on Winni-
peg, where he was a sort of agrarian king, and taken his first
dip into the cynical waters of Ottawa, where he was but one
of a Ministerial group some of whom were abler and more
interesting than himself. He had not yet appeared in
Parliament. He dreaded the ordeal. He had no know-
ledge of just to what programme he would be expected to
adhere, except the general one of winning the war. He
had little enthusiasm for the Premier, probably less for
most of his colleagues. So far as he had been able to survey
Ottawa, he considered it an administrative mess. His
direct ways of doing business were menaced by a sense of
muddle and officialdom. He missed the breezy, open
ways of "the Peg" and the sensation of being general
manager of the biggest commercial concern west of the
lakes, the Grain Growers' Grain Co. Crerar could not
business-manage Ottawa. When he opened his Agriculture
door he saw no box cars trailing in from the elevator pyra-
mids on the skyline ; he smelled no wheat ; he saw no
"horny-handed" farmers writing checks to cover their
speculative investments in grain which they had not yet
sown. No wheat-mining comrade motoring in from the
plains came to thrust his boots up on the general manager's
desk and say, "Believe me, Tom, I paid thirteen-ninety for
those protected articles. What a shame !"

Crerar complained of indigestion. I think his nerves
were on edge. I asked him if he expected to co-relate
Agriculture with Food Control and Trade and Commerce.

68 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

"Oh, I suppose so," he said wearily. "Nobody in
Union Government knows what he will do yet. I don't
like Ottawa. Its whole atmosphere is foreign to me."

He seemed almost contemptuous. He had made the
patriotic plunge in order to put his particular brand of
radical Liberalism at the service of a Tory-Unionist Govern-
ment. He did not like it. Of all the Liberals who entered
the Union Cabinet he was the sworn Radical. Both Calder
and Sifton were machine men from governments that still
had Liberal labels on their luggage. Crerar represented
the great inter-prairie group of no compromise and of
economic enmity to the Tories. He was rather looking
for trouble ; thinking rather hard of how he could get
through with such an uncomfortable job, do it well and get
back uncontaminated to his own dear land of the wheat
and his fine office in the most handsome suite of offices in
the Grain Exchange at Winnipeg. The Ottawa that he
hated was the Capital that old line politicians had created.
He was looking forward to some Ottawa of the future which
like Canberra, the new dream Capital of Australia, might
be vacuum-cleaned and disinfected of all the old partisan
microbes.

Crerar made his success in a country where the visible
signs of getting on in the world are a bigger factor than
anywhere else in Canada. The prairies are mysterious
and sublime. The West is plain big business. Crerar
represents the West rather than the prairies. He is tem-
peramentally a man of Ontario, where he was born ; solidly
businesslike and persistent. He glorifies hard work. And
he went West at a time when the law of hard work was just
coming to replace the old-timer's creed of hanging on and
waiting for something — usually a railway — to turn up.
He came up with the farmer of 60-cent wheat in a part of
the country where everything that the farmer had to buy
in order to produce that kind of wheat was high in cost.
Cheap wheat and dear wherewithals have been to T. A.

HON. T. A. CRERAR 69

Crerar and his kind Number One Hard experience. His
axioms began with the plough made under a high tariff.
His code of ethics was evolved from the self-binder, rail-
roaded the long haul by systems that thrive on the tariff.
His community religion — not his personal, which one
believes has been pretty devoutly established — is embodied
in the emotions of the skyline elevator following the trail of
the steel and the twist of the box car.

One cannot mention these rudimentary western things
without a species of enthusiasm for the Westerner, and a
consequent precarious sympathy with the views of Mr.
Crerar. Transplant yourself even for a year, as the writer
did twenty years ago, to the far northwest, and you begin
in spite of all your previously inrooted sentiments, to share
the beliefs and talk the language that lie at the basis of
even so arrogant an organization as the Grain Growers'
Association and so inordinate an oligarchy as the Canadian
Council of Agriculture. A man cannot fight the paralyzing
combination of drouth, wet, early frost, rust, weevil,
grasshoppers, eastern manufacturers, high tariffs, cen-
tralized banks and bankrupt octopean railways in the pro-
duction of under-dollar wheat, without losing much of his
faith in the smug laws of economy laid down by men who
buy and sell close to the centres of production.

Now begins the work of the novelist, making precis
notes for his Crerar masterpiece ; investigating the prairie
farm of 1900, anywhere between the main line and the
skyline. For the sake of space we copy his notes, hastily
sketched :

Low hill — General aspect, poplar bluffs, billowy landscape —
Log and mudchink shack ; pole and sod roof — stable and shed
ditto — Three or four cattle and lashions of grass — Broncho team
and new high-painted wagon — No family — Dash churn — Lucky
to have a wife — Some hens — Sod-breaking plough, long snout,
breaks odd fields twixt bluffs — Coal-black loam, strong — Wheat
and oats, wonderful early growth — Drouth first year — Second
year, pole fences, more fields, and wet season — More crops but

70 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

half spoiled by wet — Sacks on trail to cars, toiling across prairie
to elevator — Smudge of train, bit of a town and a tank — No cars
to load grain — Must sell to elevator — Monopoly — Low price —
Grading wheat to No. 2 Northern — 55 cents, used to be 40 — Lien
note to pay on wagon and binder — Goes to indignation meeting —
Lots of that — Farmer revolutionaries — Want Gov't. to pass
acts compelling Rys. to supply farmers cars to break low-price
monoply of elevators — Act passed, but roads in league with eleva-
tors— Same old trouble — Rise of radical leaders — Organization of
farmers into group to fight interests — Helots on prairies — Helpless
unless organized — Only partial relief from Gov't. — Two new pro-
vinces in 1905 — Grits make great splash, promising Utopia along
with newer trunk lines and big towns, etc. — Farmer grins, goes on
organizing, in each province association of grain growers (G.G.) —
Every few towns some fiery evangel — Great on conventions,
regular convenanters, old style — Schools of debate and Utopian
legislation — Gov'ts. wear goggles and organize elections — Farmer
organizes group ideas, to oppose old line politics — Say Eastern old
parties effete in West — Townsmen league with farmers, common
interest ; low price wheat means lean purchases and laggard towns
— By this time young man Crerar in Wpg., taken from managing
small elevator company to be general manager G.G. Grain Co. —
Co-op, movement develops in all associations, for buying and
selling — G.G.G. Co. give farmer equal rights with city man in
speculation on what farmer grows — Horn into Grain Exchange,
little office — Under Crerar Co. grows to much the biggest corpora-
tion in Exchange ; whole ground floor offices of G.G.G. Co. which
as commercial organization focuses the buying and selling end of
whole agrarian movement — Head of this, naturally chief of move-
ment— All remedial and legislative programmes merged in econo-
mics of G.G.G. Co. — Crerar wiry, quiet executive, now fuse plug
to a real agrarian party with a programme which through Canadian
Council of Agriculture, members from all over Canada, constitutes
itself a parliament of farmers telling old parties to go to the devil —
Liberal gov'ts in prairie province mere annexes of new radical
group which is now bigger nationalist force than Quebec ever was,
ready to march upon Ottawa

On this basis the novelist builds his political fabric of
Crerar, who began life as a Laurier Liberal, became a Free
Trader of the Michael Clark school, and ten years ago gave
symptoms of pushing the economic side of the agrarian

HON. T. A. CRERAR 71

movement to a point where it aimed to become the new
Liberalism of the prairies. He was the business head of a
revolutionary movement of which other men became the
ardent, flaming crusaders, both in and out of Ottawa.
Crerar calmly evolved his practical evangelism out of the
ledger of exports and imports. Nothing excited him so
deeply as comparative statistics. He never trusted to
the moral or emotional side of the case. His crusade was
in the national ledger. His church was the elevator ; his
economic Bible the Grain Growers' Guide.

Since 1914 or thereabouts this man has kept his balance
at the head of a movement that split again and again into
local factions only to come together again in the head
offices of the Grain Growers' Grain Co. and the Canadian
Council of Agriculture. He represented multi-millions of
investment in land, agriculture, co-operative commercial
enterprises and speculation. On the ground floor of the
Grain Exchange he was at the head of the greatest organi-
zation in the world speculating in visible supply wheat.
The grain that Crerar's cohorts bought and sold was either
just sown, or heading out, or being threshed, or it was
crawling to Winnipeg in miles of box cars on its way to
Fort William. In wheat he put his trust ; in railways and
steamships never ; in centralized banks and eastern manu-
facturers not at all ; in old parties at Ottawa still less —
if possible.

Crerarism was becoming power to act. Behind Crerar
was a sullen but optimistic reformation of such varied
emotional character that none but a quiet, steady man
could have controlled it in Winnipeg. The novelist's
prairie farm was now a power in the land. It was Agrarian-
ism ; that had bolted like an ostrich both old parties in the
West, and now offered a new one supposed to contain as a
new National Policy a general and itemized contradiction
of the old N.P. of 1878 — The National Progressive Party.
No economic crusade had ever been so rapid, gigantic

72 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

and revolutionary. Trades unionism had taken decades
to make head where the Agrarian movement took years.
The One Big Union of the Reds, anarching against all
Government as it is, merely applied the principle of direct
actioij which the farmers had taught them by suggestion
in the unofficial parliaments of the prairie. The Agrarian
is himself a One-Big-Unionist. His concern is not with
wages and hours, but with exports, imports and elections.
The Agrarian will not strike. Crerar knows that. He
must not tie up communities and stop trade. He must
work through Parliament. His aim is to establish farmer-
ism as the basis of the nation. His creed is, that no matter
what use we make of raw material, cheap power, manufac-
turing experience and capital, Canada's greatest revenue and
export production must be in the farm ; and that therefore
national legislation must gravitate about the farmer's garage.
This thing came to a head in a part of the country which
contains less than one-sixth of Canada's total population,
and more than half of them Canadians only by immigra-
tion. The one biggest man in the whole movement,
besides Mr. Crerar, the man who practically elected the
new farmer Premier of Alberta by appointment, is an
American born. H. W. Wood, the Czar of Alberta, came
as a farmer in search of cheaper land from the Western
vStates. He is a good citizen, and as much entitled to play
strong-arm in our politics as any native Canadian is to
enter the Cabinet of the United States. But as a rule a
free people resent men from other countries agitating for
revolution on behalf of an original small minority in a part
of the country where industrialism can never become more
than a sideshow in the business of production. A people
of national consciousness do not relish the idea of a minority
group organized to the last man and the last acre, trying to
organize a nation-wide group in provinces where the factory
and the mine and the fishery are at least as important as
the farm.

HON T. A. CRERAR 73

The whole plan smacks too much of engineering. It is
a case of complete, almost Teutonic, organization mas-
querading as a sort of democracy, but in reality a con-
trolled tyranny whose aim so far as at present defined, is
to establish group government under a camouflage of the
National Progressive Party, and by means of the power so
obtained or by alliances with some other group, to upset
the whole economic structure which it has taken fifty years
to build up. No true citizen will object to farmers in Par-
liament and many of them. None but a slave will consent
to a Parliament dominated by any group, whether farmers,
manufacturers, lawyers or labourites. Democracy means
free government on behalf of the people ; not on behalf of
a great group which arrogates by organized majorities the
right to represent the people. Agrarianism is not a nation-
wide interest. Quebec has more to hope from the Govern-
ment now in power than from the farmers. Ontario cannot
elect a clear working majority of farmers. It is the West
and the West only, which has become Agrarianism rampant.
And according to the new officialdom of the West the
farmer must save us all. Elect him to Administration and
he will open the golden gates of real prosperity by estab-
lishing a maximum of free trade, on the assumption that
our present protective investment in great railways (two
of them bankrupt), in banks, industries and speculative
land is all wrong.

The prospect glitters. Mr. Crerar is not dazzled. He
sees with a calm and collective gaze into the future. He
contemplates with profound elation the scrapping of our
present system built by experience, and the setting up of
another which makes theories a substitute. Nothing is
difficult to a revolutionist. Crerar's success in building
Agrarian grand opera is a mere augury in his mind to
still greater success in rebuilding a nation, which he thinks
is the same thing because the farmer is the nation ; and a
nation is the easiest thing in the world to revolutionize so

74 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

long as you do not obliterate its institutions. We are not
expected to abolish Commons, or Cabinets, or even the
poor old Senate — until further notice. Mr. Crerar may
need them all in his business. "For this relief much
thanks !" Mr. Crerar is not to be nicknamed Cromwell.

The repeal of the Underwood Tariff and the Agrarian
majority in Medicine Hat gave him great joy. The pros-
pect for a farmer victory in the general election is to him
almost certain by some form of coalition — perhaps with the
Liberals ; possibly with Labourites. In 1920 a man very
close to Crerar estimated a return of 75 National Pro-
gressives in a total of 235 had the election been held at
that time. Since then farmer prospects have bulled on the
market. Alberta has gone Agrarian, following Medicine
Hat. Organization has been extended. The old Liberal-
ism on the prairies has been absorbed. Dafoe, of the Free
Press, has swung into line with Crerar. There is prospect
of the Government winning some seats in the West, as
there is of the Liberals fielding candidates who will not be
elected. Ontario is already a loose-jointed but effective
part of the movement. Business is not good. A time of
trade depression has always been a good time for a change
of government, even along orthodox lines. The present
economic aftermath of destructive war and a large element
of I- Won't- Work labour along with high wages no matter
what else falls, must look to Crerar like a good time to
make us all believe that we shall all get through to Canaan
if we follow his Ark of the Covenant. He is able to assure
us of cheap clothes and furniture and machinery, because
the farmer needs these things in the production of food,
which must not become too cheap or the advantage will be
lost. What is to become of our industries is not clearly
stated ; but if living is to be so cheap we shall probably not
need employment except on the farms ; though under free
trade we are told that industry, free to flow, is sure to
locate itself at the point of advantage in material, power,

HON. T. A. CRERAR 75

transportation, and getting to market. In fact some free
traders blithely tell us that once you get rid of tariffs, living
becomes so cheap that people naturally flock to the free
trade country, and industry is bound to follow the people ;
therefore free trade will give us factories as we need them.

There is no end of the mirage for your head and morass
for your feet once you begin to consider the possibilities of
a revolution. We had somewhat the same experience forty
odd years ago in the forests of smokestacks supposed to
spring up in the wake of the National Policy. It took
a long while and much hard patient work to get those
smokestacks. Now we have got them as part of our
national equipment, along with great water powers and
long-haul railways and centralized banks and a number of
trusts and an undeniable number of dear manufactures
under a tariff — and Mr. Crerar purposes to abolish the
whole thing, to begin all over again as it was in the begin-
ning, except that even then if the farmer had lost his market
town on Saturday he would have been in a very bad way
for his Sunday clothes.

In short, Crerar proposes one more revolution, whether
by one fell swoop or by a slow process of getting us used to
here a little and there a little more — we do not know yet.
What we do know is that he proposes to govern this country
by a huge economic group that used to go to Ottawa as
delegations ; that in his opinion the real Capital of Canada
is not economically Ottawa, but the ground floor of the
Grain Exchange Building in Winnipeg.

We may not all have been reared on the farm, but be
it known to all of us, our natural gravitation is back to the
land.

Not many years ago also it was said that one large
nation would Boss the world ; later that Soviets would do
it. Both the Boss nation and the Soviets seem to be re-
considering the contract. The world is a perversely com-
plicated technicality.

76 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

Meanwhile Crerar smiles when the Premier (by appoint-
ment) calls the Agrarians "a dilapidated annex" to the
Liberals. He thinks he knows better. He smiles even
more sarcastically when he sees Mackenzie. King chortle
over that amusing fiction. He may have some use for
King. If the Liberal leader will be reasonable he may
permit him to merge his party with the Agrarians. If not
he may threaten to rob him of Mr. Lapointe and Quebec,
and let him see how he will like that.

Last winter I met Crerar in a Toronto hotel. He had
just been down east proclaiming for United Farmers in
the Maritimes. An ardent Crerarite who spends his life
watching Ottawa closely said as the leader came up :

"Tom, your 'one best bet is to make an alliance with
Lapointe. That combination could upset any other con-
federacy in Parliament."

Crerar smiled — warmly. He said nothing. At lunch
no doubt he discussed this with his supporter. The old
ace of Quebec ! When will that home of race Nationalism
ever get into the hand of cards held by Crerar who would
inundate Quebec with reciprocity ? Perhaps one E. C.
Drury can tell. He is talked about as the man whom
Crerar may call to the Premiership in a Cabinet of fourteen
Ministers of Agriculture and one Minister of Justice.

THE PREMIER WHO MOWED FENCE-CORNERS

HON. E. C. DRURY
MOWING FENCE-CORNERS.

A zig-zag old rack with its ivies and moss,

Just fifty-odd panels or so ;
A wheat-field, a scythe and a boy his own bose ;

He had the fence-corners to mow.

He slivered the whetstone clear out to the tip
Of his snake-handled, snubnosed old blade ;

And he swung his straw hat with a sweep and a rip
With the sun ninety-four in the shade.

He thought of the water-jug cool as a stone

Right under a burdock's green palm,
By the leg of a fence-corner hickory half-grown,

Where the breeze always blew in a calm.

But the boss saw him loafing clear over the corn,

The next the boy heard was a shout ;
And he wished for a moment he never was born

To mow all those fence-corners out.

Past the elder-bush blow it's five corners to mow,

To get to that burdock's green lug —
So he put on a spurt till the sweat blacked his shirt,

And he mowed his way in to the jug.

What cared the boy then for the boss in the corn

With a beaded brown jug at his feet,
While he pulled out the corn-cob as glad he was born

As the bobolink there in the wheat ?

He unbuttoned his shirt and got on the top rail,

He hung his straw hat on the stake,
And he smiled to the hickory leaves' rustling tale,

As he gazed at that berry-bush brake.

' 77

78 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

Till chuck ! went the scythe on a piece of old rail

That lifted clear out of its bunk ;
And he said what he never had read in a tale,

To that innocent, rotten old chunk.

And then he heard something that never was sung,

That no bobolink could have said,
That never was rendered by pen or by tongue ;

But it made his heart thump in his head,

As he let the scythe drop and he picked up the chunk,
And sneaked up as soft as a breeze.

And poked at the noise in that rotten rail's bunk
Till out came a bumble of bees.

Oh ! the jug it was cool and the berries were red,
And sweet was the bobolink's strain ;

But bumble-bee cups in a rotten rail's bed
Make a jug and a bobolink vain.

By noon at the nest there was only one bee,

And only one berry to pick,
And only one drink in the jug at the tree :

But that boy was as full as a tick.

They have torn the old zig-zag clear out of its snake,
And the bushes have gone up in fire;

The hickory stands but it's only a stake
To hold up a fiddle of wire.

The wires are strung tight for the fiddle is new,
And straight as a beam .of the sun :

The plough slides along it, the wind whistles through.
And the fence-corner blue-grass is done.

The old mossy rails and green ivies are gone

With fifty grass crooks in a row —
But the bobolink sits on the wire and sings on —

The music he sang long ago.

And now 'mid the jostle and rush of the street,
That boy has his dreams in the day,

When he sits on the rail 'twixt the clover and wheat,
And mows out the fence-corner hay.

HON. E. C. DRURY 79

WHENEVER E. C. Drury whetted a scythe mowing fence
corners he was, so far as can be reasonably surmised,
thinking about the tariff and the waters of the Red Sea
that swallowed up Pharaoh. It may be a coincidence,but
it seems like fate, that he was born in the same year as the
National Policy ; the indignity of which was so great
that he vowed to spend his life living it down. He went
to sleep with blue books and the Bible under his pillow.
He gave way to both. He has never gone back on either.
The iniquity of a tariff to him was part of the moral law.
The more he exhorted at revival meetings and local-
preached and led class-meetings, the more deeply he was
convinced that tariff -Tories are in constant need of economic
salvation. At threshing bees I can fancy this broad-faced,
dreamy-eyed, large-mouthed young "Reformer" who
never was born to take life mentally easy, saying to him-
self as he shoved the stack straw past his boots, that the
old boys talking so hard about elections knew nothing
about economics ; and he wished to heaven that barn
was all threshed out, so that he could get back home to
read some more tariff statistics.

The Drury farm, hewn from the bush by his grand-
father, cost the young man nothing but taxes and upkeep.
It gave him leisure in which to study the ills of farming.
What a blessing all farmers have not leisure ! Travelling
up and down that peninsula between Huron and Erie,
constantly at some sort of "Meeting," Drury could see
"Hard Times " on almost every telegraph pole. The
average farmer had a small lot, a heavy mortgage and a
large family ; scrub cattle, thin horses and poor hogs. No
doubt Drury read, when it came out, that amazing pamphlet
of Goldwin Smith — Canada and the Canadian Question, in
which the writer alleged that the Canadian farmer sold the
best he produced and ate the culls. Well, with hogs at
$3 per cwt., oats 20 cents a bushel, hay $7 a ton, and wheat
under a dollar, from stumpy little fields — the farmer in
Drury's youth did well to escape cannibalism.

80 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

To know Drury, one must understand the oddly in-
teresting epoch and region in which he came up. The
men with whose sous he went to the village school were
manufacturers first, farmers second. Their raw material
was the hardwood bush ; their factory the saw mill ; their
common carrier the Yankee schooner. In my own bush
days a few counties further down in that same peninsula,
I recall heaps of white oak slabs in the forest which I was
told were the remains of the timber-men who had gone
through buying and cutting out the oaks for square timber
that floated away in rafts, probably to build tramp steamers
in England. The bush farmer hired to wield the broad-
axe on that oak was as much an industrialist as any moulder
in a foundry. He would have fought with his naked fists
any agitator who proposed to interfere with that wages
revenue.

After the oak was gone came the elm buyers, shrewd
Americans who paid as much for a thousand feet of prime
swamp elm as the pork buyer twenty miles away paid for
a cwt. of dead hog. Mr. Drury must have known some-
thing about those friendly but niggardly Yankee dollars
that saved many a bush farmer from being sold for taxes.
He may have seen bolt mills go up and young men betwixt
haying and harvest swagger down to the docks to get 25
cents an hour loading elm bolts into the three-mast schoo-
ners. He probably saw stave mills arise in which hundreds
of youths got employment while their fathers at home
fought stumps, wire worms, drought and the devil to get
puny crops at small prices. He saw the wagon-works and
the fanning mill factory and the reaper industry come up
out of these timber products. While he was a youth the
farmers were the first promoters of bigger towns, because
the big town meant more jobs for the young men whose
father's acres were too few for the families, and bigger
markets close at hand for perishable products. The farmers
of that day would have tarred and feathered any revolu-

HON. E. C. DRURY 81

tionist who came preaching that a good market town was
a wicked conspiracy of bourgeoisie and should become a
deserted village.

Yankee money and Canadian industries were the
economics of Drury's boyhood. If he was as good a Cana-
dian then as he is now he must have had more faith in the
Canadian factory than he had in the American paymaster,
or sometimes even in the Ontario farm. There never was a
bush farmer who would not have voted for a tariff that
increased the price of timber for the saw-mill.

By the time Drury was old enough to consider being a
candidate for Parliament, heaps of sawdust marked the
grave of many a vanished saw mill. Young'men^who could
not get work in the near-by town drifted to High School, to
college, to law and medicine and the pulpit ; they went
to the big cities across the border and got high wages ; to
the Canadian West and got cheap land. The counties of
Western Ontario began to decrease in man wealth as they
increased in the wealth of agricultural industry. The
schools that used to have boys sitting on the woodpile by
the box stove shrank to about four scholars in a class.
Congregations dwindled. Little towns lost their mills
and began to feel like Goldsmith's Deserted Village. Then
came the age of farm machinery, when the big towns had
more overalls than the farms, and every good farm began
to be a sort of factory.

All this was meat and drink to E- C. Drury, who came
to voting age with the solemn conviction that though the
fathers had worked hard, the sons were not prosperous.
They paid too much for what they had to buy and got too
little for what they had to sell ; a fate which seems to over-
take most of us in varying degree. With stagnant local
towns the markets for perishable products declined. In
the open markets of the world, reached by long railway
and steamship hauls, the Canadian farmer's staple products
were in competition with nations of cheap labour. Across

82 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

the lake a nation of twelve times our population was
retaliating against our protective tariffs by duties on
Canadian grain, cattle and hogs. The Tory party and the
Canadian Pacific and the Bank of Montreal and the Cana-
dian Manufacturers' Association were becoming British
at the expense of the Canadian farmer. At the back of all
the gods of things as they are and ought not to be, stood
the damnable, desolating tariff that fattened the town and
starved the farmer in order to bloat the banks and the
manufacturer and the railways — under the cloak of patriot-
ism ! Heaven deliver us ! Was it not a Tory manufac-
turer of stoves who said in Toronto that he would build a
tariff "as high as Haman's gallows ?" Was it not a Tory
President of the C.P.R. who said he would have a tariff as
high as a Chinese wall to keep out the Yankees ? Was it
not the President of a great Canadian bank who deserted
the Liberal party when it sought to enact a measure of
reciprocity ?

On all hands Mr. Drury could see the evidence of a
master conspiracy against the farmer, who was to become
the helot of civilization. He could see it in his own barn
as he reckoned the cost of his machinery, and over against
that the price of what he had in the bins of his granary
and on the hoof outside. That thousands of farmers voted
and talked Conservative proved the astonishing power of
heredity. That all farmers did not become Liberals and
make the Liberal party a solid rural party proved that
even a man's depleted pocket cannot compete with the
traditions of his family. Drury looked to Laurier to
emancipate the farmer. In vain. Laurier created more
farmers, thousands of them in the West ; but he only
enslaved them with the voters' lists ; the very party over
which Drury had almost wept with joy when at the age of
eighteen he had felt them like the armies of Israel sweeping
out the scoundrels of the National Policy.

HON. E. G. DRURY 83

Thus his hope was no longer in Laurier, who knew
nothing about the farmer, nor dreamed that in the very
West which he had put on the political map with his pros-
perity of imported people and borrowed money, there was
arising a race that would repudiate him and his. Drury
had a weather eye on the West. There were farms in
Simcoe county now worked by old men whose sons had
gone to that Promised Land. In the constant drift of the
hired man and the farmer's son to the town and the city
for shorter hours, higher wages and more amusement, he
saw the fluidity of labour, the first evidence that there was
some common ground between the farmer and the labour
class. Working in his own fields, driving his own teams,
operating his own machinery, this capitalistic labour-
unionist of the soil said to himself that the farmers of
Canada were entitled not merely to representation in
Parliament, but to the organization of a class interest that
should take hold of the country's economic horns and turn
it on to the right road.

In the lonely furrow of the farm a man often thinks out
conclusions that are gloriously right in themselves, but in
the chequered and cynical experiences of men in office
tragically impossible. Mr. Drury was no stranger to
Ottawa. He bad been there on deputations ; and on
tariff commissions ; and each time he came back he had a
stronger determination to go there some day as the voice
of the more or less united farmer against the tariff that
had sterilized the Liberals.

Drury was a rural Liberal. He saw in the reciprocity
campaign of 1911 some glimmer of hope that Liberalism
might succeed without a revolution. The election settled
that. From then on to the war the philosopher of Crown
Hill bent himself to the deeper study of the one force that
now seemed to him to be left capable of breaking the nation's
bondage. He no longer had the fervent desire to see a new
town grow among the farms that he had when he was a

84

youth. Every bigger town, unless it had industries that
could widen the farmer's low-cost market, was a mitigated
menace. Every foundry and implement works and furni-
ture factory and boot industry making goods more or less
from imported material, considerably with imported labour,
and selling to the consumer at a normal price plus the duty,
roused in Mr. Drury as much hostility as a natively kind
and Christian character would permit.

And at last he saw the predicted slump begin to come
in the year 1913, when the boomster dodged the boomerang
of inflated and speculative values ; when east and west
the farmers, crimped by high railway rates and cost of
materials, machinery and labour, ceased to be the backbone
of Canadian buying.

And then the War.

Whatever may be traced to the normal development
of this Ontario Cincinnatus, it was the War which made
Drury. But for the war he would have bided his time to
be elected to Ottawa on a straight tariff issue. The war,
backed by the man's religion and his tariff theology, drove
him to the Premiership of Ontario.

There were times during the war when, if Mr. Drury was
as honest with himself as he is about government, he must
have reflected that the Canadian farmer was getting pretty
well paid back in part of one generation for the wrongs
and adversities suffered by generations ago. Pork at $20
per cwt., oats at $1.50 a bushel, wheat fixed by the Govern-
ment at $2.40 to keep it from bulling to more than $3 —
none of these could have been economically justified by
Mr. Drury except as an act of compensating Providence.
The farmer of all people as a class benefited most, when he
was driven to the worst labour hardship he ever had by the
terrific prices paid for war work, which robbed him of
hired help almost at any price. The higher the price and
the scarcer the help, the more the Government clamoured
for production. The Ontario farmer responded to the call

HON. E. C. DRURY 85

He was no more a patriot to do it than a man was to buy
Victory Bonds. He was simply a profitee (we leave off
the r).

And this was the first call of the war to which the
farmers as a class made a hearty response. No doubt
most farmers were better servants of the nation in the
furrow than in the trench. But the time came when they
had to leave the furrows. On top of the Government's
most frantic call for more production by the farmer came
the Military Service Act, which refused to exempt him.
The call to the plough-handle came before the election
of 1917. The call to the bayonet came afterwards
in ^a crisis unforeseen at the time of the election.
Drury himself had been defeated as a conscriptionist
Liberal candidate in 1917. No farmer could be in khaki
and overalls at the same time. There was no reason given
for the drastic change of face except the message from the
front that more men were urgently needed or the West
front was doomed. It was not even reckoned that a farmer
conscripted after seed-time in 1918 could not possibly be
of use in the trenches till long after the time when the fate
of the West front would have been settled anyway.

Hence the ire of the agriculturist, driven now to become
an agrarian. The Ontario farmer made no distinction
between the Unionist Government that had conscripted
the farmer, and the Ontario Conservative Government
which supported Ottawa. The farmer made up his mind
wherever possible to defeat both the old line candidates..

Premier Drury was the chief result. He never would
have been offered the post but for the cleavage caused by
the war. The U.F.O. were not unanimous, and Drury was
not anxious. He had his eye on Ottawa. But there was
nobody else who could unite the group with labour. Drury
had himself been the first president of the U.F.O. and
secretary of the Canadian Council of Agriculture ; he was
a thinker, something of a scholar, a futurist, and a good
deal of a radical ; and he could speak well.

86 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

He picked a Cabinet mainly of farmers. He occupied
more time drafting his Cabinet than most farmers take to
harvest a crop. He was in a hurry, but he wanted nobody
to suspect it. He said little ; / wisely. There was no
occasion. He had no mandate from the people. He
wanted sure-enough colleagues. The men he chose were all
novices. The old line critics watched him with affected
contempt. They said Agriculture and Labour never could
mix. Drury went along. No Cabinet had ever been so
prayerfully hand-picked. Labour must not get the idea
that it was merely being sopped for the support of twelve
men in a House majority of one. There must be con-
cession ; common aims understood, even ahead of experi-
ence, when there was as yet no common policy.

Mr. Drury had been only a few hours sworn Premier of
Ontario when he was summarily turned out — not, how-
ever, from Office. In company with a farmer author friend
who had been given the freedom of a certain small but
desirable Club and who wanted to show Mr. Drury one
place where he could have a quiet time of an evening,he
went to have dinner. As neither of the gentlemen was
known to the housekeeping department a member of the
Club — a well-known newspaperman — was asked to inquire
their identity. The result was that the Premier of Ontario
and his friend left the Club, without dinner.

The next day the newspaperman looked over the
shoulder of his editor-chief in office and said,

"Who is the important-looking man in the photograph ?"

The answer came, "Hon. E. C. Drury, Premier of
Ontario."

"Great Scott !" he said huskily, "that's the man I
turned out of the Club last night."

Drury had the sense of humour to regard the matter as
a joke on both the newspaperman and himself.

The opening of the new Legislature was a spectacle.
Dignitaries and judges, professors and generals stood

HON. E. C. DRURY 87

about the farmers — led by the farmer-in-chief, morning-
coated, carefully groomed, plainly nervous but sustained
by the dignity of it all. His voice was firm; his manner
that of a very circumspect bridegroom. The old smug
strut and case-hardened pomp of legislature inaugurals
was lacking. An undercurrent of deep sincerity stayed
many a tremorous hand. Drury was the least nervous of
all. I imagine that in the morning he had sung to himself
some good old fortifying hymn, like "Rock of Ages."

Since that day the Premier has learned that practical
politics is a game that taxes all a man's technique in Chris-
tianity. Autocratic Hydro and Mackenzie the loosening
octopus ; New Ontario preaching up the old plaint of
secession ; better roads and prodigal Mr. Biggs ; what to
do with Education that Cody had not started to do ; how
to stave off commissions on reform of the school system ;
the constant queues of moral reformers ; the new menace
of the movies and the censorship farce ; the timber stealers ;
disconcerting Dewart and redundant Ferguson ; returned
soldiers and khaki members ; the Reds and the plain
clothes men ; blustering Morrison, and the tyrannical
U.F.O.—

Until the Premier, plain, homespun gentleman that
he is, longed for Friday evening and the Crown Hill farm
and the quiet little church in the village, because one week
at his desk took more out of him than a month in overalls,
And then to relieve his surcharged soul he made that speech
at Milverton in which he boldly proclaimed that he was
going to head, not a mere group called the U.F.O., but a
People's Party. For this "broadening out" speech he got
clods thrown at him by Morrison, and Burnaby put rails
on the road to upset the Premier's buggy, and the Farmers'
Sun tried to change the wheels on his rig so that he would
not be able to get home. Worse than any the Onlooker,
that virile organ of no advertising and of the Meighen
Government, said :

88 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

"The U.F.O. chose this man and dragged him out of his rural
obscurity. In common gratitude he should have stuck to their colours.
He should have given fair warning of a change of heart, and indeed we
think he ought to have resigned. When a man joins a political party
he agrees to subordinate his ambitions and activities to the common
good of that party, and failing to do so honour demands that he should
leave it."

In spite of the fact that the Premier of Ontario twice
made an appointment by request from the writer of this
for the purpose of getting a statement for the press as to
what he meant to do about this whole business of ' ' broaden-
ing out," twice failed to keep the appointment and later
came out with the Milverton pronunciamento, we have
no hesitation in pointing out that :

Mr. Drury was not in rural obscurity. The U.F.O.
had no colours which Mr. Drury had not helped to paint,
for he was the first President *he U.F.O. ever had. He
had no change of heart, because when he made an unstable
coalition of the U.F. O. and the Labour party he entered
into a pact and covenant which the U.F.O. had never con-
sidered ; he had already "broadened out" to drive Labour
and Agriculture as a team and had pretty well succeeded
in doing it. Mr. Drury did not join a political party. The
U.F.O. was not a real party because it went into the election
of 1919 without a leader, and in order to get its platform
translated into party it had to have Mr. Drury or some-
body like him. And if Mr. Drury should resign from the
head of the two groups which he alone has made into the
semblance of a party, he would be recommended by Mr.
Crerar to let his guardian take him to a lunatic asylum.

Drury has done much better than his critics expected
he would do. He has been bold enough to keep Adam
Beck from being the unelected Premier of Ontario, which
is more than Sir William Hearst ever could do. He has
made Government cost more than it ever did, though it is
only reasonable bookkeeping to believe that part of the
cost was incurred by a Government over which he had no

HON. E. C. DRURY 89

control. He has begun to build public highways which
being originally a farmer's job should have been done well,
but up to the present has been on a smaller scale as bad a
case of wasting the public money as the railways of Canada
ever perpetrated. The cost of administration being a
matter of either experience or graft, it is probable that the
Coalition will cut down the cost when they get more ex-
perience. The Chippewa Canal is one glaring instance of
high labour cost which a Farmer Premier with Labour col-
leagues did not presume to regulate. If anybody knows
what a day's work is it should be the farmer ; but the
farmer in this case was not absolutely free to express his
opinions, because he depends upon Labour for his voting
majority in the House.

In the matter of referendum Mr. Drury has been an
advocate instead of a judge. He and his — notably the
church-ridden Mr. Raney, who does not even smoke — are
a dry lot. They wanted Ontario to be bone dry and there-
fore preferred to have the people vote either foolishly for
the iniquitous O.T.A. or fanatically for absolute prohibition.
Mr. Drury should have taken the spark plug out of his
Methodist car long enough to reflect that what keeps a
man contented is going to keep him from stirring up
trouble. If the Government of enlightened and moral
Ontario had brought in a measure to create a referendum
on the alternative of prohibition vs. effective government
control of reasonable liquors, it might have less cause to
be panicky over Bolshevism.

The legislation to exempt from taxation houses costing
less than a certain amount looks like a pretty straight play
for the Labour vote, and the propagation of a semi-Bol-
shevistic principle that unless checked somewhere will
exempt the many at the expense of the few.

But before Mr. Drury has the chance to be truly elected
by the people of Ontario to carry on his People's Party, he
hopes perhaps that he may have a chance to be called to

90 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

Ottawa. It is freely rumoured that Mr. Crerar has no
intention of taking the Premiership which the liberated
people of Canada are going to bestow upon him by virtue
of one more group-coalition. In which case he may invite
Mr. Drury, who has given a sparring exhibition of being a
Premier, to succeed him. Then we shall have the un-
democratic farce of an appointive Premier all over again —
for the third time in three years. And then — -well, we shud-
der to think what is going to become of Mr. Drury's hither-
to unimpeachable Christianity and of the economic welfare
of a country which has as much right to modern factories as
the bush farmer ever had to saw-mills.

EZEKIEL AT A LEDGER
RT. HON. SIR GEORGE FOSTER

SIR George Foster is a genius. The world forgives much to
geniuses, because it lives by them. Canada has tolerated
a great deal in Foster for the very good reason that no man
except Laurier has for so long a period without interruption
seemed so picturesquely necessary to our public affairs.

In his own temperamental way Sir George somewhat
compensates Canada for never having produced a Milton
or a Bach. One of his best speeches might be made into
blank verse or set to a fugue. He illuminates life. Decade
by decade he comes prancing down the vistas of our politics
with a vitality that is perfectly amazing. And when some
obituarist writes his epitaph, "Foster Mortuus Est," he
promptly rubs it out and writes, "Resurgam !"

The first allusion I ever heard made to Sir George
Foster was in 1889, on a Sunday School excursion when a
Grit lawyer superintendent spoke with admiring depreca-
tion of the then famous divorce case ; adding, as might
be expected of a righteous Grit, that it was a pity so eminent
an advocate of prohibition should have so compromised,
perhaps ruined, his political career.

Well, the compromise has lasted a long time and the
ruin seems to be long overdue. Public sentiment over
both temperance and divorce has somewhat shifted. In
1889, when virtue shuddered over marrying divorced
women, drunkards were being made by hundreds in any
town under the very nose of the church. In 1921 when
Parliament moves to popularize divorce, public sentiment
not only abolishes the bar, but votes bone dry on the eve
of an artificial millennium.

01

92 ' THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

A man who for some years has wanted the Ministry of
Trade made the remark in a magazine article that if he
had Sir George Foster in his employ as a salesman he would
have him discharged for incompetence. That man forgets
that a genius is not born to sell goods. There were times
in the war when less genius and more business in Trade
and Commerce would have been better for Canada. Foster
was almost seventy when the war began ; a pretty old
man to act as the chief business manager for a nation at
war. His department was the economic backbone of the
Administration. The nearer Canada got to total conscrip-
tion of resources, the more Foster's work should have
towered into the blue. Trade and troops were the life of
the nation. Hughes, White, Borden, Rowell, Meighen,
were all shoved into greater eminence by the work they did
in the war ; Foster was no bigger or more potent a figure
in war work or any other kind of work when peace was
signed than he was in 1914.

He never was a great executive even at his portfolio
under Macdonald in the early '80's. He has always been
a prophet. Public speech is his besetting passion. He
could rise anywhere and translate logic and economics into
ethical emotion. No man in Canada felt the war more
intensely. But Trade was not a matter of emotion ; or of
oratorical periods ; or the right hand descending upon the
left. It was a matter of urgent and colossal business.

In 1916, talking to the war budget, he declaimed against
patronage. He had done the same thing in 1910 just as
ably when he was the pot calling the kettle black.

' 'I hope," he said, "that in the white light of the present
struggle the two parties will agree to do away with the evil."

But the "white light" was more intent on doing away
with the parties themselves.

In the same speech :

"When the trenches call for munitions and supplies, when the blood
of the country is oozing from its veins in the struggle to preserve its
ideals and its liberties, when those who are at home are contributing

RT. HON. SIR GEORGE FOSTER 93

with generous self-sacrifice and without murmur or repining, I say that
to me as a member of the Government, to you as supporters of the
Government, and to you, gentlemen opposite, as a part of the great
body which represents the people of this Dominion, the call comes to
cut off every unnecessary expenditure, to refuse every improper demand.
It is our business to administer the funds of the people with perfect
economy, and to devote ourselves to the one sole purpose of prosecuting
this war to a successful and final conclusion."

Again, he spoke like a prophet when he riddled the
blind optimism of the prosperity pack. At that time
Canada had a favouring balance of $200,000,000 just two
years after a heavy ledger against us.

"The Optimist speaks of the unexampled prosperity that is to
follow the war. I would like to think so, but I can't. The prediction
of a Montreal newspaper that Canada will have from twelve to fifteen
million inhabitants within three years after the war is a mischievous
exaggeration. The first trying period of readjustment will come im-
mediately after the actual fighting ceases and an armistice is declared."

Ezekiel was profoundly right up till the last prophecy.
The Minister of Trade, with all his great ability to analyze
trade, had not mastered economics. Neither had the
President of a great Canadian bank when he said before
the armistice, that merchants with empty shelves and
able to buy cheap goods would be in luck. It was a bad
time for prophets.

However, for a man who aimed at so many nails ,Sir
George had a good average of hitting. But while he was
talking so much, and in Europe so long, the biggest-business
administration of which he was the chief went along on its
own more or less mechanical momentum. By 1917 Canada
had a total export trade of more than half a billion ; with
a possible yearly munition order of 500 millions — no thanks
to the Minister of Trade. No nation in the world exported
so much from so few people. No Ministry of Trade had
such a record. Sir George knew exactly what it all meant.
He was used to analytical surveys. But one fails to remem-
ber that at any period he issued from his office, the trade
centre of the Dominion, any statements that shewed him

94 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

to be more than a puzzled commentator on the riddle of
trade, usually between speeches and journeys. Sir George
never did have executive patience for the mastery of
detail. In this case he did not even convince the people
that he had sized up the great general outlines, so fascinat-
ing because so profoundly unusual.

In June, 1916, Sir George issued in his weekly Trade
Bulletin a resounding Call To Action for a business con-
ference at Ottawa of all parties interested for the purpose
of pulling the country's industries and organizations into
one big ensemble for getting back to peace. That "Call"
was published in one paper illustrated by a picture of Sir
George — in the climax of a speech. A few months later a
political writer was in Ottawa, and when he came back he
wrote an article about the Foster Conference. The fol-
lowing extract shows what he thought of it :

In Ottawa, last week, I met a big bear of a Canadian westerner.
He had just arrived from Toronto. He was all smiles, all energy and
enthusiasm, and he was looking for the Minister of Trade and Com-
merce, Sir George E. Foster.

"Tell you what I want him for," he said. "I want to go up and
shake hands with a real live man. That's what I want. I read his
message 'bout getting together, and it sure set me thinking. I'm strong
for this Cenference scheme. I'm going to back it for all I'm worth and
do my darndest to help a real, live statesman to pull off a big deal.
Damn if I care whether he is a Tory. My middle name is — Boost ! I
want to help."

We walked up to the Department of Trade and Commerce to-
gether.

"Just what line of industry are you interested in ?" I asked.
"Boilers — steam boilers. Vancouver. Little Van-cou-ver. That's
my town."

"And if I may ask, what is your idea about this Business Man's
Conference ? What do you think ought to be done ? "

"Eh ? Why, I don't know yet. That's what I'm coming to see
Foster about."

An hour later I met the boiler-maker coming away from the De-
partment of Trade and Commerce.

"Well," I said, "everything clear ?"

"Clear ?" he roared. "Clear ? Why, man alive ! that fellow

RT. HON. SIR GEORGE FOSTER 95

Foster's away in the West with some Dominion Royal Commission,
making speeches or something, and back there" — nodding toward the
Department of Trade and Commerce — "nobody home !"

"Couldn't they explain it ?"

"Sure. They explain that Sir George is away and nothing definite
can be done. I asked 'em when the conference would be called and
they said that was indefinite. Then I said where ? And they thought
somewhere in Ottawa. Why, all that fellow Foster made was a speech.

That's all. A speech ! Now what the h good will a speech do to

help me and help the rest of us manufacturers to keep from getting
swamped after this war ?"

Trade in Canada during the war was of vastly more
practical significance than the old fiscal idea of Empire of
which Sir George had been such a protagonist when he
stumped England for Chamberlain in 1903. But he
never seemed able to grasp it as clearly even in a speech.
I don't know which seems to me now the greater speech ;
that on the Chamberlain mirage to the Toronto Empire Club
when he elevated fiscal statistics into a pageant of economic
emotion ; or his speech on the war, I think in 1916, when
he lifted his thin spectral figure into a sublime paroxysm
of ethical appeal, corralled all opposing arguments into a
corner and flogged the life out of them in a great message
to awakened humanity. The comparison scarcely matters
except to show that in fifteen years of great Foster speeches
alas for the prophets ! — it was not the fiscal Empire of
Chamberlain that had leaped to the war.

Still more startling to Sir George, the economics of war
riddled to bits the old economics of Empire. In 1917 he
was compelled to forget that a tariff was implied in the Ten
Commandments and to consent for all necessary purposes
to remove trade restrictions across the border. That was
after the United States had declared war. The high priest
of protection himself invented a phrase "economic unit" to
express North America. He wanted markets to find their
own levels by their own routes. He no longer had any
fear of Canada being Americanized. Canada's nationhood

96 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

was already defined in the trenches more than ever it had
been in tariffs. In Sir George's phrase the food producers
of North America were to become one vast international
group. When Foster was "Yea" to Macdonald in 1887
and 1891, before he became "Amen" to Chamberlain in
1903, this economic unity was called continentalism, which
to Foster was the mother of annexation, and Free Trade
Liberals were traitors to the Empire.

Economic unity, however, meant far more than Sir
George intended it to mean. He admitted the principle
of free-trade only in production. In spite of tariffs North
America became, not only a vast group of producers, but a
huge family of consumers. Every Victory Loan raised
money that was spent in once more paying wages and
buying materials for war production in Canada. Every
time that money went round the circle, prices for many of
the staple commodities went higher. The Department
of Trade registered a tremendous increase in the cash value
of exports even when the bulk value changed very little.
The more loans "put over the top," the more money there
seemed to be. The more hazardous shipping became
through submarines, the greater the scarcity, and the
demand — and the price paid. Sir George witnessed this
phenomenon : the fewer producers left by conscription on
the land, in the mines, in the factories, the more Canada
was able to export — in cash values.

This must have given a good Tory economist loss of
sleep. No man could have analyzed the paradox more
ably than Sir George. But so far as we can recollect, he
published no illuminating bulletins from his Department
to tell us about it. How we should have enjoyed his
master mind elucidating the phenomenon of a continent
being gradually denuded of goods and flushed with money ;
of prices inexorably mounting ; of money hungering for
goods ; of fabulous wages for munition-making and any-
thing else that could be scaled up to meet the competition

RT. HON, SIR GEORGE FOSTER 97

unloading themselves into Victor}' Bonds at a sure profit,
and the surplus into commodities most of which were not
made in Canada and must therefore come from the United
States. What a prophetic commentary it would have
made on the "buyers' market" which followed the armis-
tice. What wonderful reading it would have made if Sir
George had issued replies to those commercial newspaper
editors over the border who rushed jubilating into print to
say with fabulous statistics that Canada was now the
heaviest customer that nation had. How we should have
liked to hear officially from the Minister of Trade how
Broadway was infecting the country, luxuries reeling in
argosies over the dry land to Canada, and Canada buying
herself bankrupt on the exchanges ; and that though
there were powerful economic reasons for it all, we had
better enlist in an army of economy instead of being con-
scripted later by the super-tariff on luxuries and the luxury
tax.'

But the Minister of Trade confined himself to growling
that we should all wear patches and old clothes. Which
was one good reason why many people did not. It was easy
for Sir George to wear patched trousers if he felt like so
doing. He would have been merely picturesque, like
those ragged prophets of old. Most of us still had to invest
in some sort of decoration. Anyhow a large number of
people had the money to spend ; and the more they spent
the more they approved of self-denial in other people.

This problem of American penetration is big enough at
any time here. The Department of Trade is the place
where it is most clearly understood. We are constantly
warned about the danger, not only to our Canadian dollar,
but to our national independence if we persist in importing
motor cars, fashionable footwear, party gowns and lingerie
and hats, art furniture, home decorations, phonographs,
moving pictures, and magazines. But we go on doing it ;
because Canada, whether in war or peace, fails to produce

98 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

a great many things that people like to have and to wear
and to go about in ; and for those that she does we are
charged the foreign price plus the duty and more ; so that
in many and many a case it has been found more economical
to buy the article from catalogue, paying the duty and the
express charges.

Has Sir George ever enlightened us about this ? Has
he ever tried to inform the Canadian manufacturer that if
he expects to hold our allegiance even under a more or less
protective tariff, he must refrain from charging the con-
sumer all the traffic and more than the consumer will
stand ? We fail to remember ; even when we recollect
that on thus and such an occasion somewhere in the Empire
he made some glorious patriotic speech. On a subject which
causes many Canadians to explode, often with ill-con-
sidered accusation of "the Yankees," our greatest maker
of pure and applied speeches seldom has a word to say.
But he knows. Sir George Foster knows our economic
subjugation by the 12 to 1 method, even under a tariff.
Alas ! he hails from the Maritimes, a land of great people, of
constructive Canadians who have too often been in absolute
economic need of more of that sort of subjugation.

Then there was the never-dead dragon of high prices
for everything, which our St. George made no real attempt
to spear. That is a long story. It was his department
which furnished the Food Controller, the duties which the
Trade Department could not discharge. Well remem-
bered are the evangelical injunctions of the Controller to
consume perishable and export other products ; to live on
garden truck grown in back yards and corner lots so that
grain and butter and bacon and eggs and oatmeal might
run the submarine blockade on the high seas. There was
no fault to find with this, so long as it was economy. But
heaven knew what armies of housewives, already desperate
from lack of help, were dragooned into making their kitchens
amateur canning factories where they wasted good fruit

RT. HON. SIR GEORGE FOSTER 99

along with tragically expensive sugar in jars that approxi-
mated the cost of cut glass. And after all the slavery and
the self denial, butter and eggs that were not shipped
abroad because there was no room in munition ships to
carry them, vanished mysteriously in the lower price season
into some limbo known as cold-storage, only to emerge
when it suited the storage barons at prices as high as were
paid in Europe. No doubt there is an economic philosophy
in cold-storage just as there is in hydro-power. But we
have always supposed its virtue was in taking care of a
perishable surplus, so that when there is a scarcity the
surplus can be released at a reasonable profit.

Did the able Minister of Trade ever stoop to enlighten
us with the economics of this ? If so, the recollection has
faded.

There is at any time, whether in peace or war, a great
function for the Department of Trade to perform in the
matter of what is the reasonable cost of any commodity in
general demand. But no Trade Department in this
country has ever done it. There is always plenty of time
for the consideration of new markets, the plotting of new
trade routes and the planning of mercantile marine for
export ; all very well, and if we are to pay our bills by
exports, very necessary. But the common consumer has
many a time, long before the war and often since, found
himself in the jaws of a nutcracker in the shape of some
combine or trust or confederacy of middlemen ; and if
there was any sphere of government to deal with these
things it was the great Department of Trade.

This has nothing to do with party politics. Any party
up to date has been capable of neglecting the people in
these matters. But it is quite as important as the abolition
of patronage.

We have ceased to expect any such function from a
Minister so old, so eloquent, so Imperially-inspired as Sir
George Foster. There is always something else to do.

100 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

The party must be led in the House. Sir George was the
House leader. Magnificent ! No man ever rose at a desk
in Parliament who could more superbly play upon the
bigotries and the high patriotic emotions of even a remnant
party. The man is a genius. There must be the valley
of dry bones for Ezekiel. And the bones must come to-
gether and walk. Sir Robert Borden on ^uch occasions
was a mere interested gargoyle. Patriotism demanded
that the party's desks be thumped. Sir George saw that
they were thumped without stint.

Twice during the Opposition period Sir George was
dead and buried by the Grits ; once over the Union Trust
land investigation ; again in a libel suit which he lost to
the Globe when Rowell was against him. None of these
things defeated the able author of Resurgam ! who was
made Minister of Trade, went for a six-months' journey in
the Orient trying to convert the yellow races from rice to
Canadian flour, and afterwards got his title. So when the
people, in 1917, asked Ezekiel for a prophecy, the Minister
of Trade stoically advised them to eat less, save
more, waste nothing, wear what their grandmothers wore
if possible, and hope for the best. In the matter of fixing
prices Sir George had as much wisdom as most, though he
made a very awkward attempt to adjust the price of wheat
and only then at the instigation of the British Government.

The world by this time was full of upsetting anomalies
to Sir George. Even government was perverted. He had
no desire for Unionism ; to sit at Council with even win-
the-war Liberals — once plain Grits. It needed political
philosophy to make colleagues of such men as Calder, the
Grit enemy of Toryism in the West, Crerar, the avowed
apostle of free-trade, Sifton, the Alberta mystery man, and
Rowell, who had won the libel suit against him for the
Globe. It was not to be expected that so complete and
historic a Tory as Sir George could at first easily regard
such men as anything but interlopers, even though he

RT. HON. SIR GEORGE FOSTER 101

admitted their strength in the Coalition. One can imagine
Meighen making up to his old trade enemy Carvell, but
not Foster making overtures to Rowell.

But the vital element was gone out of the Administra-
tion, and Sir George had to admit it. Cold and repellent
as he has always seemed in politics, without a crony or
even a man who cared to make him a confederate, he has
never been a man of implacable resentment. He was yet
to regard Rowell as a real man, worthy his confidence.

A newspaperman sent to Osgoode Hall to report the
Globe libel suit for an Ottawa Liberal paper relates how the
night of the conclusion of the trial he met Mr. Foster at
the Toronto Station. The reporter had already wired the
decision of the Court adverse to Mr. Foster, who had not
even taken the trouble to inquire what it was. The two
chatted amiably on the train and met the next morning in
Ottawa. On his way home Mr. Foster saw the Liberal
bulletin at the newspaper office. A few days later he met
the scribe.

"Tom," he said, genially, shaking hands, "why didn't
you tell me about that decision ?"

"Well, sir, I really thought you knew, and I didn't care
to hurt your feelings."

The member for North York laughed.

"Feelings !" he repeated. "You are the first Grit
that ever said I had any."

A prominent Liberal described to the writer the exit
of Mr. Foster from the House after the Royal Commission
investigation into the Union Trust.

"Mr. and Mrs. Foster," he said eloquently, "went to-
gether down the terrace in a fog of rain, into the shadow of
the night, under one umbrella. And I said to myself as
they went, dejected and pitiful, 'Well, that's the final exit
of Foster from political life.' '

The author of Resurgam knew better. He could always
somehow come back on the stepping stones of a dead self.

102 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

Something made him feel that without him the Conserva-
tive party would have been like the Liberals without
Laurier, or in an earlier day his own party minus the old
chief Macdonald. He was almost right.

One other episode illustrates how spontaneously the
emotional aspect of things sometimes sways this cold
politician who never could lead a party. When the Premier
by request called a caucus of his Union supporters for the
purpose of discovering what could be done with the Coalition
to make it a party, it was not the Premier who held the
floor, but Sir George, who made a long passionate speech
upon the vicissitudes of men who — like the Premier and
himself — had carried the burden and the heat of the political
day. When Foster had finished, there were tears on case-
hardened faces and the caucus adjourned. Asked later for
a copy of his great speech, Sir George said he had not even
prepared any notes ; when he went to the caucus he had
not intended making any such speech ; he did not now
remember what he had said.

Can we call such a man anything but a genius ? As
Minister of Trade he may be a poor salesman. He is not
less a poor salesman of his party, his country, or his big
original belief in the Empire, whatever form of government
it might become, or of his birthright to spend his tremendous
talent in public service rather than in private gain. And
he has been for almost a generation the most interesting
personality in the ranks of the Conservative party.

There is but one other politician in America with the
political vitality of Sir George Foster. "Uncle Joe"
Cannon is the man. In Washington Cannon is regarded
as a miracle because he was once the autocrat of Congress
and is still a member of the House and a very old man. Sir
George Foster is almost as old a man and has been in public
service much longer. He has held portfolios under all the
Conservative Premiers that Canada ever had — Macdonald,
Thompson, Abbott, Bowell, Borden, Meighen. There

RT. HON. SIR GEORGE FOSTER 103

have been times in the shuffles of these men when for
ability he, rather than Abbott or Bowell or Borden, should
have been Premier. But there was always a fatal obstacle
in the personality of the man whose leadership always
depended upon making a great speech. When he was first
Minister under Macdonald, a lad named Arthur Meighen
was getting ready to attend a High School. Could that
Minister and that lad have been introduced, would Ezekiel
have prophesied that in 1920 he would be holding office
under the lad, Premier of Canada- ?

Anomalies like these are the rule in a life of a man so
unusual as Sir George, who is now a Senator. Even in
the Senate he is not dead; for in Ezekiel, 37th chapter,
it is written, "Son of man, can these bones live? And I
answered, O Lord God, thou knowest."

A HALO OF BILLIONS
HON. SIR THOMAS WHITE

SIR Thomas White was the world's only continuous Finance
Minister for the whole period of the war — and after ;
when nobody else cared to have his job, and Sir Thomas
did. He seduced billions of patriotic dollars out of the
pockets of this country and smiled as he did it. No man
in Canada was so exquisitely fitted to the task of making
an average dollar burn a hole in a man's pocket in order
to do its bit. It gave him "the pleasure that's almost
pain" to feel that no man except Henri Bourassa or an
Eskimo could escape the snare of a Victory Loan advertise-
ment prepared by Sir Thomas and his committees of ad-
men and brokers. Never before on this continent had a
nation been so advertised into patriotism. In England
some expert had done it for Kitchener's Army. But it
was easier to recruit England, with 30 millions of people
within the area of our maritime provinces, than to mobilize
billions from a vast emptiness like Canada.

It must be admitted that the divinity which keeps
governments from wrecking nations had somehow picked
the right man for this stupendous task. Sir Thomas had a
quality of mind and a political experience which made it
possible for him to pull the last dollar for victory. In the
war annals of Canada he will have a halo of billions, while
Sam Hughes has one of bayonets. He mobilized our
financial resources by a system that stopped only short of
conscription.

I seldom see Sir Thomas standing at a street corner
when I do not feel like urging him to run along and attend

104

HON. SIR THOMAS WHITE 105

to his office and not to be losing time. He seems to belong
to that cold group of men whose time is naturally money.

In 1912 I asked Mr. White in Ottawa for an interview.
He appointed an hour when I might see him. As soon as I
entered the office he began to talk. The ease and fluency
of his conversation amazed me. No other Minister of
that Cabinet could have been so suave and entertaining.

"Er — with regard to the question of railway fin ?"

He saw the question coming in a sort of parabolic
curve and he dodged it. By a neat evasion he got the
topic switched to sociology, from that to philosophy, to
heredity, literature, journalism, art, and finally prenatalism.
Every effort I made to probe him on public finance was
met by some calm and smiling barrage of eclectic interest.
For an hour we played conversational pingpong in the
most amiable style. And when Mr. White urbanely con-
fessed that he liked everybody in the House of Commons,
even "Bob" Rogers and Dr. Pugsley, it was time for the
interviewer to go, before so charmed a Utopia should
vanish like a film on a screen, and to conclude that the
Finance Minister of Canada was no novice in a certain
species of diplomacy.

Time made some heavy changes in him. A press
gallery observer, asked by a certain Canadian periodical
to name a possible successor to Sir Robert Borden four
years before the Premier's resignation, picked Sir Thomas
whom he said he had watched turn grey and careworn in
office, sedulous at his desk, always busy, never at ease.
Yet in 1912 he could lecture hon. gentlemen opposite
seasoned in political intrigues as though he, himself, had
discovered some new coefficient in politics.

Sir Thomas White lias always been a political emergency,
a sort of administrative occasion. For real politics he was
never meant. For government by business he had great
aptitude. To him government is big business, and the
human side of democracy a sealed book. He has an almost

106 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

exquisite sense of prerogative. His equilibrium is adjusted
to the niceties of a seismographic instrument. Yet he has
never held himself aloof, and is not commonly proud.

There is an idle story that near the end of his term in
office he went to a bank teller's wicket — being in urgent
temporary need of a little common money — and presented
a cheque. On being courteously reminded by the teller
that he had not brought the customary identification, he
blandly announced, "I am the Finance Minister of Canada."
The manner in which the Minister spoke is said to have left
no doubt in the teller's mind that he was indeed the very
man whose photograph had appeared in the newspapers.

There is also a little story that during one of the Victory
Loan conferences in Ottawa, one of his older associates in
newspaper work politely called him Sir Thomas, and that
the Minister replied, "Oh, forget it ! Call me Tom."

The first may be fiction. The second is a fact. But
the number of men who without invitation would call him
Tom, is not very extensive.

From his youth up Tom White had a powerful capacity
for ordered work. There was "a time to work and a time
to play, a time to laugh and a time to weep." Nor did he
acquire this from Sir Joseph Flavelle, with whom he was
so long and intimately associated. He had it from the
cradle, which he must have left at the appointed time with
some impatience at too much rocking. As a student at
the University, as a law student at Osgoode, as a barrister,
as reporter on the Telegram, as an employee in the Toronto
Assessment Department, he had always a sort of mathe-
matical regard for the diligence that makes a man fit to
stand before kings, and the sensation of a superbly pigeon-
holed mind.

By heredity Sir Thomas was labelled a Liberal, and at
the time of the Taft-Fielding reciprocity junta he sat on
the edge of his political bed pulling the court-plaster off.
Next morning, without a single new grey hair in his head,

HON. SIR THOMAS WHITE 107

he found himself a Conservative. The Liberal regime of
shipping in people and booming up speculative towns on the
prairies was a good thing for any Trust. But when the
Government began to barter its preserve for another lease
of life, Mr. White decided that it was time for a change.
When he quit the National Trust to take on a trust for a
nation he was a new-born Conservative, and in the eyes
of the new Premier a lovely child. And as Finance Ministei
in a Tory Government he became the real author of
Coalition.

Mr. White took into the Finance Department the
atmosphere and the technique of the fiduciary corporation.
Hence he was never able to read himself into the life of the
country, never became more than a superficial master of
its political forces, never rallied men about him in a great
effort to save anything but a financial situation, and never
lost a superb sense of himself. The fact that without ever
having been elected to Parliament or Legislature, or even
a County Council, he could walk into what is usually
regarded as the most important department of adminis-
tration in an)' country, is a proof that government as big
business was more important to him than politics as ex-
perience.

The average portfolio is handed to a politician, not
because he knows anything about the matter in hand, but
because he is a good politician, a big enough man to repre-
sent some electoral area, and may be left to learn his public
job after he gets it. Such is democracy. White was a
tyro in politics and public administration. But he did
know finance. When Laurier picked editor Fielding from
Nova Scotia to look after the Budget he chose a good
deal of a genius. Mr. Fielding was a master of tariffs and
of inspiring fiscal speeches outside the House. He had
almost a Gladstonian faculty for making statistics scintil-
late with human interest. He had made a survey of the
country on tariff for revenue ; and he usually had a book-

108 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

keeping surplus at a time when he practically boasted on
the platform of what it cost to run the country. Much
thanks to him the Liberals had given Free Trade a pro-
foundly respectable burial, with Michael Clark, headmaster
of the Manchester School in Canada, as chief mourner.

But the ledgers of Canada looked to be in a bad way to
Mr. White. "The cost of high living" had been demon-
strated by the Liberal Government some time before James
J. Hill coined the phrase. Laurier monuments to high living
were dotted all over the country in the shape of armouries,
post offices, customs houses, docks, courthouses, the Quebec
Bridge, and vast systems of unpopulated railways.

When Mr. White's sensitive finger came to that prodigal
item in the public ledger he had almost excuse, in spite of
his pre-knowledge of the business, for curling up like a
cutworm. His knowledge of banks and their customers
was very extensive. He had dealt with those banks.
The ex-manager of the National Trust had long known
that Canada was overbuilt with railways and going-to-be-
bankrupt towns. The orgy of expansion whose familiar
figure was the prodigal with the scoop shovel in the gold
bin by the open window with a huge hole in the ground
beneath, was just about at the crest of its master carousal ;
and the transcontinental railways with their entails of
cash and land grants and guaranteed bonds was the thing
that gave the new Minister the greatest concern of the lot,
though he never said so. An ex-Cabinetarian who used to
agree with Sir Thomas in politics still stoutly alleges that
the 1911 "bolt" of the famous 18 Liberals, of whom Sir
Thomas was one of the leaders, was a tactical manoeuvre
to save the Canadian Northern from bankruptcy by reci-
procity.

Sir Thomas should have made the railways his first
drastic item of reorganization. Here was a Verdun for the
Finance Minister to take But for two years while the
railway cataclysm was coming he went along with business

HON. SIR THOMAS WHITE 109

as usual. It would have been less of a burden to unload
that railway bankruptcy in 1913 than it was during the
stress of after the war.

But of course the Finance Minister was only the chief
subordinate in the Administration. Time would force the
railways to terms. The war and war business came faster
than the time. Sir Thomas probably dreaded the public
ownership in which he has never profoundly believed. In
conversation with the President of the Canadian Pacific
he practically admitted that a Government cannot compete
with a great corporation in operating a railway. But in
1912, on the principle that an egg hatches into a chicken,
he must have foreseen that national* ownership of half
Canada's railways would be thrust upon him.

It is not explicitly known what are Sir Thomas White's
opinions about the Government ownership of railways ;
but one can easily imagine what he would have said prior
to 1911 to any proposal of any Government to begin owning
and operating banks and trust companies. And as Govern-
ment is the owner of the Royal Mint in Canada and does
its own coining of the metals used in our currency, it would
seem to be vastly easier for a Government to own banks
and loan companies than to own and operate transportation
systems. Sir Thomas would scarcely deny that. He is
too shrewd in experience. It is one thing for a munici-
pality to own street railways, because all the streets are
automatically part of a city's property. It is quite another
matter for Government to own and operate railways, because
the routes of these highways and the machinery necessary
to conduct traffic are not naturally the property of a Govern-
ment, which exercises its power chiefly through the regula-
tion of rates and the functions of the Railway Commission.

One imagines that Sir Thomas sincerely hoped that the
railways built from cash borrowed on Government guaran-
teed bonds, and by direct loans from the national exchequer
would some time develop business enough to pay their

110

own way. But it is not remembered that he held any
conferences with the Minister of Railways to prepare a
public statement on this question. Both these Ministers
had troubles enough without creating more. The country
was on the crest of a wave whose trough was not far ahead.

Sir Thomas had made but one really constructive
budget speech when the inevitable slump began to come.
But as yet he seemed to be rather charmed with the novel-
ties of Parliament and the ironies of preparing to win
elections. The war plunged him into a system that cared
no more for his budget than a cyclone for a baby carriage.
Tariffs, bankrupt railways, the banking system, exchanges,
and the common cost of living were all but obliterated in
the campaign of war loans, not the least marvellous feature
of which was that selling Victory Bonds almost made the
Finance Minister a friend of the common people. The
"vicious circle" of higher wages and higher cost of living
was offset by Sir Thomas White's virtuous circle of money
raised in Canada, spent in Canada, for goods needed by
Canada and the Allies at the front. The formula was 5^
per cent with no taxes, and the best security in the world —
if the war was won, which of course it would be if people
bought Victory Bonds.

In this era of the patriotism of the pocket, common
reason almost tottered from her throne. Ordinary finan-
cial logic was forgotten. Economic delirium took hold of
the nation. A broker in those days could talk in language
more mysterious than the polite attentions of a juggler
who pulls an egg from your pocket. Newspapers were full
of jargon that sometimes seemed more fantastic than the
theories of the Holy Rollers. The citizen who could not
cash a Victory Bond to pay a debt was considered behind
the times, and the banker who told you that it was better
to sell bonds than to borrow on them at the bank was
regarded as an oracle, even though you could not begin to
comprehend his logic. ,.»,:

HON SIR THOMAS WHITE 111

But the Finance Minister was as calm as Gibraltar.
He was the man behind the curtain and the show. He was
seldom absent from the Orders-in-Council convention,
commonly known as Parliament. He was again and again
acting Premier. He cared little for Imperial Conferences.
His war was at home. His firing line was all over Canada.
He was the most stay-at-home and sedulous of our ministers.
He worked while others slept or sailed the seas. No
Victory Loan advertisement proof escaped the eagle eye of
this ex-newspaperman before it went to press. He scanned
and corrected every syllable. Every advertisement was a
sermonette from the Finance Minister.

An independent writer visiting Ottawa in the fall of
1916, wrote concerning the Finance Minister :

"One of the best evidences of Ottawa's frame of mind is the way
it talks about Sir Thomas White — and the way Sir Thomas talks about
himself. Sir Thomas White has probably rendered more real brain
service to this country in his few years of office than any one man who
has held office as a Minister — I am not now speaking of Prime Ministers,
whose functions are particular and peculiar — since Confederation.
To Ottawa, Sir Thomas is little short of a miracle. The frame of mind
on both sides of politics regarding Sir Thomas is not unlike that of the
farmer who saw a two-humped camel for the first time. "Hell," said
Ottawa, "they ain't no such animal !" Now it calls' Sir Thomas
White 'great' — and even Sir Thomas admits it !"

Vol. I., No. 1 of Th^ Onlooker, had this to say on the
other side of the ledger :

"One would gather from the way some of his admirers talk that
he, and he alone, was responsible for the success of the various loans
issued during the war. He had it easy. The country was literally
bursting with money seeking investment. One could almost have
raised it with his eyes shut. The whole community was humming
with activity like a top asleep ; and still the orders from abroad came
pouring in. Every fresh loan stimulated activity anew. All that was
required was to issue the prospectus, pass the solicitation of funds to
interested canvassers, newspapers, publications, loan companies, banks,
brokers, and hurrah at the end."

Some things do look easy to the man who is not doing
them. Common sense admits that the man who patrioti-

112 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

cally juggled the billions from pocket to exchequer and
back to pocket again would have had a much harder task to
undertake what somebody called "the Gethsemane" of
paying the nation's bills when the "hurrah" was over.
The method of financing Canada in the war may be vastly
different from the method necessary in peace. But when
money must be had quickly in vast quantities there is no
time to debate on just how you are going to get it. Sir
Thomas White's raid upon the pockets of Canada was a
financial spectacle not to be judged by standards of thrift,
for the very good reason that the people were nauseated
with thrift talk, were looking for something easy, and
White had the instinct to know that the easier and the
more spectacular he could make a Victory Loan the better
for the war. He rowed with the current and knew he was
doing it. In his own financial brain, which is not un-
thrifty, he knew that the "hurrah" was not healthy in the
long run and that it could not last forever. But once it
was started there was no other way bu to keep it up.
Thanks to Sir Thomas, every citizen had an oppor-
tunity to get himself rubber-stamped on behalf of the
nation ; which on general principles was a good thing,
because a large number of people at that time indulged
the fiction that as the Government was paying its debts, a
good way to do it would be to print more paper money.
It was the Finance Minister's opportunity to instruct us,
that the Government was not paying debts — but making
it possible to pay wages. Unless the surplus of every
man's earnings was invested in Victory Bonds there would
shortly be no big industries left to pay the earnings at all,
Canada would cease to export munitions — which might
be the one thing to lose the war, in which case nothing
would be left for any of us but to pay war indemnities to
he enemy. Critics declared that non-taxable bonds were
an iniquity in favour of the big investor who could heap up
bonanza investments without taxes ; another way of

HON. SIR THOMAS WHITE 113

accusing the Finance Minister of being in league with the
"big interests." But we must do Sir Thomas the credit
of taking a sure way to encourage the small investor by
refusing to tax his patriotism. A 100th per cent tax on
some people's patriotism might have squelched it alto-
gether. It would have been a public service if Sir Thomas
White had plainly told the people, not less about why they
should buy Victory Bonds during a period of inflation, but
more about what would happen to them when deflation
began to set in ; when, ceasing to buy Victory Bonds at a
low price, we should have to buy bread and butter and
clothes at higher prices than ever at a time when money
began to sneak away, we knew not whither.

Perhaps it was too much to expect one man to organize
the "hurrah" and afterwards to conduct the "Gethse-
rnane." At any rate, before we had an opportunity to
test the real size of Sir Thomas as a public servant he
resigned office.

Whether the Finance Minister at the climax of his big
opus was shrewd enough to imagine that the kudos of the
loans might get him the Premiership, we do not profess to
know. He is not considered famous as a political strategist.
He has far too much serenity.

In 1917 Sir Thomas was chairman of a monster meeting
in Toronto when ten thousand people who tried to hear
Theodore Roosevelt speak on behalf of that year's Victory
Loan of Canada were turned away. For some hours he
had been in company with a man whose mastery of the
unusual was almost the equal of Mark Twain's. If ever
he had a chance to be startled out of his headmaster poise,
here it was. But he made a long, tedious preamble of a
speech the only sentence of which that sticks in my memory
is that sincerely girlish utterance of Portia to Antonio after
the trial, "Sir, you are very welcome to our house." It
was like pinning a pink bow knot on the head of a lion.

Sir Thomas showed strategic ability when he refused

114 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

the Premiership. After declining the Premiership he
was not likely to need a portfolio.

Public life is considerably like war. Every time you
move there must be a motive.

A former political crony of Sir Thomas said to the
writer that the excess profits tax imposed by the Minister
was one of the cleverest political manoeuvres ever perpe-
trated in Ottawa, because it drove manufacturers and
merchants to advertise in the newspapers in order to reduce
their profits, thus paying part of the excess to the newspapers
rather than to the Government ; which was supposed to
have made the Government popular with newspapers on
both sides of the political fence. This is a genially cynical
way of saying that every publisher has his price, and that
the Finance Minister had made some startling progress in
his mentality since the day when he was charmed with
everybody in Parliament. But it is a Machiavellian touch
quite uncharacteristic of a man whose friends had designated
him for the Premiership.

The friends of Sir Thomas may have had good reason
for considering him as the next Premier. On the evidence
of the mere handling of executive big business demanding
cool judgment, practical vision and powerful action he was
the equal of any other candidate for the office. His defects
were less obvious, but perhaps more vital in the case. Sir
Thomas was not designed to lead, which in these days
means to be constantly recreating a party, not to operate
a well-built governmental machine. In his nine years of
public life he did a big national work and justly earned all
the real distinction he ever got. He did so much in a big,
unusual way for the nation that his passing out becomes
another example of how easy it is to cripple administration
by sacrificing public service brains to private busi

CALLED TO THE POLITICAL PULPIT
HON. NEWTON WESLEY ROWELL

N. W. ROWELL has the bearing of a man who long ago felt
that he was called to do something for a cause or a country
and has never got over it. Meanwhile he has done much
for both a cause and a country, and seems to have quit
before the country had begun to enjoy more than the
least agreeable elements in his character. To have suffered
the insistent righteousness of Mr. Rowell so long, and at
the close of the first period of his life when he seemed to be
getting his own measure as a public man on a big stage, to
see him withdraw like a chambered nautilus into his shell,
not only from the Cabinet but from his seat in Durham, is a
little hard on public patience. But of course the cham-
bered nautilus may emerge again.

Years ago Mr. Rowell had moral energy enough to
reconstruct a large part of the world in Liberalism and in
the Methodist Church. Today he finds evangelic Liberal-
ism rampant out on the skyline under such men as Crerar
and Drury, and the church discussing social reformation in
phraseology associated with dynamic ideas to which he
never could be assimilated.

Mr. Rowell's career reminds us that there are four
brands of Liberals in Canada : Evolutionary ; Manchester
School ; Laurierite ; Agrarian. Tories never evolve.
There are only good Tories and bad ones.

He belongs to the first group, and there is nothing in his
temperament to make him anything else. Free Trade
never did convince him ; he broke away from the enchant-
ing tyranny of Laurier ; and, though born on a farm, he

115

116 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

never could revert to the plough-handles for a vision of the
world.

Judging from .some fairly recent preachments by able
reverends such as Wm. Woodsworth and Salem Bland,
there may be as many brands of Methodism. If so we
unhesitatingly place Mr. Rowell in the evolutionary group.

Therefore by personal development he is next thing to
a Conservative ; and the latest phase of his career proves
that in working it out he has practised the fine old platitude
of Polonius to Laertes :

"To thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man."

Mr. Rowell is one of our most encouraging types of
what is called the self-made man. Any Oxford professor
hearing him make a typically good speech in London on
"The Commonwealth of Nations under the Union Jack,"
would infer that he had taken a post-graduate course in
political history after graduating as a B.A. But Mr.
Rowell never even attended a High School He went from
the farm as a lad to be a parcel boy in a London, Ont., dry-
good store. The class-meeting and the sermon and the
Mechanics' Institute gave him a taste for serious literature.
He came up in the oratorical county that produced G. W.
Ross and J. A. Macdonald. He must have regularly read
Talmage's sermons. He was a youth when the Y.M.C.A.
movement invaded Canada along with baseball. He made
the choice. He passed into the Law School, somehow
dodging all the good brethren who advised him to go into
the ministry. And through the opportunity afforded him
by the successful practice of law and Liberalism on a large
scale he has been able to preach his sermons to much bigger
audiences than he ever could have found in the Methodist
Church.

If some of the advanced radicals of these days would
con over the outlines of a career like this, they might get

HON. NEWTON WESLEY ROWELL 117

rid of some of their fantastic notions about State-devised
equality and emancipation. Mr. Rowel 1 instinctively
reached out by industry and enthusiasm for the forces that
would better his condition. In so doing he spent a large
part of himself upon the betterment of society. The
result is an intellectual, moral and financially successful
character of which any community might be proud — so
long as the community contained but one of the kind.

Rowellism is a good salt. It is not good porridge. The
average unprofessional Christian man cannot live on the
levels where Mr. Rowell breathes so easily.

Time and again have we heard the equivocal remark
about this man ; if such, and however so. Why not take
the man as he is and make the best of him ? Surely by
now he has proved that he has a definite and uplifting
leverage on public life. It is of no use to complain that he
never was cut out to be a leader in anything but ethical
ideas of statesmanship. It was political makeshiftery to
make such a man the leader of Ontario liberalism, which
did not ask to be led but to be cajoled and tricked up for the
carnival. It was fatuous to imagine that he could ever
become a chief of the National Liberal and Conservative
party to which he now inextricably belongs. If secret
ambition ever spurred him to indulge that dream — which
seems incredible — sober reflection at the looking glass
should have corrected the strabismus. Mr. Rowell is not
a leader of men, in action ; never was and never could be —
without some drastic transformation in his outward charac-
ter such as he has never shown.

The last time I observed Mr. Rowell he was in the
lounge of a club where he had just finished lunch. All
about him were scores of men in groups, each group ani-
matedly intent upon some topic from baseball to high
finance. A few weeks earlier that same club had given a
public dinner to Mr. Rowell and Sir George Foster, when
each seemed to overdo the other in gripping those present

118 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

by the presentation of a world theme backed by a striking
personality. In the lounge Mr. Rowell, our best authority
on the ethics of the Empire and the League of Nations,
went about alone, unobtrusive, drab-coloured, almost
insignificant. He spoke to nobody and few men as much
as noticed him. He nodded gravely now and again, but
never smiled. Both hands in his trouser pockets, he seemed
to be gazing at some vagabond blind spot in the room.
He almost seemed to be whistling to himself like a lad in
a forest. Presently he wandered out.

By no exercise of imagination could one conceive such
a man as a Canadian political leader. If there is anything
in an aura he has it not. A halo would have suited him
better.

Three elements conspire to make Rowell :

Conscience ; oratory ; opportunity.

Most men have trouble enough with any two of the
three. Mr. Rowell continues to hold our respect in spite
of the whole trinity. Too much conscience always on
duty at a peak load is no way to attract a vast variety of
people who relish a degree of sinfulness now and again.
We do not repudiate the value of conscience in public
affairs. The public man without it provides almost the
only sane argument for the preservation of the gallows.
But when one man carries so much of it, a number of others
may be excused for carrying less. This is an age of special-
ties.

It is required of a truly efficient conscience, however,
that it be instant in season and out of season, and that it
do not wait upon opportunity. When the Ross Govern-
ment was so old in sin that even the new Globe editor
accused the ship of having barnacles, we fail to remember
that Mr. Rowell lifted his voice against it. He was a can-
didate for the Commons five years before James Whitney
began his regime of government by indignation ; at a
time when if Ontario went on a political spree Ottawa got

HON. NEWTON WESLEY ROWELL 119

a headache. Big-party government was pretty strong in
those days to keep a man like Rowell from talking out in
meeting. The value of a conscience to a community,
whatever it may be to an individual or a party, is in giving
it a chance to speak out when something is wrong with
your own group, not when it is politically convenient to
take off the muffler. Mr. Rowell's method of opening
Durham as a safe seat for himself by making a Senator of
the Conservative member for Durham, was one way of
reforming the Civil Service, which was one of his Govern-
ment hobbies. But in practical politics it is sometimes
necessary to do evil that good may come. Mr. Rowell
needed a safe seat — in order to do his work for the country.
It seems a pity that a constituency so shrewdly obtained
could not have been steadfastly held.

As an orator Mr. Rowell is remarkable in spite of two
defects ; no classical or humanities education except what
he diligently dug out of books, and a very thin voice. Few
public speakers of our time use such admirable diction,
and it is a rare one who can make so lean a voice thrill so
completely with passion in the presentation of powerfully
synthetic ideas. This is a great gift ; but like personal
beauty it has its fatal fascination. Mr. Rowell has not
ceased to suffer from a sort of bondage to his oratory as he
has from the tyranny of his conscience. In conversation
he seldom just talks. He seem? to deliver dicta. He
rarely glows with the fire of the moment ; he seems to be
preparing for the grand occasion, The stage must be set.
When did he ever make a poor speech that he had time to
prepare ? Or a good one impromptu ? One cannot soon
forget his remarkable speech in the Toronto Arena at the
citizens' reception to Premier Borden in 1915. Here this
lifelong Liberal made what up to that moment was the
greatest speech of his career ; and he was speaking as a
British citizen, not as a Canadian Liberal.

With equal power, to a small group, but with even more

120 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

passion as a broad-minded Canadian, he spoke to the
Bonne Entente in Toronto in 1917 on a subject which may
have had something to do with his future as a Dominion
instead of a Provincial statesman. In this connection I
quote from a report of that meeting made by the writer :

"He took his preconsidered skeleton of argument
with all its careful alignment of crescendos and climaxes
and clothed it with the passion of a rousing, emotionaliz-
ing speech. The points somewhat roughly made by
other men he remade by a new grouping of the ideas.
With eminent juridical clarity he worked himself up
the ropes of oratory, and when he got to the tiptop of
the trapeze he flung out his big compliment to the
French-Canadians now at the front. Of course he
said other things. He made fine use of the historic as
he always manages to do But when he got away
from that into the great little story of Courcellette and
the gallant 22nd with its sole surviving eighty men and
two officers besides the C.O. " fighting the Germans
like devils," he had voltage enough for an audience
of ten thousand."

It is doubtful if Canada ever had a public speaker who
with so little personal makeup for the part could so wonder-
fully deliver himself in orational speeches on any topic of
nations, commonwealths and empires. If Rowell were
less of an orator he would be more of a power as a public
man. Carrying around loaded blank pistols is not nearly
so congenial to most men as a cigar in the left hand vest
pocket. There is in most of us a strain of buncombe
which we exhibit often when others are not looking. I
think Rowell exhibits most of his in solemn form in public.
If one has not what is called sawir faire he must make his
abstractions and silences confoundedly interesting. Rowell
packs all his power into a speech. Therefore even his
greatest speeches are sometimes to some people a bore.
I think he must have risen to about his height of un-

HON. NEWTON WELSEY ROWELL 121

ceremonious informality at a Peace dinner in London when
he sat next to the plenipotentiary from Serbia, to whom
he remarked :

"I should think so many dinners and public functions
would be hard on your constitution."

"Yes," rejoined the Serbian with a gravely astute
look at his companion ; "but we have an upper and a
lower chamber."

Rowell told this on himself. Even that he could not
have done five years ago. Mingling with men more
solemn than himself he observed the inconvenience of
solemnity. He really wants to be a conductor of the little
currents of energy that make men think and act in small
groups. Some good parson years ago should have en-
couraged him to smoke between speeches.

Opportunity. This focuses the other two. Rowell
has seldom neglected this mistress. It is comparatively
easy for many men to make themselves at the Sign of the
Dollar ; as a rule more difficult at the Sign of Culture.
Mr. Rowell is a man of fine intellectual attainments, which
he has seldom failed to use in furthering his public success.
Yet he was a good while becoming incorporated into the
body politic of Liberalism. The world was his parish.
Wesley was his idol ; then Laurier. Between these two
it is a marvel that even at the rather late age of forty-four
he came to the leadership of Liberalism in Ontario. Here
he became the prophet who would abolish the bar even
before its time, not without provocation. There had been
stories of wild drinking escapades among some of the
Liberal leaders in Queen's Park. Mr. Rowell can there-
fore be amply forgiven for having been the instigator of that
poster, "Is That You, Daddy ?"

This can be remembered from his five years of misfit
rule in Queen's Park when many of his good offices there
are mainly forgotten. It was rather pitiful to observe
how incapable Mr. Rowell was of giving vent to his great

122 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

talents in that Legislature. He did not understand the
lingo. Most of it was too piffling and small. He knew
Ontario better from the angle of corporation law. He
made a poor showing as leader, for there were no great
issues in which he could lead ; though he did initiate a
great deal of useful welfare legislation. He made one
heroic effort to understand New Ontario in the rough
when he donned overalls and went down in some of the
mines. But it was all too much in the rough. One ima-
gines there must have been many a moment when he
wished he had never taken that leadership with so precious
little to lead, and yearned for some larger way. But it
was a long, long trail. And Laurier was now a strange
old man. Whichever way he looked he was in a blind alley.

The Coalition gave him a way out. The old chief's
attitude towards the war made Laurier Liberalism still
more unpalatable. Rowell was deeply stirred by the war.
He could see in the upheaval of old and new world ideas
the sort of grand realignment which he could understand ;
the assertion of true Liberalism in true democracy. Any
average speech of his during the war demonstrates that he
was among those few leaders of thought whom the struggle
lifted into a larger conception of manhood in the State.

Again, honesty to himself suggests that Mr. Rowell
did not suffer such pangs at his severance from Laurier as
did men like Carvell, Guthrie and Clark, who had fought
under the old man in Commons. At the Liberal Win-the-
War meeting in 1917, he threw off all disguises and fer-
vently proclaimed that he had chosen to take office under
"the greatest Premier in the world." The statement
smacked not so much of insincerity as of a sense of emanci-
pation. Mr. Rowell was no longer labelled a Laurier
Liberal. He was a free agent in a new great conflict of
force. He was stirred as never he had been. Of all the
Liberals who took oath under the new administration he
was the strongest, and the most difficult to assign a com-

HON. NEWTON WESLEY ROWELL 123

petent task. He was made President of the Council and
Minister of Information. The peculiar advantage of the
latter was that as real information was the last thing that
seemed to be wanted by anything resembling a Government,
there was very little for Mr. Powell to do at his desk and
very much time for him to be absent where he felt much
more at home, in Europe. As President of the Council
he had great ability.

This one year of Ministry before the end of the war
gave Mr. Rowell an opportunity to survey forces of whose
operation he had no knowledge while he remained a mere
Liberal. He became officially familiar to London and as
the constant companion of the Premier came very near
to the elbows of the great, when he did not suffer by com-
parison.

But it was the Peace Conference that gave him his real
work. During the war any nation got the prestige that
it could win, either by its own efforts or in league with
others. All nations on each side were more or less animated
by the one great purpose. Suddenly the golden grip of
union was off. The second war began around the Peace
table. In this new and more precarious conflict of pour-
parlers and old secret diplomacies under the dangerous
flare of the self-determination torch, national selfishness
rushed to the front of the stage. Every pocket of people
in Europe hemmed between a river, a mountain and a
dialect claimed the rights of a nation, when more than half
of them should have been conveniently merged into work-
able groups having some form of government with which
nations of experience could deal.

In this clamour of the voces popidi the voice of Canada
was not to be disregarded. We had reason that it should
be heard. We were in sudden danger of being over-
shadowed at the Conference by the vast figure of the other
half of North America. Mr. Rowell has never been an
anti- Yankee. He has too much fine sense ever to pull

124 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

feathers out of the eagle in retaliation for twisting the
lion's tail. He knows as well as any man the strategic and
moral necessity of Canada being the real House of Inter-
preter to the two leading Anglo-nations. He knew it at
the Conference. But he knew also that in proportion to
service and sacrifice in the war, Canada in the Council of
Peace had a right to be heard and considered as the voice
of a nation occupying the northern half of North America.

There was great sense in the estimate of a leading
London correspondent that among the four most impres-
sive and masterful personalities at the Geneva Assembly
of the League, Rowell the Canadian was at least the fourth.
This was not merely a personal or natural compliment.
It was the sincere recognition of a fact.

Mr. Rowell had the gift and the energy of will to trans-
late the Peace into Canadian language. He gave Canada
a voice in Europe. He did try so far as one man might to
play up to the voice given to Canada by the dead in Flan-
ders. In the big occasion when great tumult of forces
were rushing to a climax Rowell rose to the opportunity —
as he always has done — and he earned the lasting gratitude
of his country. We needed just that intellectual power
and that moral audacity, not only in Europe but in Wash-
ington.

Yes, N. W. Rowell has made a big use of opportunity.
He has even created it. But it was seldom the little simple
thing at his door that roused his great qualities. It was
the bigger issue that lay out among the mountain tops.
He was overwhelmingly eloquent for the universal eight-
hour day when he attended the International Labour Con-
ference in Washington. The League of Nations had recom-
mended it. But what of the cheap-labour competition in
the Orient ? And what did Mr. Rowell know about
Industry and Democracy at all ?

Mr. Rowell made a bold bid for recognition as a states-
man of international repute. And he got it. His speeches

HON. NEWTON WELSEY ROWELL 125

on the Empire were consistently a greater voice than
Borden ever could have had. The colleague of the Premier
became his Imperial master because he had the power
which Borden lacked, of making the British world-Common-
wealth live in great public utterances.

What a journey had this man travelled now from "Is
That You Daddy ?" in Queen's Park !

And it may be sensibly asked — What was his great
intention ? Canada is interested to know what is "the
big idea" in this man's mind. Corporation law cannot
contain him now. He has tried his strength and knows it.
He knows that other men know it.

Once during the derelict days of the Coalition it was
rumoured that Rowell on a Western trip would sketch out
a new leadership — for himself. But he was not a man to
throw Borden overboard. He had a profound respect for
the Premier, who had made great use of him.

Perhaps, if only Rowell had been born Conservative
instead of a Win-the-War Liberal converted into a Coali-
tionist, the Premier might have called him to succeed. We
know not. There was a predicament. White, Meighen,
Rowell— all must be considered. There was the Washing-
ton post, if ever it should come to be. Did Mr. Rowell
ever intimate that he wanted either of these ? Nobody
has said. But Sir Robert was wise at least not to have
offered him the Premiership. Too long had that been the
office of a man who could not lead. It was time for a
leader. It is not surprising that Mr. Rowell should have
stepped out of the Administration when Meighen went to
the head of it. He could not comfortably serve under
Meighen. Ambition is a tyrant. Self-sacrifice is usually
easiest when great moral issues are uppermost. For more
than one session he would not even retain his seat in the
House. His retirement opens Durham, a safe consti-
tuency under Rowell, and may weaken the Government.
But what if it does ? Mr. Rowell took office as a

126 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

Coalitionist to win the war. The war is won. But his
work — is only nicely beginning. How is he going to finish
his work for this nation ? He has not said. Not by
making sundry speeches about the League of Nations.

If this country is to go ahead on its own native steam,
it must be wise enough to find a big public place for the
great talents of N. W. Rowell. And if Mr. Rowell, or any
other disciple of opportunity in public affairs, wants to
give Canada what she has a right to expect from him, he
will do well to make his needed money now at corporation
law, and when he comes back to public life have a con-
stant eye single to the glory of his country.

To evolve men of that stamp is not easy. Rowell, like
Meighen, is a product of the older studious days when
youths buried themselves in books for the sake of getting
on in the world without reference to mere money. He is
now at an age when the best he has made of himself might
be of incalculable good to the country if he could help the
Government to go back to power and go with the National
Liberal-Conservative Party as conscientiously as he entered
the Unionist Government.

Conscience ; Oratory ; Opportunity. The greatest
of these is Conscience; the least, Opportunity.

AN AUTOCRAT FOR DIVIDENDS
BARON SHAUGHNESSY

CANADA has a national habit of veneration for the C.P.R.
just as England used to have for Kitchener in Egypt. The
travels of H. M. Stanley in Africa were not more wonderful
than the everyday lives of Sandford Fleming's engineers
routeing that great new line through the Rockies ; and
the legend of Monte Cristo scarcely more fabulous than the
exploits of Van Home in getting the money or the work
done without it. The man who bought supplies for Van
Home (when there was money) and wrote letters or sent
telegrams when there was none, got a finer preparation for
being a great railwayman than most Premiers ever got for
the duties of public life.

The sensations of the cured scriptural blind man who
saw "men as trees walking" were repeated to Canadians
of thirty-five years ago who read about those legendary
Scots, Yankees and Canadians who flung that chemin de fer
over Canada to start a Confederacy into a nation. And
there was no Boys' Own Annual in Canada to tell the tale,
as it should have been done, along with the tales of the
Northwest Mounted Police and the adventures of the
Hudson's Bay Company. George Stephen, Donald A.
Smith, Robert Angus, Sandford Fleming, John A. Mac-
donald, Van Home, the young Shaughnessy — all seemed
then to be not merely doers of the undoable, but men of
mighty imagination and a sort of Old Testament morality.
Even the Pacific Scandal seemed as necessary a part of
the narrative as the story of Joseph's coat and of Jacob
and Esau were of the epic of Israel.

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128 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

Well, admittedly, most of that has faded from the
Canadian Pacific. We read the annual address of the
C.P.R. President with yawns. It all seems considerably
like what is said and done at any directors' meeting of a
rubber factory or a street railway. You read the names
of the directors and few of them strike you with any sense
of novelty or of awe. The room in which these magnates
meet is — just a room ; it used to be thought of as a sort of
Doges' Palace of finance. You may even note that one
of the directors is baggy at the knees, and any two of them
may be talking along the corridor about that very ordinary
thing — the cost of living.

Of all the men at any C.P.R. directors' meeting, I/ord
Shaughnessy knows most about the steep side of finance.
He was the spender when there was nothing to spend.
The romantic adversities of those days never left him. He
came down to the presidency with the fear of no-funds in
his soul. From the beginning until then he had felt all
the ragged edges of C.P.R. life. He had grimly chuckled
to Van Home, the occasionally helpless wizard, over the
hard times. And hard times never really left the road
until Van Home handed the C.P. over to Shaughnessy just
at the edge of the era when the system was getting ready
to handle phenomenal traffic arising out of stupendous
immigration.

From then on till the day that he also went out was the
epoch when traffic and travel became vaster than the road,
and greater than the men. It was his to operate, and to
build as well. But the operations were all of a system
which had creaked into through traffic from Yokohama to
Montreal as far aback as 1889 ; and the new lines built
under Shaughnessy were just branches of the old trunk.
Shaughnessy took over bulging receipts after he had spent
years at painful expenditures. He took over a despotism
and made it an autocracy.

It was not in his practical, unromantic temperament

BARON SHAUGHNESSY 129

to play the Gargantuan role. He had not the mentality.
Van Home left the road when the road threatened to
become bigger than its creator. Shaughnessy began to
work on it when he knew that the bigger he made the
system the greater would be his own executive authority,
and the bigger the dividends to the holders of stock.

There was a radical contrast between these two men ;
and as much between the road built by Van Home and the
system operated and magnified by Shaughnessy. The
former would not have his shadow dwarfed by the dimen-
sions of his own creation. The latter had created nothing :
he would have the shadow of the thing fling itself so vastly
over the nation — and the nations — that whenever men
spoke of C.P. they thought of Shaughnessy, and when they
said his name they mentally took off their hats to the head-
ship of the greatest system of its kind in the world.

This may or may not have been Shaughnessy 's inten-
tion. It was certainly the effect. We have all gone
through the era of profound respect for the cold autocrat
of the twentieth century, as some of us did that of awesome
veneration of the railway giants of the nineteenth. We
have read newspaper stories — some of them buncombe —
about this man's all-seeing eye as he travelled over the
system, as we did of the peripatetic omniscience of James
J. Hill and the Gargantuan humours of Van Home. We
have consented that the system perfected by Shaughnessy
was the most marvellous known of its kind, and therefore
the man at its head must be a phenomenal administrator.

Very likely we have been warped by our enthusiasm.
Shaughnessy was no miracle man. He was a wonderful
maestro of details, a clear-headed organizer of systems and
a man to provoke high respect in those who had to deal
with him at close range. But he had perhaps less sheer
ability for detail than Van Home, who as a rule despised
the botheration of it. I have heard Van Home dictating
to his secretary a mass of intimate instructions to a con-

130 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

tractor about how to build a rotunda in a hotel in Cuba, at
the same time with his left hand on a drawer full of com-
plicated notes on his philosophy of life, which with the
other lobe of his brain he was traversing in order to engulf
the interviewer as soon as the letter was finished. Shaugh-
nessy never could have carried on such an interiew, lasting
four hours of a busy life. His talks to the press must be
curt and comprehensive — or else elliptical. He had no
exuding vivacity. When I talked to him — or listened to
him — he was cold and exact. He left his chair only to
walk erectly to the window. He deviated not a syllable
from the subject in hand — the system. He worshipped
that : as much as any Mikado ever did his ancestry. He
paid passing veneration to Van Horne — when from the
slant of his remark I surmised that he was critical even
in his admiration for that epical character.

Shaughnessy is essentially a system-man. When he
travelled he had his practical jokes and his Irish stories
and his fondness for the social side ; but he was conven-
tionally as correct as a time-table. Had there been a
spark of genius in him he would have extinguished it for
the sake of betterments to the most conventional Colossus
in Canada. The C.P.R. was supposed to lead. It was
built for dividends, and born in politics. It had craft at
its cradle. The new policy under Shaughnessy was bigger.
It had to do less with Asia, with spectacle, with carved
gods ; more with Europe, with immigration posters, with
land settlement. Shaughnessy had taken over a system
which could be used ostensibly as the agent of the Immi-
gration Department and of the Interior ; effectively as the
base of population-supply on its own account.

As Shaughnessy worked it out the C.P. had a scheme
of national expansion that acted independent of govern-
ment ; its own ships, trains, roads, docks, land offices,
immigration agents, poster-advertising — until the average
European looking for a way out of economic slavery be-

BARON SHAUGHNESSY 131

lieved that the C.P.R. was the owner and operator of
Canada. A belief which was not contradicted, except
officially, at home.

William Mackenzie set the pace for building ; Shaugh-
nessy for operation. But Shaughnessy built fast. He
did it under a handicap of two systems against one. The
difference was that an average new line under Shaughnessy
paid dividends, or at least did not appreciably lower divi-
dends already declared.

Under Lord Shaughnessy it was unofficially believed
that the head of the C.P.R. was somehow overlord to
governments. Shaughnessy the impenetrable was not the
agent of a democracy, but an emperor. He had his counter-
part in Japan. The Orientalism which Van Horne infused
into the system even while he laughed it out of court, was
solemnly accepted by the man who came after. But it
was the Orientalism of efficiency. Shaughnessy was its
symbol. Away from it he was of little consequence except
as a benevolent citizen with statesmanlike views upon how
governments should govern. Within it he was mighty.
He felt himself the apex of a thing that knew no provincial
boundaries. He consciously made it the instrument of
Empire. He was inordinately proud of its morale. To
him it was a complicated army. He felt it assimilating
men who lived, moved and had their being in C.P.R. — as
he had. He was the great human rubber stamp. He had
extra power. He lived on fiats and papal bulls. Men
learned to tremble at his nod — not at Shaughnessy, but at
the man who personalized the infallible system. And as
governments came up and capsized in the storms of public
sentiment, the great system went on in its sullen but
splendid way, a sort of solar system in which parties and
governments gravitated.

It would have needed a greater soul than Shaughnessy
to be cynical about C.P.R. It often needed his latent
Irish humour to appreciate the larger cynicism which it

132 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

expressed concerning the country. The pap-fed infants of
Mackenzie and Hays served but to illustrate by contrast
the perfection and the well-oiled technique of the dynamo
operated by Shaughnessy. It became an obsession with
him, as it did with Flavelle over a commercial company,
that "the king can do no wrong." His annual report
bristled with pride over the Company's achievements. He
insisted upon the inherent morality of the thing and of the
men who were its officials. And the older he grew the
more Shaughnessy became absorbed in it. In his career
the office of President reached its climax. It was shorn of
much of its aspect of awe as soon as he left it.

His knighthood was a slight decoration on so august a
personage ; as though the king had decorated the Mikado.
The baronage more nearly fitted the case. Shaughnessy
was not too passionately a Home Ruler to take it. But
he was never so good a president of the C.P.R. after he got
it. He became particular over forms and etiquette. One
almost looked for a change of guard at the gate when
entering the President's office.

No pomp, however, could undo such efficiency , and in
the main such national sanity. Shaughnessy always liked
to have a voice in national affairs. That was partly
tradition. It also kept the public from remembering that
the railway after all was a creature of government and of
politics. It sometimes deflected public attention from the
"melon" patch which was the Toronto World's sobriquet
for the C.P.R. "pork barrel," and from the ever potential
lobby maintained by the company at Ottawa. Of course
lobbies are always repudiated. No self-respecting railway
ever knows it by that name. There is no department of
lobbyage in the head offices. The art is never taught.
But it is childish to dodge the public necessity of a great
corporation being represented at the centre of national
legislation. In fact, C.P. has loomed so large in public
affairs that a member of Parliament for the Company

BARON SHAUGHNESSY 133

would sometimes have been scarcely ridiculous. When-
ever Lord Shaughnessy went to Ottawa, it was public news.
He never went for his health, seldom without some issue
too big for a subordinate to handle. Had the Minister of
Railways gone to Montreal to see Mr. President, it would
have seemed quite as natural.

The war gave Lord Shaughnessy for a time almost
equal prominence with Sir Sam Hughes. His quite sensible
speech criticizing the haphazard and costly methods of
recruiting made Hughes retort that to raise the First Con-
tingent was as great a task as building the C.P.R. Lord
Shaughnessy earned that absurd retort because of his
announcement to the Government that he meant to make
the speech ; as though the nation would be waiting to
hear it. There was room for one super-go vernmentarian at
Ottawa ; never for two. It was Hughes vs. Shaughnessy.

Lord Shaughnessy's retirement from the presidency
was not sudden. He had reached his zenith. His eye-
sight was bad. But he had not lost his grip. The war
threw such an unusual load on the system and so changed
its complexion that it became necessary to have a younger
man. There is reason to believe that the war rudely upset
much of the Imperial dignity of the great system. The
C.P. was no longer a law unto itself. It was part of the
national pool. The President was no longer a sublime
autocrat ; he was a public agent. The life blood of a
globe-girdling system was drained by the war, even while
it retained its supremacy as the greatest railway and more
than held up its end compared with the railway muddle in
the United States. Never again could the C.P. recover
its splendid isolation of greatness. Public ownership was
being thrust upon the nation by the bankruptcy of the
other roads. Shaughnessy had no real fear that it would
ever absorb the C.P.R. But he had reason to suspect that
a huge Government system would be more or less of a
menace to the system which he had spent his life to build up.

134 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

There was no better way than to retire, leaving the
chief administration to a man of his own choice and retain-
ing the post of Chairman along with the room occupied
by the old President. Even here the old autocrat survives.
The proposal made by Baron Shaughnessy to pool all the
railways, except the Grand Trunk, and to put them all
under C.P. administration with a guarantee of dividends
to C.P. shareholders — was a magnificent play to the gallery.
The other roads were undeniably bankrupt, when even the
splendid showing made by the management could not
make their records palatable to the public. It was a
strategic time to advertise once, finally and for all, the
unequalled efficiency of the old Transcontinental.

But Canadian railwaydom is dominated by C.P.R.
as naturally as tides by the moon. The Railway Associa-
tion, once the Railway War Board, are now a junta of
dividendists and of paid chiefs of the Government system,
to oppose — whenever necessary — the adverse judgments
of the Government's Railway Commission. The road
which was the tangible nexus of Confederation was built
by two Americans, one of whom became a high-tariff Tory
and a knight, the other an Imperialistic baron who believed
in Dominion Home Rule for Ireland when the average
Canadian considered Home Rule as treasonable as annexa-
tion. It is the prerogative of any robust Canadian to
oppose either infection from Broadway or domination
from Downing Street. But, regarding the strategic
position of Canada in the misnamed "British Empire," we
might all take a cue from Lord Shaughnessy, who has had
all the internationalizing emotions of which any man is
normally capable, and can challenge any man to shew
where he has ever compromised conscience or country.

THE PUBLIC SERVICE HOBBYIST
SIR HERBERT AMES

WHATEVER may be done by the Washington Conference
to the League of Nations, there still live two men to whom
it is and shall be the hub of the world. Lord Robert
Cecil and Sir Herbert Ames at least will never admit that
the League was a mere Wilson-Democrat device for making
the world safe for humanity, and that the alternative is a
Harding- Republican expedient for making Washington
the new hub of the world.

Sir Herbert is much, too cordial a cosmopolitan to
begrudge Washington any eminence she can get from
imitating the League. He is too charitable even to admit
that if Dr. Wilson had stood for peace first and covenant
second, no Washington Conference would have been needed.
He is also Canadian enough to realize that transferring
the centre of the Peace progaganda to the leading Capital
of the New World is a good way to remind the Old World
that Ottawa has more to do with Washington than even
London has. Out of the Washington Conference may
arise the Canadian envoy. Whatever happens in the
Pacific zone of the world-open diplomacy can never hurt
Ottawa — nor disturb the complacent optimism of Sir
Herbert Ames, Financial Director of the Secretariat to the
League of Nations. The time may come when even Ottawa
is considered a better place than London or Geneva for the
conduct of world-peace agenda.

When Sir Herbert Ames was chosen Financial Director
of the League Secretariat he was chosen less to please
Canada than to vindicate his own ability. When he

135

136 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

spoke in Canada on how the League works he showed his
remarkable optimism by extolling its operations at a time
when Europe was more anarchic than at any time since
the war.

Every forward nation should have its Ames. This one
justified his existence in Canada long before he became a
knight or even an M.P. for St. Antoine. Montreal. At one
time in his citizenship he was the incarnation of what a
large number of people would be anxious to avoid ; in the
days when he used to pack his grip from Montreal and go
forth on lectural pilgrimages over Ontario and other parts.
On a platform he always seemed like a long, lean school-
master. Sometimes he used a blackboard. One of his
pet subjects was prohibition. He looked entirely like it.
One could scarcely recollect having heard quite so dry av
man on any subject. He looked like the genius of self-
denial — like a man who long ago should have gone into a
monastery, doing penance for the uplift of the world as
mirrored in his own conscience, instead of remaining at
large a common Presbyterian and a very uncommon sort
of Tory.

I was agreeably startled to find Sir Herbert in 1920 one
of the most cordial and amiable men on the roster of Who's
Who. He was no longer dry, bigoted, or pedagogical. In
fact he was almost benignly human, even humourous.
And I concluded that if intimacy with the League of
Nations could work such a change in the average man con-
nected with it, there is surely some function for the League
as a cheerful solvent for the world.

Sir Herbert Ames" previous work as Hon. Chairman of
the National Patriotic Fund of course did a good deal to
reclaim him. Of all war work this was among the most
destructive of personal bigotry and political prejudice. If
Sir Herbert imbibed the real philosophy of the Patriotic
Fund he must be, speaking humanly, one of the wisest men
in Canada. It was a scientific fact that at a time when

SIR HERBERT AMES 137

men in the army were displaying incredible heroism, certain
people at home were exhibiting unbelievable meanness.
The people who used to attempt graft on the Patriotic
Fund were the kindergarten of the college of national
profiteers who came later. They were happily out-num-
bered by the people who were thankful for all they got and
who in the greatest losses that life can inflict showed almost
sublime fortitude and patience.

Preparation for some form of public service by doing it
as he went along has always been Ames' strongest charac-
teristic. He had eyes for the homely, sometimes mean,
job under his nose. There was an evangelism about him.
Why ? Because he was a citizen. Where did he live ?
In Montreal. No man can be a reforming citizen in Mon-
treal unless he has plenty of time, and some money. Mr.
Ames has always had both. He also has endless patience.

Perhaps the most remarkable proof that he intended to
be a practical philanthropist is the fact that for eight years
he was one of the feeble Anglo-Saxon minority in the Mon-
treal City Council. An artist in search of contrast could
never have found a finer example than a comparative study
of the leader of the English section Ames, and the French
boss, the late L. A. Lapointe. In the bilingual Legislature
of an incorrigible city Mr. Ames spoke two languages. If
he had mastered twenty he never could have equalled
Lapointe, who in my recollection of a long conversation
some years ago could genially and grandly boast that the
fad for reforming the City of Montreal would never make
much headway so long as he remained boss of the French
section in Council. Lapointe was Montreal's Tammany.'
He held Montreal under his patronage and executive thumb
before Mederic Martin had begun to achieve any fame
beyond that of a maker of cigars. He knew every cranny
of Montreal as intimately as the late John Ross Robertson
used to know Toronto. Mr. Ames' knowledge of the big
town was fairly complete. But if Mr. Ames and Mr.

138 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

JLighthall, the genie of civic information in Montreal, could
have been one two-headed man, they never could have
matched Lapointe in the expert business of knowing where
to plant a man to give him a civic job or how to create a
job to suit a man in need of it.

Yet for eight consecutive years Mr. Ames with no other
desire than to do his duty, to study Montreal, and perhaps
qualify for larger service later, remained a member of the
City Council. And he did his work there before the
English-speaking element undertook to clean up the city —
the most genial, sarcastic failure of modern times. He
wrote little books about Montreal. He mastered French
by studying it first-hand in France. Those who used to
listen to his evangelical speeches in his own tongue some-
times wished he had learned a few nuances and inflexions
in English. He was for some time Chairman of the Muni-
cipal Board of Health, in a city where infant mortality is
such a constant epidemic that babies' coffins are displayed
in shop windows. In 1907 he wrote a tractate on the
housing of the working classes, just on the eve of the period
when Montreal began to be the worst city in America for
high rents, extortionate charges for moving and intolerable
congestion. The publication of his views on the subject,
however, showed that he had the courage to point out
what was wrong, even though he had no concrete con-
structive proposal which any municipal government in
Montreal or any Legislature in Quebec would ever accept
as a working basis for putting the thing right. As far back
as 1901 he indited a treatise on The City Problem, What
Is It ? Twenty years later, after all Mr. Ames* burnings
on the subject, Montreal has slumped back into sheer
mediaevalism in civic government under the wheedling
despotism of Mederic Martin, who presided at the public
funeral of the only effort the city ever made to establish
a real business administration. In that Quixotic eruption
of public virtue in 1912, Mr. Ames, after all his publicity

SIR HERBERT AMES 139

on the subject of redeeming Montreal, was not even con-
sidered as a candidate for the Board of Control.

On the whole scarcely a public man, or even a reforming
editor, in Canada has talked so consistently and so cheer-
fully for so long a period and to so little apparent purpose,
on the need for cleaning up civic government. The dif-
ference between Mr. Ames and the average public-service
expert in Montreal on this question is that Mr. Ames has
never been worldly-wise enough to become an avowed
cynic on the question. He probably knows as well as any-
body that to clean up Montreal is in the same category as
making Europe safe for the League of Nations ; a much
harder city to regenerate than even Philadelphia. Muck-
raking has no effect, when two-thirds of the population read
French papers which never use the rake, and when the
boss of three-fourths of the rest is himself often a target
for the yellows. Mr. Ames should long ago in this con-
nection have propounded a thesis, Hugh Graham, What
Is It ? He would then be free to dissect the ethics of
Mederic Martin and the late L. A. Lapointe.

Martin rules Montreal in spite of Lord Atholstan, the
Archbishop and the International Union, because in his
own person he interprets the distinction between Anglo
and Franco. In Montreal a dominant minority controls
three-fourths of the commercial wealth. A couple of
dozen men control big industries, railways, electric and
water powers, finance and newspapers. When these men
want the City Hall they consult the directory. To them
Montreal is a convenient sea-wharfing spot to conduct big
business ; otherwise a French Canadian city and so, hope-
less. The chief common bond between this group and the
city at large is the labour market. The elections are a
mere superficial disturbance, f he old courteous alterna-
tive of a French mayor, an English mayor, and an Irish
mayor has been discarded. The mayors are all French
now. The population is overwhelmingly French. The

140 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

City Hall is as French as the courts. The civic jobs are
given to Frenchmen. As a rule there are plenty of jobs.
It is a fair compromise — that if the Anglos will monopolize
most of the big productive business, the civic administra-
tion must go to the Francos who are the elective majority.
Sir Herbert Ames ,who was born in Montreal and is
the only man who has ever undertaken to theorize openly
as to its redemption, knows exactly why the place is so
absbrbing to the cynical mind. He understands that a
man cannot have the same geometrical and diligent enthu-
siasm for Montreal as he has for Toronto. To be a thought-
ful citizen of Montreal stimulates the imagination and dis-
gusts the economic sense. For the past ten years Sir
Herbert has been too much absorbed in Ottawa and the
League of Nations to care much about the city where he
spent so much of his earlier zeal for reclamation. The
member for St. Antoine has a larger orbit — to negotiate
which he has resigned his seat in the House.

One is tempted to consider whether there are not
enough secretarial minds in Europe from which to take a
man as Financial Secretary for the League of Nations, and
let Sir Herbert come back to Canada to finish his work.
He has had world experiences enough to come back and be
of some real use to the country. He is not yet sixty. He
has ahead of him twenty years in which he could do a great
deal more for the Empire about which he is so earnest by
working in Canada than by occupying a. conspicuous post
somewhere in Europe. It is not the fashion for ex-Cana-
dians who have had political or other experiences abroad
to come back here for anything but speeches and banquets.
Sir Herbert may be permitted to change the fashion. With
his versatility in French, his knowledge of Europe, his
acquaintance with large public questions of finance and his
general savoir faire, he seems to be just the kind of man
who could head a movement to nationalize Montreal.
But of course he never will do it.

THE SHADOW AND THE MAN
HON. SIR SAM HUGHES, K.C.B.

THE career of the late Sam Hughes is a tragic reminder
that no man in public life can afford to regard himself as
bigger than his suitable job. When a nation has to retire a
genius for the sake of enthroning what remains of common
democracy the nation's loss is nobody's gain. In the jungle
book of our aristocracy Sam Hughes should have been
Lord Valcartier. Not that a democratic country cares at
all to be given any more lords, even if Parliament had not
asked the King to abolish the custom. But while peerages
and baronetcies were being handed about for honour,
Hughes was the kind of man that should have got his —
except that he made it impossible.

However, it is more interesting to record the short-
comings of Hughes than to report the success of medio-
crities. Canada had in Hughes a name with which for a
year or so to poster almost any part of the Empire, especi-
ally England. We are in danger of forgetting at this
distance — five years now since he resigned office — just
what were the conditions that made him such a tre-
mendous figure.

Sam Hughes, M.P., born in County Durham, Orange-
man from the town of Lindsay, editor, soldier, adventurer,
school teacher who once taught English and who never
could make a speech, though he talked in public — what
was there about him up till 1914 to make any nation
wonder ? The first time I saw Hughes, in 1910, a man
whose office he had just left said, as though imparting a
State secret :

141

142 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

"There goes the next Minister of Militia."

Up till that moment if anybody had asked me, "Do
you know Hughes ?" I should have said, "Oh, yes, every-
body knows Jim Hughes, the School Inspector."

The story of Canada's Army is immortal. It is yet to
be truly told. When it is told by the right man — whether
historian or poet — the name Hughes, as we know it at its
best and biggest, will shine out like a great fixed star that
tried to play being a comet. On April 22nd, from the sick
bed that even he probably knew he never would leave
of his own will, in memory of St. Jnlien, he sent the army
boys a brief message, that he still believed in them as he
always had.

Simple little message, it meant much. It would have
meant a million times more if the "boys" could have
flashed back a helio to the wan old General who used to be
such a noise in the world — "Same to you, General." The
boys somehow liked him. The defects of Sam Hughes
were of the sort that soldiers love. He was a man's man.

"Tipperary" was just becoming popular to whistle
when a camera man authorized by the Government of
Canada took one of the most striking pictures in our part
of the war outside the zone of the shell areas. Gen. Sam
Hughes, jack boots and oilskin cape flung back by the gale
to show his belt and the flap of his khaki, wide-legged on a
rope ladder, coming down forward from a troopship in the
Gulf, almost baring his teeth to the October wind ; bidding
farewell to the First Contingent 33,000 strong, that steamed
out of the Gulf into the convoy.

You recognize in such a picture a man who perhaps
understood the sensations of Alexander. Sam Hughes had
finished his first job for the war. Among all the war
achievements that thrilled nations when big men suddenly
took hold of them in after years, this one holds its own.
Hughes never could match it again. Here was the greatest
army that had ever put out to sea at one time ; an army

HON. SIR SAM HUGHES 143

forty per cent bigger in three months than the total force
that Gen. Ian Hamilton estimated Canada could send as
her whole contribution to a great war. This was Hughes'
answer to Hamilton. Not only were the men Canadian
— if not many of them Canadians — but their uniforms,
boots, kits, rifles, horses, tents, artillery, machine gun
batteries, army waggons, cook waggons, engineering out-
fits and munitions, were as far as possible produced in
Canada. Troop trains and transport steamers were
Canadian. The money that paid for the army was Cana-
dian. The pay of officers and men was Canadian. And
we know what Hughes was.

But the moment Hughes let go the rope ladder that
should have made him Lord Valcartier, he began to undo
his own career.

In a misguided speech afterwards Sam reminded Lord
Shaughnessy that to raise, equip and dispatch the First
Contingent from Canada was a heavier contract than
building the C.P.R. The comparison was foolish, but very
human. Shaughnessy had provoked it by announcing to
the Government that he intended to make a speech in con-
demnation of Hughes' methods of recruiting.

The author of Canada in Flanders describes exactly
what the work of organizing that Contingent was. A few
extracts will do :

"In less than a month the Government, which had
asked for 20,000 men, found almost 40,000 at its disposal. . .
General Hughes devised and ordered the establishment of
the largest camp that had ever been seen on Canadian soil.
The site at Valcartier was well chosen. ..."

"The transformation effected within a fortnight by an
army of engineers and workers was a remarkable triumph
of applied science. Roads were made, drains laid down,
a water supply with miles of pipes installed, electric lighting
furnished from Quebec and incinerators built for the
destruction of dry refuse. A sanitary system second to
none that any camp has seen was instituted. Every com-
pany had its own bathing place and shower baths: every

144 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

cook-house its own supply of water. Troughs of water for
horses filled automatically so that there was neither shortage
nor waste. The standing crops were garnered ; trees cut
down and the roots torn up. A line of targets 3^ miles
long — the largest rifle range in the world — was constructed.
.... Camp and army leaped to life in the same hour.
Within four days of the opening of the camp nearly 6,000
men had arrived in it. The cloth mills of Montreal began
to hum with the manufacture of khaki, which the needles
of a great army of tailors converted into uniforms, great-
coats and cloaks. The Ordnance Department equipped
the host with the Ross Rifle. Regiments were shuffled
and reshuffled into battalions ; battalions into brigades.
The whole force was inoculated against typhoid. There
were stores to accumulate ; a fleet of transports to
assemble ; a thousand small cogs in the machine to be
nicely adjusted.

Sir Max Aitken did not mention the message to ' ' My
Soldiers " in every man's knapsack, an imitation of
Kitchener's knapsack message to the "Old Contemptibles" ;
or that he himself had applied to Sam Hughes for a "job"
in Canada's army.

Hughes was Minister of War, not a Minister of Defence.
In the tramp of battalions down the street he felt Canada
to be a young nation, not an overseas Dominion only.
Yet the First Contingent was the work of one of the most
scientifically unprepared-for-war peoples in the world.
Valcartier was the glorification of Hughes, who was always
personally prepared for war ; what or where he was not
always sure, except that it would involve the Empire, that
when it came, the sand-bags of Canada's front line would
not be in Canada, and the Canada Militia Act would be as
useful in the case as a page from Pickwick Papers.

Allow for the British-born majority in the First Con-
tingent, the patriotic enthusiasm of Militia officers, the
commandeering of national resources and the great work
of subordinates ; the fact remains that had he not been
as much his own enemy as he was a soldier born and bred,
Sam Hughes should have been Lord Valcartier.

HON. SIR SAM HUGHES 145

The sad fact about Hughes is that he did not estimate
what Canada did and did not in her first impact upon the
war. He could not see Canada except as the shadow of
Sam Hughes. In the light of the war as he stood in front
of it, that shadow of Hughes seemed to him to cover the
country. For two years, it seemed to grow. Then it
flickered. In 1916 it went out. And there never was in
Canada a going out like it.

Hughes was the embodiment of force without power.
He began to mobilize a nation, not merely as battalions
on parade, but as an army equipped by Canadian science,
industry, transportation, intelligence, and citizenship. So
far as he carried that out, the editor of the Lindsay Warder
and M.P. for Haliburton and Victoria had no superior in
organizing force in this country. Up till 1916 he was a
patriotic cannon-cracker exploding without any particular
objective, except that he wanted a Canadian Army in
Canada, not an overseas Contingent, or an Imperial Army.
Between 1914 and 1916 he was a great organizing soldier,
at his best comparable to any men who were doing wonders
at the front. As Nationalist as Quebec, he thought of
Canada as a unit in the Empire, most of which he had seen
for military reasons. Canada could not declare war ; but
in the mind of Hughes the force that held Canada and
other overseas dominions within the Empire was not in
trade and tariffs, but in ships, armies and victories.

Sam Hughes failed to translate his force into power
because he failed to estimate the elements which carried
him to success, and therefore could not measure the energies
that would defeat him. He never understood what Bis-
marck called the "imponderables". Nature gave him the
energy ;• Fate the ambition : Destiny denied him the
vision.

The electric energy of this nation in response to the call
of war made a flash that blinded Hughes. He seemed to
think that he was the man who was running the cataract.

146 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

He had a wholesome contempt for Kaiserism in Germany.
He tried to express it by an imitation of Kaiserism in
Canada. He had a sense of relative omnipotence. He
put editors in jail, went over the heads of District com-
manders, inexcusably humiliated General Lessard in com-
mand of the most important military district in Canada,
openly browbeat officers in front of their men, played
Napoleon on a white charger at the crest of a mound in
Valcartier, and trod on the official corns of his colleagues.

Such things are now somewhat blurred by perspective.
At the time they were glaringly in the spotlight as the
pranks of a Jack the Giant Killer. In December, 1914,
Premier Borden made a tactical visit to the headquarters
of Military District No. 2, nominally commanded by
General Lessard.

A military writer had this to say about the Premier's
speech :

". . . . He thought the accomplishment of this task
(Valcartier) was a tribute to the spirit of the people. He
claimed no special credit for his Government ; inferentially
it was a high compliment to the organizing ability of the
Minister of Militia, but Sir Robert deftly left that to the

imagination of his audience A curious feature was

his avoidance of any mention of the 'Minister of Militia.'
When he desired to speak of the military programme, he
stated that he had decided, after consultation with the
' Chief of Staff'. This was done repeatedly and apparently
with definite purpose. Once he mentioned the name of
Major Lessard, and a shout went up from the audience."

Further quotation is not needed. In less than two
months after the glorification of Valcartier, the Premier
found himself challenged by the man who had already
begun to act as though national headquarters were in the
Militia Department. Sam Hughes was never unpopular
in Toronto. The incident referred to might almost have
taken place in Montreal.

Canada was beginning to understand, to heroize and to
censure Sam Hughes. His measure was being taken here.

HON. SIR SAM HUGHES 147

But the censure was unheeded. Hughes worked while
critics talked. He was mobilizing, if not organizing, a
nation. He still believed that he (ipse) could do it. The
mobilization included everything needed by the army as
well as the army itself. He wanted to get the nation
behind the army : and himself behind the nation. He
started everything — even to shells, high explosives and
aeroplanes. Hughes knew what the army needed. He
refused to admit that other men also knew how to get
some of these things better than he did.

Cabinet colleagues were adjuncts. The motto punct-
uated by the smashing fist was, "I want to tell you !"
No major on parade ever felt so overwhelming. Hughes
was more than a martinet. He was a dilemma. The
phenomenal was always about him. War was not even
hell to Sam Hughes. It was more often a chance to show
a civilian minister that he was a mere conventional orna-
ment. Hughes may have hated the necessity, but he
loved the spirit and the fire, of war.

Sam Hughes was probably wiser on what modern war
demanded than many of the British command. Even
Kitchener argued for shrapnel when Lloyd George wanted
high explosives. There was no civilian in Canada to argue
against Hughes, who aimed to do in Canada what the
Minister of Munitions, Director-General, Headquarters
Staff, and the Minister of Transports did in England. He
was able from the first to get a realizing measure of the
kind of mechanical hell known as modern war.

Start a force like that and you may expect abnormali-
ties in the wake of it. We had "Sham Shoes". Hughes
had nothing to do with those. He stated in Winnipeg
that Wellington had once said that a contractor who made
bad boots for an army should be shot. We had shell
contracts — and the "friend" Joseph Wesley Allison ; the
Kyte charges, which brought the Minister home from
England to answer them in the House. Neither the

148 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

answer nor the friend was characteristic of the kind of man
we had supposed Sam Hughes to be. We had the Ross
Rifle. Hughes knew that in actual warfare the Ross was
the finest sniper's rifle in the world, but that in quick action
it jammed so badly that often the Canadians furtively
swapped them for Lee-Enfields whenever the chance came.
There was no excuse for the Ross rifle, and Hughes ought
to have admitted it. There never should have been a
chance for any detractor of his to insinuate that the Minis-
ter had stock in the Ross Rifle Company. We had cellulose
nitrate and Grant Morden, who has never had an equal
over here for making sudden wealth out of next to nothing
and getting popular credit for doing it. What the ex-
Minister of Militia made out of that promotion was never
stated. It never should have been necessary for him to
have made a copper in any such way. On his retirement
from the Cabinet Hughes should have had a big honour-
able endowment from the nation sufficient as an income
for the rest of his life. The whole idea of such a character
being even good-humouredly mixed up with any deal not
absolutely foursquare is a paradox. The Sam Hughes
that we knew best was as straight as a chalk line.

The exploits of Canada's army never surprised Hughes.
He had always said they could do it. He boasted about
the generals he had taken from desks and offices. But
the generals were fighting. There was a cubist picture in
the War Memorials at Ottawa thus described by a Cana-
dian editor who went over the battlefields which it depicted :

"The canvas shrieking with its high hues was filled
with Turcos in panic flight crowding one another in /their
terror, while over them billowed the yellow poison pall of
death ; but in the midst of the maelstrom the roaring
Canadian guns stood immovable and unyielding, served
by gunners who rose superior alike to the physical terrors
of battle and the moral contagion of fear."

That picture of St. Julien must have thrilled Hughes,

HON. SIR SAM HUGHES 149

whose son was soon to be Brigadier-General. It was on
the crest of the St. Julien wave that Hughes got his title
and was given the freedom of London ; when some delirious
writer in a London daily predicted that some day Sir Sam
would ride through London at the head of his victorious
troops. One writer called him the Commander-in-Chief of
Canada's Army. None of these things moved Sam Hughes
to humility. As well as any man he knew how small the
greatest man was in the fury of that war.

Other Cabinet Ministers had to wait till the Peace
Conference before getting such press notices. Even the
Premier took nearly two years to convince London that he
was much more than the civilian colleague of Gen. Hughes.
Sir Sam was idolized from the beginning ; at times when
generals at the front were baffled, discouraged and beaten,
and when patient old Kitchener was enduring red tape and
making perfunctory reports to the Lords, knowing that
the war was bigger than his knowledge of it.

Hughes may not have been wise enough to estimate
the real value of this idolatry ; but he was probably shrewd
enough to know that it would soon be over. He knew
that much as had been done to make Canada a war nation,
the first two years had done less than half the work.
87,000 troops went overseas in 1915. That was natural.
The majority of the men were in camp. In 1916 the
number was almost doubled, from the enlistments of 1915.
In 1917 the number sent overseas dropped to 63,536,
proving that the enlistments of 1916 had' been about half
those of 1915.

Hughes knew this better than anybody. He knew
that the voluntary system, in which he believed, was going
to break down. We had no national register. A country
as big as twenty Englands, with a population about one-
fourth as big, had • also Quebec — and the farmer. The
Canadian census was five years old and useless for anything
like a national register of resources of war. Camp Borden

150 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

in 1916 helped to stimulate recruiting and to give Hughes
something resembling in a feeble way the sensations of
1914. But Camp Borden was not Valcartier. General
Lessard, whom he had ignored in 1914, was sent down to
Quebec to encourage enlistments. He went too late.
Wrong men had gone earlier. Hughes had never tried to
placate Quebec. But in 1916 he himself went down to
see Cardinal Begin. For an Orangeman like Hughes that
was a desperate measure. He got what he expected —
cynicism. Begin afterwards issued a letter to the press
in which he tried to set the clergy above the law of con-
scription. No doubt the Cardinal came at Hughes with
the twaddle invented by the Nationalists and later adopted
by I/aurier, about enforcing the Militia Act which pro-
vided for nothing but defence.

Canada had now four divisions in the field. The prob-
lem was how to keep them up, and how to send a fifth.
The fifth never went. But it stands to the immortal credit
of Sam Hughes that the four did, and that he had sent them.

The affair about the Chairman of Munitions was to
Hughes a sore blow. He had started munitions as an arm
of war. He did not want a civilian to take it over as a
mere industry. Even that was a sign that the volunteer
system was about done. Ottawa was full of experts now,
each man taking over as a big business something started
by Hughes. The one-man epoch was over. But Hughes
refused to admit it. The man who had started everything
was in no humour to admit anything. Yet in the darkest
days Hughes never lost faith in the men who had gone.
No man continued to say more heartening things about
ultimate victory. And he played blind optimist against
the cold, comfortless fact that the Canadian Army was
wasting and the reserves were not marching up to mend it.

Hughes knew that conscription had to come. But he
was the very last man in authority to admit it. Only a
few days before Ottawa announced that compulsory service

HON. SIR SAM HUGHES 151

must be applied, and when Sir Sam knew it was coming, he
said publicly to soldiers in Toronto that Canada, the free-
man's country, would never need conscription. It was
most pitiful to hear him. Sir Sam never seemed to pity
himself. His egoism was game enough for anything.
Bigger men than he had gone down. A big man here or
there was nothing now. But what of little men that
stayed up ? Hughes probably asked that in silent con-
tempt as he saw the coming of Coalition. But he knew he
would not be there when it came.

By this time the egotism that was so splendid in 1914
had begun to breed in Gen. Hughes rancours and envies
and enmities. Some of the men he had sent overseas
were now more potent figures than himself.

There was still a person at the head of the Militia
Department known as Lieut.-General Sam Hughes, K.C.B.
But there was no longer in Canada any such man as old
Sam Hughes. The Fate chickens hatched in 1914 were
coming home to roost. For two years* the Government
had carried on two wars, one with the Kaiser Wilhelm, the
other with Kaiser Sam. It had to be determined that
whatever defects government may have because it is a
democracy — even such democracy as was left in 1916 —
it is bigger than any one man. It had to be conceded that
the nation was bigger than any one political party, and
war bigger than all the world's volunteer armies.

Sam Hughes belonged to the eternal Volunteers. The
days of his glory were the days when Canada of her own
accord went to war or stayed at home. The Force called
Hughes dreamed that it was bigger than a machine called
War. But the machine won. Hughes went down. He
went down as he had come up — alone. His going down
seemed more swift than his rising. And yet he began to
go down when he stood on the rope ladder down the Gulf
and watched the troopships drift out. If in that moment
he had not dreamed that General Sam Hughes was above

152 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

government, he might have continued his great work long
enough to become Lord Valcartier. He might have helped
in a second Capture of Quebec, made conscription less
difficult when it came, and put the Fifth Division into the
field. And in that case Canada's part in the war would
have been even more magnificent than it now is.

The latter days of the General were characteristic of a
man who never knew he was beaten. Musical geniuses
have written tremendous scores to depict a man's struggle
with death. None of them could have transcended the
long battle which Sam Hughes put up to stay here. For
months we had intermittent bulletins from his bedside
when any morning we expected to read that he was gone.
He was a hard man to conquer. And only his intimate
friends are likely ever to know whether or not it was his
own ultimate biting failure, after his almost super-human
success, that turned this man of the shadow into a phantom
before he let go.

And before he went the hard, bluff soldier, who has as
much iron in his composition as any man of his time
sprang one of those human surprises that even war fails
to emulate — when he listened time after time to the record
that he loved better than most music, "I know that my
Redeemer liveth", from Handel's "Messiah".

THE STEREOPTICON AND THE SLIDE
LIEUTENANT-GENERAL SIR ARTHUR CURRIE

THE war was a great cosmic artist of infinite satire, making
of humanity little stereopticon slides which he slipped in
front of his calcium and flashed upon the clouds for a
screen. When the war was done the stereopticon was
smashed. The slides remain. What shall we do with
them ?

One of the most world-interesting characters in the
magic lantern of war was Lieut. -General Sir Arthur Currie.
who in 1914 locked his real estate desk in Victoria, B.C.,
and in 1919 came back to Canada admittedly one of the
ablest commanders in a war which made the exploits of
Wellington seem like comic opera in simplicity.

Whatever partial, prejudiced or private opinions some
Canadians may have about Sir Arthur Currie, it must be
generally admitted that he was perhaps the most remark-
able of all the slides slipped into the stereopticon of the
war artist. To quote from "Canada's Hundred Days",
by J. F. B. Livesay, concerning the secret strategy of Sir
Arthur Currie for the great Amiens show in August, 1918 :

"That afternoon the Corps Commander had a talk with
the two Canadian correspondents. Before him was a large
scale map and the barrage map. It was all very clear and
lucid. We take up our line here ; and our first objective
is there ; 'zero' hour was named ; our final objective for
the day over there — constituting a world record for a first
day's advance

"So at last all is ready. The story goes that the Corps
Commander was asked how soon he could deliver the

153

154 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

— , ..,,..„.

Corps in fighting trim at the appointed place. 'By the
tenth,' he had said. 'Too long ; do it by the eighth.'
" And he did it. ... .

"And it was all done secretly and by night. For an
entire week the men of Canada were passing south from
their old front, taking circuitous and puzzling routes. None
knew where they went. They sang as they marched — a
thing they had not done for two years.

"Foremost that night of nights was one's sense of
wonder at how it had been done ; how of many tangled
threads of railway and lorry and march, all that great and
intricate machine — more complex far than Wellington had
gathered on the field of Waterloo — had been assembled in
perfect order to the minute

"Up the winding hill go all the impedimenta of war —
marching battalions, traction-engines towing great guns,
ammunition trains, long lines of Red Cross lorries ; every -
wl;ere the pungent odour of petrol. From every little
wood belch forth men. They march silently. They might
be phantoms, dim hordes of Valhalla, were it not for the
spark of a cigarette, a smothered laugh. There is no
talking. All is tense excitement. For miles and miles in a
wide concentric sweep every road and lane and bypath is
crowded with these slow-moving masses. Over the bare
hillsides lumber the heavy tanks, just keeping pace with
the marching men.

.... "Berlin thinks we are in Flanders ; London that
we are in the south. All is well

" .... The watch hand is creeping round — half-past
three — four — ten past four — an interminable laggard. It
is to be the greatest barrage of the war.

". . . . 'Zero' is set for four- twenty, and the pointer
has barely reached that figure when behind us there goes
up a mighty flare, and simultaneously all along the line
ten miles to north and south of us, other flares light up the
countryside. At the same instant there breaks out the
boom of our heavy guns, the sharp staccato of sixty-
pounders, the dull roar of howitzers, and the ear-splitting
clamour of whizz-bangs — a bedlam of noise. Shells
whistle and whine overhead ; they cannot be distinguished
one from another, but merge into a cataract of sound.

". . . . The heavens are lighted up across their broad
expanse by a continuous sheet of lightning, playing relent-

LIEUT. -GENERAL SIR ARTHUR CURRIE 155

lessly over the doomed lines. Now a faint light of dawn
shimmers in the east and soon blots out the fireworks. A

lark rises high, carolling

'"the fog lifts. It is eight o'clock. The cavalry, a
wonderful sight, appear on the scene. They have come up
from Hangest-sur-Somme and have lain overnight in the
great park of Amiens. Like a jack-in-the-box they have
sprung from nowhere — miles on miles of gay and serried
ranks, led by the Canadian Cavalry Brigade."

». * * * i « e

On the 1913 side of this Wagnerian stage setting take
a look at a real estate office in Victoria, B.C. The junior
member of the firm is a pink-faced giant who had taught
school and made no money, and having no other qualifica-
tion for getting ahead in the world, went into buying and
selling houses and corner lots. Victoria was booming
then or he never would have done it He had maps of the
city on his walls and could solemnly point out to some
timid newcomer in 1913 what little house there or nice
wooded lot yonder might suit her ; and the price — oh, yes,
the price ; seems high, but the location is excellent, the
neighbourhood fine, the scenery superb, and the city —
well, it had been going ahead until the slump and then

"Oh, yes, Victoria's all right," he insists heavily. "Got
sleeping sickness, that's all."

Then he yawns, which is a relief to the lady client, who
thinks that his face is less ugly that way. Such a huge,
long, solemn face ! She glances at the office, wondering —
if the agent is hard up ? If so, no wonder ; for he seems a
sad salesman.

He closes his desk and locks up. Off to the rifle ranges,
where he stays as late as the eye can see because — well,
it's a joy to help the men get bull's eyes.

Sunday — marches in full Highland regalia at the head
of the 50th Gordon Highlanders on garrison parade. On
the curb a twinkling little Jap watches him.

"Nothin' like him in Japan, John," says a boy scout.
"Wow !"

156 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

"Big — so big !" admires the Jap.

"Yah. Makes them big Macs, in the ranks look shrunk.
Knows artillery, too. Rifle — kick ! got a great eye. Look
at 'im right wheel !"

A 3f HC 3f ». % 3f

Then on the 1920 side of the Wagnerian stage picture
observe this same giant, less baby pink, thinner in the face,
clad in evening dress ; Inverness cape, crush hat, in the
rotunda of the Ritz in Montreal, beside an average athletic
citizen similarly dressed ; the superb civilian — and his
marionette.

"Er — I think the car's waiting, General."

"Oh, no. We'll walk. Only a block or two," booms
the giant.

He crosses the rotunda in seven swift, great strides,
while the marionette trots to keep up. They are off to a
function at McGill University. The new President — to
whom professors bow with frigid politeness and ladies ogle
in admiring awe, and university governors stand about
like a bodyguard as though to intimate, —

"Ridiculous ? Not a bit of it. There's no other univer-
sity President like him. And what else could we do with
him ? The Government had nothing to suit him ; for
politics he's never meant ; for business never. Geddes
left us. We picked a greater man. Yes, it seems awkward,
but never mind. A year from now you will say — here was
the man that made McGill as famous in 1921 as Sir William
Dawson, the world geologist, made it in 1890."

Montreal that made a citizen of prodigious Van Home
had here a character in a setting far more unusual. The
eminent soldier as head of a university. One of the last
surprises of the war ; almost as it seemed then a joker in
the pack ; when men had to remember how this man
leaped from an almost bankrupt real estate office in Victoria
to what he was in Canada's Hundred Days.

Of all men who seemed to have been absolutely created

LIEUT. -GENERAL SIR ARTHUR CURRIE 157

by the war Currie was the first. He enlisted for active
service in 1914, and Hughes made him brigade-commander
at Valcartier. He was in the First Contingent that swung
out of the Gulf the day that Hughes stood on the rope
ladder, almost forgetting that he had shaken hands with
Currie. He went to France as Commander of the 2nd
Infantry Brigade. Within two months came St. Julien
and the green gas when Currie held his part of the stricken
line from Thursday till Sunday.

"And on Sunday," said Max Aitken, eye-witness, "he
had not abandoned his trenches. There were none left.
They had been obliterated by the artillery. He withdrew
his undefeated troops from the fragments of the field forti-
fications, and the hearts of his men were as completely
unbroken as the parapets of his trenches were completely
broken." Much more was said in official despatches about
the fine spectacular heroism of other officers of lower rank.
Currie, the most picturesque physique on the West front,
was no man for mere gallantry. Poor dashing Mercer,
beloved of the ranks, later paid the penalty for the sort of
bravery that inspires troops but does not win battles.
Currie was no coward. But he was cautious. The Scot in
him preordained that he might be a necessity higher up.
He just flung his left flank around south and hung on.

We read on in the official record :

" Monday morning broke bright and clear and found the
Canadians behind the firing line But this day too was to
bring its anxieties. The attack was still pressed, and it
became necessary to ask Brigadier General Currie whether
he could not once more call on his shrunken Brigade. 'The
men are tired,' this indomitable soldier replied, 'but they
are ready and glad to go again to the trenches.' And so,
once more a hero leading heroes, the general marched back
the men of the 2nd Brigade, reduced to a quarter of its
strength, to the very apex of the line as it existed at that
moment."

Five months later a party of Canadian newspapermen

158 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

visited the Canadian front when one of them wrote concern-
ing Major-General Currie :

"English officers spoke of him with a curious mixture
of enthusiasm and reserve as though he were some new
sort of being. It was everybody's secret that this big,
husky Canadian with the baby pink face and the blue eyes
and the slow, smooth, bellowing voice was to be in command
of the Second Canadian Division just then being organized.
.... No place except Canada produces such voices .as
Currie' s, or such tremendous easy-moving bodies. He
met the newspapermen with a smile and a great outstretched
hand. The gesture was something like that of a popular
preacher shaking hands with the children on their way out
of church. But the voice was the great thing. It seemed
to come from illimitable depths. It suggested at once
poise and unlimited balance. Cool judgment that could
never be upset. Officers who saw Brigade Headquarters
being strafed and who saw the roof blown in over Currie's
head whispered among themselves that would be the last
of Currie. But he emerged as calm and smooth and pink

as ever The day the newspapermen saw him a very

junior officer who has since distinguished himself came to
report breathlessly, 'That last one, sir, got my tent !' He
was excited and just a trifle hysterical ; but two words
from the General seemed to calm him at once. 'That so ? '
he said, with the same quiet interest that a farmer might
have received news that a certain hen had at last laid an
egg. 'I thought that last one sounded a bit close.' '

Then there came to the head of the Canadian Corps a
man named Byng, who could stroll casually into a billet or
a training field to inspect "the muddy trench hounds" in
canvas leggings and with three buttons loose. Until Byng
came the Canadian Corps was a semi-disciplined and
marvellous mob of men who could swear as hard as they
could fight and fight like wildcats. Byng gave then
the massive and complex mechanism of an army competent
to conduct operations as a unit of modern war, dominated
by the man of whom the boys sang to the tune of Three
Blind Mice, "Byng Bangs Boche, See how they run !"
Currie, commander of the 2nd Division, had seen this

LIEUT. -GENERAL SIR ARTHUR CURRIE 159

Corps Commander stroll into a billet and hurl machine gun
questions at the men who jumped like eager school-boys to
answer. He must have silently envied this genius, who
cared far less than he knew about what was wrong in a kit
inspection, but had a shrewd eye for manoeuvres. Not
often in actual war does a man so personally popular
organize a cross-section of a vast international country
into a war machine called an army, and not seldom do men
when they hear of such a commander being transferred
look at one another in a sort of blank dismay and say,
"Well, I'll be damned. Now who's it ?"

Out of the army came slowly and ponderously the huge
Highlander, with the "baby pink face" and the rumbling
gong of a voice.

Sir Arthur Currie was much too honest to imagine that
he or any other man could make the Canadian army. It
was a heavy ordeal to follow Byng, just as it had been
easy for Byng to succeed Alderson. But Currie knew the
Canadians down at the root better than Byng knew them.
He knew how that army had been made : that he was
taking over a hunianized machine that was to war in 1917
what the sword of Wallace had been in man-to-man combat
seven hundred years earlier. He knew the weakness of
men for idolizing a popular commander. They never
would parody any nursery rhyme in his honour. Except
the Anzacs, they were the most audacious army in Europe.
They had become great in defiance of red tape, insisting
on whatever is called Canadianism. They embodied all
there was of Western independence on that Front. The
Anzacs, great in fight and in ideas of personal liberty, had
not been welded into such a machine as the Canadians,
whose advertised national qualities Currie was expected to
conserve.

"As soon as one lets the cheeky beggars, Canadians from
America, have a bit of quiet, they get uppish," was the
illuminating sentence in a letter found in a German trench

160 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

near St. Eloi. Currie knew those "cheeky beggars". In
his own elephantine way he loved them, when few of them
could figure it out. He knew how hard those "beggars"
could hit : how grimly they could stick : how madly they
could raid and rush : how infernally they could scheme
to "put one over on Heine "; how desperately they could
abuse earth and heaven when they had time in the rest
billets to smoke fags and write letters home. They were
no army to go whacking on the shoulder.

It had been all right for Byng the Briton to go among
those men with three buttons loose. Men like a touch of
insurgency in a commander who has come up among the
martinets. Byng was a professional soldier. Currie was
not yet even a mild insurgent, or was not known as such
to the ranks. ' He was almost a man of prayer. He moved
in a large arc somewhat like his great resolute body ; an
engine of might that never seemed weary ; who af'Molly-
be-Damned" studied battle reports at two a.m., and was
in the field at six. As he had almost come up from the
ranks, the men knew him. Here and there in a British
Columbia battalion may have been a man who had bought
a corner lot from Currie in Victoria. If so, he liked to
talk about the hard-up days of the Corps Commander
when he was in real estate.

Currie knew that above all things he must keep the
confidence of those men and that he could never do it by
familiarity. Success was the only way. Not, anyhow,
speeches. The C.C. was rather fond of talking aloud at
first ; sometimes too religiously. It was a habit that he
never quite abandoned, though he changed his style as he
grew in experience. f^4$$'$ V*$$ $%$? <*$$$

There was work to do. No army had more ; few
armies as much. Currie's was a mobile army ; needed as
shock troops in rough places — a very good reputation if
not too much of it. There was danger of the army losing
its Canadianism by being shunted about. One of Currie's

LIEUT. -GENERAL SIR ARTHUR CURRIE 161

first objectives that he wanted above all things to achieve
as a Canadian commander of initiative, was the capture of
Lens. He had a plan for this. He was never allowed to
carry it out. Says the author of "Canada's Hundred
Days" :

"Thus when he is ordered to abandon his planned
offensive at Lens and take the corps up the Salient, he
refuses point blank to serve under the Commander of the
Fifth Army. He is placed under his old Chief of the First
Army, looks over the ground before Passchendaele and
then protests against the whole operation as being useless
in itself and likely to cost the Corps 15,000 men."

It was said by some who believed they knew, that the
Lens preparation was nothing but a huge feint put up to
mislead Heine for an attack in force elsewhere. This was
one of the bewildering events of that baffling year when
the French army was in a state of mutiny, the nation
behind the army in a state of nerves, and the politicians,
clamouring for victories — or at least a cessation of defeat.
Something had to be done, not only by France but by
Britain, whose Premier insisted that unless the Germans
could be broken in the north he could not hold his country
united at home. There was a Council of War — so, a few
weeks before the writing of this, said a Canadian General
in New York — at which Currie was present. Sir Douglas
Haig unexpectedly arrived and was soon into an argument
with the Canadian Corps Commander demanding that he
abandon Lens and strike at Passchendaele. The two com-
manders were in violent disagreement. Currie refused to
yield. The British Premier went to France and met
Currie, who gave way to the Premier — as people usually
did — and, against his own convictions, abandoned Lens.
The precise military significance is of less value here
than the remark credited to Lloyd George, who is reported
to have said in England after a subsequent War Cabinet
meeting — that in the Canadian Corps Commander he had
met "the biggest thing physically and mentally on that
front."

162 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

What Currie was at the head of the Corps no civilian
then in Canada has any means of knowing, except by what
men say who were under him or about him. A brawny
veteran infantryman, whom I met with his chum, said :

"Currie — oh, yes, he was a good general. But few of
the men where I was in the trenches or the billets ever
liked him."

"But did you see much of him ?"

"Too much, begad." His chum nodded agreement.
"Too awful much, sometimes. Why, he used to come
into a rest billet almost every day after we'd come there
all shot to bits with only a corporal's guard o' the whole
battalion, muddy and tired and sleepy ; yes, and what's
the first thing we hear, but begad, we've all to shine up
and get spic and span for parade because the O.C. says the
C.C. orders it. Out we go, like a ragbag remnant and he
looks us over, says he knows we're tired and makes a
speech "

"Oh, boy, them speeches !" sighs the chum.

"Tells us how well we've done and all like o' that, and
at the end says there's such a devil of a job yonder that
he's compelled against his will

"Oh, yes, dead aginst his will," pipes the chum.

"To intimate that he'd like us to trail back to the
show and do it some more for the sake of the victory and
the good long billet we'll get presently. Yes, Currie was
a good General. He did the work, he got results. But
never tell me he was easy on his men — becuz four years
I was wan o' them."

One allows in this man's opinion for the tendency to
"grouch" that always appears in veterans who know best
how to fight. Men like this were "fed up" on the war, of
which they never saw anything but the glimpse of their
own sector. The war was over now, and between the
armistice and getting home many such men had a chance
to talk, as they wearily waited for a ship.

LIEUT. -GENERAL SIR ARTHUR CURRIE 163

"Yes, and that capture of Mons," says the chum, as
he sips a little drink. "Altogether useless and against
orders. The war was over."

"No," says the veteran ; "that was a mere trifle, as I
see it. Not one, two, three with the march into Germany.
Begad ! if ever I was a rebel it was then on that 150 miles,
says you. But — 'twas so ordered by the C.C. and we
went."

It was not likely that Gen. Currie believed his army
to be rebellious against that march. He was too much of
an insurgent to fear insubordination. He had packed
many a pipe-clay parade officer home for inefficiency.

A machine gun officer, who had got a Blighty at Pass-
chendaele and was asked by the writer what he thought
about Currie, admitted that he knew very little about
him because all he saw at the time was his own little corner
of the show. He casually referred the question to two
others, one of whom was a H.Q. staff officer, and saw Currie
at first hand for months at a time. The answer was :

"I'll say that Currie always inspired me with absolute
confidence in his genius for modern war. It was a pleasure
just to see him revise a Divisional plan of action. He had
a hawk eye for any weak spots and he pointed them out.
No doubt some of the stuff that got through to the boys in
some of the shows shortly after Currie took command was
Byng stuff, and Byng sure handed over a fine army to
Currie. But believe me, Currie had his own programme
and picked his own men and developed his own machine
shortly after. And I don't believe there was a commander
in any of the Corps on that Front that had anything on
him for what makes an army win."

The General's return to Canada was preheralded by a
barrage of criticism that seeped through from men coming
home. Some day we shall know how much or how little
of this was politics inspired by Currie's enemies in Canada
and by men who, jealous of his success and his eminence,

164 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

had no scruples about fomenting the criticism. But
Currie must be judged by what he did with his army. In
that last hundred days all the armies but the American
army were remnants of what they were in 1915. The
wonderful thing about the Canadian army is that in the
three months before victory it was an even more terrible
arm of war than it had been at Vimy Ridge. After a year
and a half of Commander Currie it was still the superb
fighting machine described in the extracts already quoted
from the battle of Amiens. For a few of the reasons why
it was so we quote again that same book the writer's
estimate of Currie :

"But according to the letter of the law he is not a good
subordinate. He cannot be popular with the powers that
be : he is always complaining about something ; getting
his own way or making it unpleasant for people if he
doesn't.

"In the panic of the following March (1918 after
Passchendaele) he finds the Corps is being torn to pieces,
its divisions hurried here, there and everywhere ; orders
given and countermanded and then issued again. He
protests strongly ; the Canadian corps whose value is
tested, must be kept together ; and he wins out." . . .

"Is all this insubordination ? If so, it is a quality that
makes for victory. The average Canadian is always
willing to "take a chance" because he has confidence in
himself. And the Corps Commander is very much of a
Canadian."

The author does not criticize Currie, though he had so
good an opportunity. In telling so well the wonderful
story of that last hundred days and so explicitly glorifying
the Commander whose best work of the war was done
during that period, he gives us no perspective. Is it not
just to admit that though the four reduced Canadian
divisions — with certain attachments — had defeated forty-
seven German divisions, they had conquered divisions
terribly more reduced than their own and absolutely with-
out reserves in either men or materials and devoid of the

LIEUT. -GENERAL SIR ARTHUR CURRIE 165

last vestige of morale ? The great bluff was about to
break. It was due to have broken sooner.

When the armistice came all the armies but the Cana-
dians laid down their arms. Currie had not finished his
work. He had planned the whole hundred days, beginning
with Cambrai, and the apex of that achievement after the
breaking of the infallible Hindenburg line, was the recapture
of Mons. He was once more "insubordinate". He did
not seem to pay respect to the armistice. His men had
often said that they wanted to fight Heine on German soil.
Denied that, at least they wanted a chance to be part of
the army of occupation, as far east as Cologne. Currie
could never have ordered an unwilling army — not that
army unwilling — to march 150 miles into Germany. He
had an army of conquest, not of armistice.
But the stereopticon and the slides :
What was to be done with this soldier at home ? How
could he be re-established in civil life ? Thanks to the
Administration's predicament in trying to please both the
General and his enemies, here was the worst D.S.C.R.
problem of the lot. Thanks to McGill University, the
predicament was removed.

A sagacious professor in McGill who knows by experi-
ence what it is to get the ear of the public, said when Currie
was appointed President that almost the entire faculty
were opposed to him because the idea was so ridiculous.
That professor now alleges proudly that faculty, students
and management are all convinced that Currie is a wonder-
ful President ; that he has revolutionized all existing ideas
about the headship of a university, that he understands
even the academic mind ; that the esprit de corps of McGill
is such as it never was.

In short, nobody is left to remark —

"I say, what a pity Geddes left us in the lurch !"

They are making a new stereopticon for that slide.

A COAT OF MANY COLOURS
SIR JOHN WILUSON

AFTER a life of wearing Joseph's coat, Sir John Willison,
ex-editor of the Toronto Globe and of the News, finds him-
self President of the National Reconstruction Association.
Programme — to reconstruct Canada, beginning in 1918,
after fifty years of Confederation.

A supercilious editor once asked why on such an Asso-
ciation no farmer had been appointed. The answer was
simple enough. Sir John was born a farmer. He used to
wield a handspike at logging bees in Huron County, Ont.
Why no Liberals ? But Sir John used to be the leading
Liberal of unelected Canada. Why no professor of political
economy to represent the great universities who are always
supposed to be reconstructing a nation ? Simple again.
Sir John himself once conducted a university of culture,
economics and general information known as the Toronto
News. In fact there was no need of an Association at all.
Sir John Willison was sufficient unto the day.

One finds it tolerably easy to be sarcastic about Sir John
Willison, because for many years he was to some of us the
sort of man that compelled a sincere, almost idolatrous
admiration. In this also he is more adept than the average
man. He himself once idolized Sir Wilfrid Laurier in two
volumes ; but a few years before he turned all his political
guns on the French-Canadian Premier to get him out of
power for good.

In all Canada there has never been a more versatile
character ; never one who after a volte face in politics could

166

SIR JOHN WILLISON 167

turn with such poise and dignity upon any critic cradled
in the foundations of belief and ask, "Well, what's new ?"

From his crisp manner of speaking and a certain aus-
terity of manner, I used to think that Sir John was in a
measure inscrutable. He had such a curt way of sum-
moning a reporter, as once, —

"Never," he began when the culprit had got into the
corridor facing the editor-in-chief, "never, when inter-
viewing a man in his own home, say anything about the
furniture."

Born a Conservative and a farmer, Willison became on
the Globe Canada's greatest unelected Liberal. He con-
served Liberalism. On the Globe he held the balance
between the Free Traders who believed only in reciprocity
and Erastus Wiman, who with Goldwin Smith made Taft
a mere plagiarist when he said that Canada was an "ad-
junct" of the United States. It was Willison's attempt
to consider commercial union on its merits that made the
Globe seem like a mark for the annexationists, at a time
when the high priest of the movement in Canada had the
effrontery to remain a citizen of the nation which he was
openly trying to sell at a bargain counter. The man who
kept the Globe from becoming an annex to Goldwin Smith
in 1891 had an experience that would fit any man to become
a protection-tariff Chairman of Reconstruction, and to
remember the sirens that tempted Ulysses.

Nobody could have predicted in those days that the
great editor of the Globe would live to become first an
Independent, next a Tory, and at the last a Liberal-Unionist.
And perhaps none of these transformations would have
been necessary if Sir George Ross had not tried the trick
of "32 years in the saddle" from the days of Mowat ; to do
which and to remain politically virtuous was an impossible
feat, even though the Premier of Ontario was a director of
the Globe. Ross remained director, and also Premier. But
it seems that Mr. Willison saw in such a dual role a greater
inconsistency than even he deemed to be worthy of so bril-

168 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

liant a man. As he could not remove the director, he took
what seemed to be a providential opportunity to remove
the Premier.

The reconstructed Toronto News was the opportunity.
The elimination of Ross was the first result. The removal
of Laurier was the necessary sequel. The first was a
pleasure. The second must have been a pang. Because
of the first, in place of Sir George Ross, Willison had as
frequent visitor to his sanctum James Pliny Whitney, the
new Premier of Ontario, "honest enough to be bold and
bold enough to be honest." From that to Toryism was
merely opening a door. It took the new Tory editor
eight years to remove his old idol Laurier, the result of
which was a sort of intense and bigoted animosity to the
Province of Quebec which Sir John is now learning to over-
come. When the Tory News became a Northcliffe Im-
perialist organ it was inevitable that Sir John should
convert his common hostility to the western Laurier-
Liberals into a polite suspicion of the Radicals who were
becoming Agrarians.

When finally, weary of mere politics in which he was
our greatest journalistic expert by instinct and experience
Sir John left the News, he was free to engage in work of a
more practical character than writing, and to become
Chairman of the Government's most important branch of
active agenda outside of professional politics.

In all these Protean changes of makeup, if not of charac-
ter, Sir John Willison has never abandoned two early
habits ; lawn bowling and reading the Globe. He is an
expert in both. Bowling vexes him least, because its
rules never change. The Globe gives him pangs because
alas ! it is now engaged in the unpardonable effort to
merge the Liberals with the National Progressives as a
greater Liberal Party.

Inconsistency may be the evolution of greatness. In-
constancy never. The Globe of a certain date in June,
1921, contained a front page display of the Agrarian bye-

SIR JOHN WILLISON 169

election victory in Medicine Hat On another date there
was an editorial once again advising the Agrarians to make
common cause with Liberals against the common enemy,
Meighenism, or as it might be said, Willisonism.

Perusing the Globe in his Reconstruction office, Sir John
glances up — leisurely at a spot on the wall, next to the
portrait of Sir John A. Macdonald Like Macbeth's dagger,
he sees a cold, organizing face smiling like Mona Lisa,
fair at Sir John ; the face of T. A. Crerar.

The Levite of Reconstruction shakes his fist.

"Down with you," he mutters. "Avaunt ! I'll have
none of you. There's nothing under Medicine Hat — except
what Kipling said, 'all hell for a basement,' Natural gas,
Crerar, not a test case at all. Oh, no. Too near the border. ' '

Sir John yawns and peruses a proof of the 745th pam-
phlet issued from Reconstruction, total of nearly seven
million copies paid for not by taxation of the people, but
inferentially by tariffs. Probably a very patriotic minority
read these Willison bulletins aiming to reconstruct the
country by putting a crimp in the exportation of the Cana-
dian dollar, looking after welfare work in factories, women
and children, grappling with unemployment, helping to
change over industry from war to peace, aiming to "stabi-
lize" the nation, to curb that team of wild horses, Bol-
shevism and Agrarianism, and generally to keep Canada
from going to perdition.

In spite of Sir John, in 1919 and 1920, people bought
Canada almost bankrupt on the exchanges. Hence among
the items in the cheapening list may be placed the Cana-
dian dollar which is now worth about 89 cents in New York.
That is what happens to the dollar when it goes away from
home and plays prodigal son. What Sir John works to
see is Canadian commodities crossing the border and the
Yankee dollars coming back in exchange.

Here is one of the greatest moral issues of the age for
this nation. Even the preachers, if they coold see us
put up the barriers against luxury imports from the United

170 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

States — said to be such a wicked nation — would breathe
more easily. People so often buy sin done up in dutiable
packages. For the fiscal year ending March 31, 1921,
Canadians went into debt to the United States over a
million a day — adverse exchange. Nearly $400,000,000 in
one year spent for Yankee goods more than Yankeedom
spent buying goods from us.

And now comes the need for the rationalizing philosophy
of Sir John Willison, truly our most versatile expert on
tariffs from the Globe reciprocity down to the Reconstruc-
tion. Beginning in 1917 with Foster's "economic unity"
in North America, a friendly Democratic tariff had let
Canada send certain natural products into the United
States free of duty. Private interests found it profitable
to handle Canadian trade, much of it in transit to Europe
in a state of high demand. The democratic element in
Sir John must have approved that. Grit as he used to be,
Sir John must believe in letting the great United States
practise free-trade if it be so disposed. Those good Demo-
crats ! Had they not enacted the Underwood tariff, what
a mountainous load must have been imposed upon the
Atlantean shoulders of Reconstruction !

Which brings us to the eve of Dominion Day, 1921.
Sir John was not bowling ; he was reading, the Round
Table for June — at least if not he should have been — an
article on the meeting of the "Imperial Cabinet".

"Mischievous title !" he mutters. "It's an Imperial
Conference of Premiers. John S. Ewart will be sure to
make a kingdom article out of that. Very ill-advised.
Er— Come !"

"Evening paper, Sir John," says the boy.

Sir John takes up the paper and is at once confronted
by an item which convinces him that if ever Canada needed
protection from the United States, now is the time. The
item is the repeal of the Underwood tariff. Accustomed
for life to unpleasant sensations from printed pages, his face
gives no sign of emotion. Swiftly he reads through, flings the

SIR JOHN WILLISON 171

paper down and looks up. At once he rises, glaring coldly
at the Crerar palimpsest on the wall. Again that Mona
Lisa exporting smile, as the lips seem to say :

"Well, Sir John — what will be the Republican Recon-
struction price of the Canadian dollar now ?"

"Bah !" Sir John snorts into a handkerchief, like a
Tory squire. "That tariff, Sir, is not a menace, nor a
prophecy of agrarian victory at the polls. It is a challenge
to this nation. Canada will not let down the bars. We
shall put them higher ! Keep the Canadian dollar in
Canada. Sell our natural products to Britain. Build up
our towns and our industries. Utilize our great water
powers, the cheapest power in the world. Use our raw
material ; our manufacturing experience gained in the war.
Develop the home market. Sell more to ourselves and
spend our incomes in countries that do not put up eco-
nomic barriers against our products. Without some ade-
quate protection, sir, we are economically as extinct as the
Dodo. There's but one alternative — commercial autonomy
from the United States or commercial annexation. Nobody
but a lunatic or an Agrarian would ever doubt which of
these we shall choose — eh, what's that you say ?"

The portrait chuckles. An uplifted hand appears in
the unframed picture.

"I said, Sir John — put the repeal of the Underwood
tariff under your Medicine Hat."

In sudden fury Sir John flings the Round Table at the i
place where the picture vanished.

This may be a whimsical conclusion to the study of a
personality so perplexing and vagarious as Sir John Willison.
But he himself, having a high sense of humour, will appre-
ciate its psychological justice as much as he regrets its
historical inaccuracy. Sir John has always aimed at being
a big Canadian, and he has usually succeeded. He did his
share of contribution to right thinking about the war, as
he did in vicarious action when he lost one of his two sons
in that struggle. He could not do otherwise, because in

172 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

spite of his bewildering superficial changes of coat,
when even his detractors almost admired the dignity with
which he changed it, Sir John, the Tory at heart, has
always been a loyal servant of his country. Without him
the story of political journalism in Canada would be a thing
of shreds and patches.

He has at various times wielded an immense power
usually in the direction of shrewd, sane thinking about
national affairs. No Canadian editor of his time so
thoroughly mastered its intricate problems. He has a
faculty of clear, constructive thinking and a fine style of
writing. With no college education he became a cultured
journalist — which is sometimes an anomaly — though he
never showed any zeal for the "humanities" and never
knew much about that peculiar sociological phenomenon
called the proletariat.

Since he drew away from the farm Sir John has never
had a desire to return, even in sympathy. With a fine sense
of humour he has never relished reminiscences of the back-
woods and the smoke of the log heaps. His published
"Reminiscences" are a fine contribution to our political
history, but they show no real sympathy with the rude
pioneer life from which the writer came and to which he
owes a debt that he could very well discharge, if he would
write a book about the social and craft life of the Canadian
farm as it was in the Victorian Era. There is more national
vitality in the story of that than there is in the programme
of the National Reconstruction Association. Sir John has
a true sympathy with that life, because he knows it has
been at the root of all his own big Canadianism in all its
forms. He is one of the kindliest men alive and he writes
with great discernment and dignity. Let him stop writing
Reconstruction bulletins and do something of more value
to the country, so that the older enthusiasm of men who
used to think he was Canada's greatest editor may not
althogether die.

WHATSOEVER THY HAND FINDETH
SIR JOSEPH FI.AVEI.LE, BART.

"WHATSOEVER thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy
might." I have forgotten whether it was Paul or Solomon
who said that. But Sir Joseph Flavelle, Bart., will be
sure to remember. From the time he was big enough to
carry in wood for his devout Christian mother near Peter-
borough, Ont., he was living out that text.

The Flavelle family afterwards moved to Lindsay,
where the future baronet went into business. Queer little
town — to be the home of three such men as Flavelle, Hughes,
and Mackenzie.

A man who has had years of business intimacy with Sir
Joseph said to me once — under suggestion — "Yes, you
never miss a word he says to you, because he puts every-
thing so clearly, and you admire the big things he does,
because he has such a genius for action after he thinks —
but somehow you are so exasperated when you leave him
that you feel like giving him a big swift kick."

Another man who was under him in an organizing
position for years during the war said : "Well, the higher
critics can say all they like against his methods and his
personal peculiarities, but I tell you — I like the old boy."

One of Britain's foremost financial experts in the war
said to an interviewer : "Ah, you know Flavelle ? Clev-er
man ! Clev-er !" That was nearly twenty years ago.

In 1918 Sir Joseph Flavelle had in his Munitions Office
at Ottawa a staff of 360 accounting clerks working upon
thirteen ledgers, each representing a separate department
of the Board, which up till that time had placed orders in

173

J./4 j. J.J.1-J j.rj.£~i.kj\xi^> UJU * v

this country for war material aggregating $1,60,000,000
in value.

At that time an editor wrote Sir Joseph asking for a
statement of what his Board had done. Within a few
hours of receiving the letter Sir Joseph forwarded an
itemized statement a column long, of which one paragraph
read :

"Upwards of 56,000,000 shells have been produced ; 60,000,000
copper bands ; 45,000,000 cartridge cases ; 28,000,000 fuses ; 70,000,-

000 Ibs. of powder ; 50,000,000 Ibs. of high explosives ; 90 ships built,
or under construction aggregating 375,000 tons ; 2,700 aeroplanes have
been produced. "

He stated also that 900 manufacturers had taken con-
tracts in all the Provinces except Prince Edward Island.
The great ex-Minister of Munitions himself, reading that
report, might have said : "Flavelle ? Yes — he is mighty
clever." And Flavelle had been for one year then a
baronet. That also was clever ; and just in time. The
man who happened to be in England when war was de-
clared and sold war bacon in August, 1914, was not to be
caught napping in 1917 ; neither after he had got his title
was he to be found slacking in his marvellous work in 1918.
Flavelle earned a title — even after he had taken it.

"Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do !" Yea, verily.

I have been fairly well acquainted with Sir Joseph for a
good many years. I do not know him. Yet his altogether
uncommon personality has almost frozen itself into my
memory. Whenever I see that thick-shouldered, whiten-
ing-whiskered man of sixty-three hastening afoot up the
street, or driving his little runabout, or wiping his glasses
every minute in some office, or coming becaped and crush-
hatted to a concert, I can hear that high-keyed, slow voice,
the calm dispassionate utterance with never a syllable
misplaced, and feel the energy of a nature that of all men

1 ever met is the oddest compend of clear thinking, cool
judgment, strength of grip and juvenility of impulse.

SIR JOSEPH FLAVELLE, BART 175

The story of his struggle to affluence is not much
different in basic outlines from that of any average, self-
made man ; differing vastly in the character of the man.
A year after he was forced out of Lindsay by boycott
because of his Scott Act campaign, the freezing of a car of
potatoes on a Toronto siding almost wiped out his business.
Frankly and modestly, yet with a sort of fatalistic assurance,
he discusses the kind of man he thinks himself to have
become since he lost those potatoes. He denies that he
has ever been interesting ; rather bewildered that at one
time or another people have taken such a peculiar interest
in him. He talks of his early struggles, the economy of
bacon, and the bigotries of Old Testamentarians in the
same concise language set to the same unvaried monotony
of voice. If you should fail to follow him, he would almost
chide you for not paying attention.

Nearly twenty years ago I met a preacher keenly in-
terested in Flavelle. He told me a story repeated to him
in a sort of admiring deprecation that very day by a Metho-
dist preacher from Toronto who had a gift for elevated
gossip. This story was probably out of the Apocrypha, as
it concerned a very worldly episode in the joint experiences
of Mr. Flavelle and another Canadian financier on a visit
to Chicago, when the latter got a wire stating that a certain
conditional donation of his to a small church in Ontario
had been unexpectedly covered by the congregation with
the stipulated equal amount, and that it was time to send
the money. It was said that he showed the wire to Flavelle ;
that the two financiers took joint action on the Stock
Exchange ; and that the money was wired immediately.
The little details about the transaction I omit, partly out of
deference to the preacher who bandied the yarn — wherever
he got it. He probably only half believed it himself. Even
ministers will gossip.

Much has been said about Sir Joseph's religious affairs.
He has had many. He has been in publicity over a few,

176 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

such as the controversy between the late Dr. Carman, his
old adversary, and Rev. George Jackson, his then pastor,
whom he defended. Flavelle has never concealed his
enthusiasm for the church. He has entertained many a
celebrated minister. He has been prominently identified
with Missions, with the Methodist Book Room — that
sadly unecclesiastical corporation — with debates in Con-
ference on amusements and other things, with Methodist
education. In all these he has practised the text, "What-
soever thy hand findeth to do." The church needed
Flavelle's organizing hand. He generously lent it. He
could not do otherwise without being untrue to his own
prodigious and inherited passion for a certain kind of
organized religion.

The personal faith of a public man is no business for the
critic, except where that faith becomes public works. Sir
Joseph has been conspicuously aligned with the militant
work of the Church. It has been the belief of those who
know him, casually or intimately, that his philanthropic
works were inspired by his faith. But many men have had
as much faith with less works, because of too much dissipat-
ing emotion. Sir Joseph with all his juvenility of impulse
had a way of hitching his emotions up to a job. The church
needed organization. Other wealth-getting Methodists
were prominent in pews, public donations and conferences.
Flavelle believed in the seven days' work. He had a pro-
gramme of action for the Sabbath. Church, social work,
business, were to him very much one thing ; all in need of
organization to get results. He had no use for the idle
church and less for what he called "the dead hand" —
referring to the influence of his old adversary, Dr. Carman,
who thought it presumption in a wealthy pork-packer to
regard himself as a critic of clerical authority.

It is tolerably certain that had Flavelle made less of a
business of religion, the public would have had less business
condemning him on the bacon inquiry evidence. Here was

SIR JOSEPH FLAVELLE, BART. 177

a man who all his life had been a tremendous organizer of
the church and a professor of a peculiarly active faith,
president of a company which in one year had made an
alleged profit of $5,000,000 on a capital investment of less
than $14,000,000. Bacon at that time— 1917— cost the
consumer 50 cents a pound. The price was considered
outrageous. Bacon afterwards went to 80 cents at a time
when nobody blamed Sir Joseph ; and when he had disposed
of his interest in bacon altogether. But the alleged extor-
tion of this powerful and baroneted Christian stuck in the
public mind. Bacon was the pioneer in exposed "pro-
fiteering." O'Connor's report was made public at a time
when it was yet the private property of the Cabinet. There
was politics here. And the Premier was away. Other
men afterwards made much more amazing profits that
never were mentioned in the press ; men who never went
to church ; who had never in public said such words as
"let war profits go to the hell where they belong."

It was not the actual profit, but the alleged hypocrisy
of Flavelle that roused the detestation of a large section of
the public. And to the end of his life this man will never
erase from the minds of many people the notion that he
was of all profiteers the worst, because the most hypocritical.

Then there was the baronetcy. For a man who had
preached Christ so much this seemed a thin business. A
man's Christianity, if he works hard at it, becomes adver-
tised without posters. The world that mistrusts the
church on principle, that only waits the chance itself to
profiteer and to get social preferment, is quick to anathe-
matize the man who in a big way seems to corelate church,
profits and society.

The public are no longer concerned, neither did they
understand at the time, whether the Davies Co. made
5.05 cents a pound on bacon or 5.05 minus overhead
charges, 4.1. Here was the first "sinner" caught ; senti-
mentally lynch him. It made no difference then what had

178 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

been the man's serious work in philanthropic organization
and in public service ; or that for war production he had
offered the Wm. Davies plant to the Government to operate
at so much percentage to the company ; or that Flavelle
himself had no connection with the management and at
the time concerned knew very little about it. The public
appetite did not want extenuating facts. It wanted a
victim. Certain other interests, curbed by Sir Joseph
in the matter of prices for munition contracts, wanted
revenge. Under the old system of contracts these men had
made a fairly good start at plundering the nation in its
extremity. Between the long-suffering public, who thought
they had a reason for hating Flavelle, and the profiteers
who really had such a reason, Sir Joseph had an experience
that would have tested any man's Christianity.

However, he made no protest ; did not resign his post
or leave the country, but worked on. The time came when
he could have said, "Et tu, Brute !" to men who with no
record for helping the church or organizing to help humanity
had profited far more prodigally than the Wm. Davies. Co.
But he kept silence. He believed in his conscience that
the company buying hogs at competitive prices, and selling
in a protected market was ethically Al at Lloyds. He
still believes so. His enthusiasm for the company has
not waned. He admires it even to a point of emotion.
7*he company was not his, but he had made it. From the
day that William Davies drove to FJavelle's house in an
old open buggy and asked him to sell out his provision
business to manage the company, till the day it produced
about 100 million pounds of bacon alone, in a year, he had
been its energizing head. The Wm. Davies Co. was but
the main thing from which he made his money. Its stock
was not sold on the markets. There was never any need
of capital except what came from the business conducted
by Flavelle. There was no wit and philosophy in "The
Letters of a Pork Packer to His Son" that could have

SIR JOSEPH FLAVELLE, BART. 179

instructed him in the shrewd business of making a great
commercial concern out of a little business. His success
in Canada was relatively equal to that of any Swift in
Chicago. Multiply it b,y the ratio of population and see.
In one year during the war the Wm. Davies Co. had a bacon
output of forty million dollars.

But Flavelle never can be judged by bacon. He could
have done as well at railways or banking or law. He did
even better at munitions when there were no profits, not
even a salary. He did as well at any other form of public
service. No man can justly judge him by commercial
success. He invested — himself — in everything to which
he set his hand, with the one exception of the now defunct
Toronto News, which he left to the management of other
people. He invested the same self capital in the com-
mercial concern and in public service.

Any patient who has been in the Toronto General
Hospital will tell you what a wonderful institution it is.
He may not know who made it possible, or whose genius for
order and perfection of mechanism it expresses. Without
Flavelle, Toronto, instead of one of the greatest hospitals
in the world, would have had just a good hospital. Almost
a village was pulled down to make room for it, on a site
that would suit the medical needs of the University. It
needed a strong will to put it there, against the opinions of
other people ; a great hospital on the end of a slum !
The same will put the great "Methodist Book Room"
where it is — against the wish of a majority.

Flavelle was Chairman of the Commission that re-
organized the University of Toronto. He had no desire for
the work. The late Goldwin Smith was already chairman,
much disliking Flavelle for some editorial about him in the
Toronto News. The old professor was feeble. The Com-
mission asked Flavelle to replace him. He consented. If
they thought he was the man, he was willing to do the work.
And it was thoroughly done, so far as a business brain

180 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

could direct the reconstruction of a concern in which
business system is the anatomy, not the life.

No man could sit at a conference with Flavelle and not
think hard ; or accept a duty from his committee and not
discharge it. He demanded on behalf of the public —
service. No man ever sat on a committee with him who
had time for badinage. That man with the slow, high
voice and the steady look was judging other men by results.
Men came to believe that when there was a public task
to perform, Flavelle was the man to take it. He was
almost forced into service, often by the public indolence of
other men. Canada has always played the professional
grandstand method of getting things done for the public.
Before the advent of Rotary and Kiwanis Clubs our two
chief cities systematically advised the humble philanthro-
pist without pull to go to such men as Flavelle, Edmund
Walker, one of the Masseys, E. R. Wood, J. C. Eaton,
Thomas Shaughnessy, Herbert Ames and F. S. Meighen —
because these men were in the habit of doing or giving or
organizing for the public interest, which is supposed to be
a game for experts, not amateurs.

Flavelle's investment in things that made him no money
was one of great ability, hard work and conscience. His
returns on such capital were in the efficiency and useful-
ness of things which he had helped to create ; the need for
which he had observed as clearly and calmly as ever he
had foreseen the scope of a great business.

Yet for much of his life he has been a creature of im-
pulse, powerfully attracted by things not in business. He
left his seat once in a great Buffalo hall to stand at the door
that he might judge the effect of a certain decrescendo from
a choir.^-To a group of musical enthusiasts in Chicago he
suddenly suggested a trip to the Cincinnati May Festival.
Speaking to the boys of Upper Canada College, he drew
from his pocket a piece of putty to illustrate the plasticity
of character. Standing amid heaps of luggage at the

SIR JOSEPH FLAVELLE, BART 181

docks in St. John, he looked at the immigrant sheds and
said, "What a very human picture !" Pocketing the
proof of an hospital article, which as proprietor of the
Toronto News and Chairman of the Hospital Board he had
withdrawn from publication, he said to the reporter, ' ' Old
man, a place of suffering should not be described in the
language of the racetrack." When Pastor Wagner, author
of "The Simple Life", was in Toronto, he was the guest of
Mr. Flavelle, who for a time was as much absorbed in the
peasant philosopher as he often was in the "Meditations"
of Thomas a Kempis.

Considering these impulses to express himself, it is not
hard to understand how Sir Joseph came to say to the
Toronto Board of Trade that war, profits should go to the
hell to which they belonged. He was speaking under a
sense of emotion. All through his enormously successful
career he had been energized by a sudden enthusiasm to
take hold of something, and afterwards to make it go.
"Whatsoever thy hand findeth."

Flavelle's hand found many things. Among them was
the Toronto News, his one recorded failure. This also was
an impulse ; precisely the same as had led him years
before to subscribe $5,000 to a fund for the better education
of the Tory party. The News cost him one hundred times
as much, for much the same reason on a larger scale ; and
he lost it. But he has never regretted the loss, because
he gained the experience. The News did a valuable work.
But its rather Utopian resurrection had a sad sequel in
Toryism such as Flavelle never could have endorsed, and its
ultimate extinction seemed to prove that newspapers cannot
be operated by ideals.

Again, reconstructing enthusiasm followed him to
Ottawa. He went there at the instigation of the Imperial
Government. Whether he himself made the original sug-
gestion of the need, I do not know. But he obeyed the
need when he saw it. Impulse drove him to meet it in

182 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

the greatest work of public organization ever done in so
short a time in this country, except the sending of the First
Contingent.

Flavelle had never liked Ottawa. Ordinarily he had a
sort of contempt for its waste of time and its dissipation
of morality. It is not conceivable that he would have
taken Munitions under any Canadian department. Nor
was it necessary. Canada was to produce munitions for
much more than the Canadian Army.

The work was vast and varied ; the man at the head
of it capable, exacting and impartial. His sole aim was to
produce and to export munitions at a price high enough to
attract industry and low enough to prevent profiteering.
For three years he was the superman of Canada's industrial
fabric. The C.M.A. and the Department of Trade became
mere annexes to munitions, at a time when Davies' bacon
clamoured for ship-room needed by Flavelle munitions.

Official Ottawa had never known a man like this. He
was not popular. The Government had no control of him.
Ottawa had never cared for super-men. Flavelle was there
without politics. He had a department greater than any
in the Administration. He was never responsible to Par-
liament. Ministers to him were not necessary. He had
no favours to ask of members. He never even looked in
at the Commons which he would like to have reformed.
People sometimes ask why such a man does not go into
Parliament. Impossible. He regards government as sheer
business, when it is often a passing show. Foster's Busi-
ness Conference that never met would have caused him to
discharge the department for incompetency. Sir Thomas
White had no desire to lift his eyes unto the hill Flavelle,
the super- Minister who for years had been a critic of his
own party, and now believed it more inept than ever in
spite of the great work of the Finance Minister. Sir Sam
Hughes had never wanted Flavelle. There was a good
reason. Sir Sam had started the munition industry in

SIR JOSEPH FLAVELLE, BART. 183

Canada as a branch of war, not as a department of mere
business. Flavelle was all business. War was business.
There was the rub. The nearer the war came to a climax,
the more men like Flavelle at home became part of the
machinery. Foster never could have salaamed to this
super-man of trade and commerce. Did even Sir Robert
Borden ever feel comfortable with him ? Back from Europe
in a fit of impulse more powerful than he had ever known,
impressed by the success of Coalition in England, Sir Joseph
wanted to see it established in Canada. The nation was
united for munitions ; why not for national business ?
The Premier was away in the West. Sir Joseph wired him
asking permission to urge coalition at a certain public
dinner. There was no response. Evidently the Govern-
ment wanted no advice from a man who had nothing what-
ever to do with it and represented merely big business.

Something must have caused the Premier to treat Sir
Joseph coolly. Afterwards at the bacon investigation
there was cause for a change in temperature. The Premier
had been negligent about some documentary evidence
extenuating to the Flavelle presentation of the case. The
two had warm words. Sir Joseph told the Premier one
thing which, as it was repeated to me without reference to
use in publication, had better be omitted here. But it
was scathing. Sir Joseph is no mean master of the kind
of language that hurts. But he has the Christian spirit —
which in this case he laid aside. I should like to know
what the Premier said to Sir Joseph ; and precisely what
were the Premier's opinions, before and after, concerning
the baronetcy.

In his quiet moments Sir Joseph does not rebuke him-
self more than he regrets the moral myopia of other people.
I think he is somewhat disillusioned as to what it is worth
to gain a good deal of the world at the risk of a lot of people
thinking he has lost his soul. He does not believe that his
soul was ever in danger of being lost. Often he goes to

184 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

rugby games. In this he sees again the virtue of struggle,
probably wishing he .himself had played rugby in youth.

"When a man gets old," he said lately, "he loves to
sit at home."

But Sir Joseph, for all his whitening whiskers and his
impatience with the shortcomings and animosities of the
world, is not yet old. He has the strength of two men,
and a power of administration possessed by few men in
public office in any country. He has lost some of his
bubbling enthusiasm for the humanities. The last thing he
will lose must be his faith in himself : and that is very far off.

"Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do ... ."

Sir Joseph Flavelle has yet a strong hand. What
remains that he will do with all his might ? If he so
desires, more of service on behalf of the public good in the
ten years he has left than many men accomplish in a
strenuous lifetime.

It is time we learned the difference between a public
pirate and an organizing servant of the public. Take away
from this man his public church business, his power to
make money, his human vanity over an hereditary title,
and we still have left the story of a big life, much of it spent
in doing good for the sake of other people. You cannot
efface that strange personality ; that desire after all the
admiration of his wonderful ability to administer him
mentally "one good swift kick." But you will never
mentally kick a man of such powerful good to his country.

NO FATTED CALVES FOR PRODIGAL SONS
HON. SIR HENRY DRAYTON

I a novelist sketching a character for Henry Herbert
Drayton I would have him, except in one item, just about
all that he is not. He should be unmarried, live with his
maiden aunt, most of his time make very little money and
depend for his income upon winning abolit three good
criminal prosecutions a year ; the rest of his time to be
spent reading up criminal psychology and taking his aunt
to see pictures. The commonplace scene-shifter who
places behind people the scenery of real life has bungled
Sir Henry, thereby robbing him of much interest. What
a net a man with his classic patience and enormous ferret
instinct for minutke could have woven about some cunning
but once too often embezzler ! Instead we have Drayton,
K.C., pushing himself methodically through a series of legal
metamorphoses, at each change getting one convolution
higher, by public corporation solicitorships and county
attorneyships, burrowing into hydro-electric affairs for
Toronto until he becomes Dominion Railway Commission
chairman — seven years at that — and at last steps out into
the full glare of undramatic notoriety by taking office as
Minister of Finance in 1919.

Well, in that capacity he has rubber-stamped millions
of people in the region of their pockets whom he would
have missed altogether had he been taking his maiden aunt
to the picture galleries between detective cases. Besides,
he has three or four children, and I'm sure that when some
lady writes the cinema of his life she will portray him as a
hugely devoted papa with perfect young geniuses of chil-

185

186 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

dren who yearn to spend papa's money upon the very
luxuries against which he is warning the parents of other
young people.

Once, — it was something to do with Niagara power — I
heard Mr. Drayton weaving a dull dry web of apparently
trivial evidence about some very important people. It
seems to me that one William Mackenzie was a particular
object ; if not he should have been. Once you admit that
Drayton belongs to corporation instead of criminal law —
though sometimes there's precious little difference —
Mackenzie and Adam Beck are just the sort of audacious
public-interest performers that a man like him should be
after. He seemed to have an insatiable capacity for picking
out little filaments of dry-as-dust technique from which on
behalf of an impersonal client like the city of Toronto he
could manage to inveigle a web of silk about any anti-
civic despot who regards a city as a thing to be worked for
dividends, and people merely as common economic dots
and carry ones.

He impressed me then as a born Englishman. He had
the neat, chiseled accents and the imperturbable air of a
perfect gentleman, with a touch of nonchalance and the
suggestion that if at the time of adjournment he had just
got to the up stroke of a small "i", he could leave it there
and come back to-morrow, beginning precisely where he
had left off. But he was not born in England ; only
educated there — which is something. A few more of our
public men would be the better for a little Harrowing.

Once into public finance, Sir Henry does not propose to
be a mere reverberation of Sir Thomas White. Never have
we had two such drastic highwayman budgets as those
which Drayton flung at the people in 1920 and 1921. From
the tone of any supplementary remarks which he feels like
making in order to amuse us while he lightens our pockets,
it may be worse next year and thereafter unless we have a
care. This man has never uttered a soothing phrase since

HON. SIR HENRY DRAYTON 187

he took office. He has made no attempt to furbelow our
finances. He is not even concerned about the precise
political effect of his taxes and tariffs. We never had a
Finance Minister who so disregarded the Gladstonian
principle, that if figures cannot lie they may at least make
interesting romances of the truth. In the two years that
he has been budgeteering, this dapper, tailored man with
the sailor hat and the truculent jaw and the heavy outskirts
to his eyes has treated a budget as though it were a Santa
Claus stocking to be talked about a long while in advance,
so that when it comes it may be all the more significant.

Such budgets as he gives us are not the work of a true
Cpnservative. They bear no interesting bigotries of the
party. They deal only secondarily with tariffs. I believe
Sir Henry knows that most people regard a tariff as a very
oblique way of reaching the pocket. People compute tariffs
and argue about them. Only the farmers can make them
into frightful realities. Nobody understands a tariff any-
way when it comes to the schedule. Its chief use is for
winning and losing elections.

But Sir Henry's admonishing finger goes up, and we are
hushed to see what is the really cruel thing he intends to
show us next, that will hurt just like a thumbscrew. He
smiles and flips down a long scroll of — direct and drastic
taxes quite shocking to contemplate.

"This is going to hurt you all, good people," he says.
' ' But I may as well be honest about it. I am not a financial
Christian Scientist. You will all feel better after you are
properly hurt."

Thus far we remember chiefly how it hurt. We are still
hoping to feel better.

Drayton had some grounding in practical finance long
before he took any of the detail jobs that have had so much
to do with computations and costs. We are reminded of a
little episode of his early youth in Toronto.

Harry Drayton and Frank Baillie were schoolboys to-

188 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

gether. They lived on the same street. A neighbour was
about to have an auction sale of his goods, but looking over
the lot he made a present of a punching bag to Harry and
Frank, no doubt because he foresaw that they would both
have strenuous lives. The boys thanked him and took
away the bag. On the way home Harry said to Frank :

"Do you really want a share in that punching bag ?"

"Not so keen as I might be," said Frank. "Why ?"

"Because he had something else I'd rather have. Re-
member that little printing press ?"

"Oh, what he uses to print calling cards on ?"

"How would you like to go snooks with me and get
that, Frank ?"

"Well, it certainly would be swell to print our own
calling cards, Harry."

"He wants $6.50 for it, though."

"Oh ! That's different. Here, let me sell the bag, any-
how. That'll be a start."

Frank, already budding into finance, sold the bag for
one dollar and twenty-five cents.

"Well, we're still shy $5.25, Frank," said the coming
Finance Minister of Canada.

"Yes, and it's your move, Harry."

"All right, I've got an idea. You wait."

Next day the sprouting financiers met, when Harry
had a fine steel trout rod.

"See that, Frank ? Got that from dad. Made me a
present of it — at my own suggestion. What is she worth ?"

"Don't you want to fish, Harry ?"

"Not if you can sell the rod."

Frank took it and looked it over.

"Sure !" he said. "I'll sell that for the company."

There being no guile in either of these young men, the
sequel is that Frank sold the trout rod for $5.25 and Harry
proudly took the entire $6.50 to the neighbour, paid for the
press and had it taken home to his attic, where it must be

HON. SIR HENRY DRAYTON 189

presumed the two of them spent rainy days printing calling
cards for Draytons and Baillies.

Canada took very little interest in Drayton till he came
to be Chairman of the Railway Commission. But by that
time the said Commission was no longer the grand court
it had been in the days of J. Pitt Mabee. It settled more
disputes than ever and settled them as well as ever. Drayton
had almost twice the mileage to cover that Mabee had in
1903. He did it with tireless exactitude. He was less
concerned with the ethical issues at stake in decisions be-
tween railways and communities than with the unethical
fact of such a prodigal lot of lines having been built at all
to give trouble to the nation We were just getting to the
end of the race of the railroads, when thousands of foreigners
had been dumped into the country with shovel and pick, and
thousands of miles of new railway built that would shortly
be a charge on the country.

An able writer a few years ago wrote a series of articles
in a Canadian publication headed, "Is there a Railway
Muddle ?" Being himself a railwayman he seemed to
think that the muddle, if any, was chargeable to conditions
over which the railways had little or no control.

Mr. Drayton, shrewdly traversing the network of those
prodigally built railways, felt no need of asking any such
question. He carried on into the slump in business, and
on into the war when the Railway War Board, practising a
sort of church union by cutting out competition and re-
routeing traffic for the sake of getting war haulage done as
quickly as possible, left very little for the Drayton court to
settle. But there was a, bigger settlement to come later, and
Drayton was to have a hand in it.

As Chairman of the Commiosion he never made a state-
ment that was good for a headline, or coined an epigram, or
lost his temper, or spluttered into print. But on a certain
occasion, before retiring from the Commission, Sir Henry
put on record a number of things that the people of this

190 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

country read with acute and sustained interest. This was
the report of the Smith-Drayton-Acworth Commission for
the purpose of finding out whether the Canadian Northern
and the Grand Trunk Pacific could ever manage to pay
their own debts, including interest on multi-millions bor-
rowed from abroad, or whether, debts and all, they should
be handed over to the people of Canada ?

During the war this nation had many commissions.
Their very names are mostly forgotten. Most of them
committed themselves to nothing. This commission to
investigate railroad bankruptcy was fated to be very
different. Much of the difference was in Sir Henry Drayton
who, had he been asked the question, might have saved
the country the cost of the Commission.

But of course he was prejudiced, and against the roads.
He knew those roads. The minority report of the chief
of the New York Central made no difference to the grim
bulldog judgment of the Chief Railway Commissioner —
that the two secondary systems of Canadian railways were
alike and for much the same causes constitutionally bank-
rupt, and should therefore be given the nationaliz-
ing cure.

What more disagreeable qualification could a man have
for being made Minister of Finance ? The air holes that
White had skated around, Drayton proposed to go right
over and to take the people with him. What the common
stock of these roads might be worth was for Sir Thomas to
find out. By the time Sir Henry went to the national
ledger that matter was all adjusted and the thing left was
to raise the money.

There's a divinity that shapes our ends even when they
do not meet. The little Houdini of calculations was at
last into a predicament where it seemed that he never could
figure himself out. One fancies him gazing intently over
the Finance Department of whose precise technique he
knew nothing as yet, and saying to himself :

"Well, White did a wonderful turn. I don't believe the

,/ HON. SIR HENRY DRAYTON 191

audience will like mine half as well — at first. No audiences
ever do. I'm bound to be more or less unpopular because
I don't know how to act a bit like Tetrazzini."

The great organized orgy was over, when the dollars
followed the drum and the drum thumped at every cross-
road ; when a Victory Bond in every top commode drawer
was more necessary than a bottle in every cellar. The
whole nation, four times tagged for Victory, was once more
tagged for reconstruction. Done with credits to England
for purchase of war material in Canada, we were invited to
extend credits to war-swept nations in Europe who would
be sure to want things made in Canada to help put them
on President Wilson's new map of self-determination.
Even profiteers now admitted everything to be abnormal.
The whole country was like a milkfed pumpkin at the fair.
War wages inclined every man to become a profiteer. The
land was teeming with war money and denuded of necessary
goods. People who used to be content with good wages, a
plain rented home and a bottle of beer, went out after short
hours, high wages, French heels, $300 coats and motor-cars.
It was part of the emancipation of people for which soldiers
had not died.

"Er — if you need me, telephone, old chap," one fancies
Sir Thomas saying as he carried Sir Henry's luggage to his
room. "But I'm sure you are the man for the job. I
really have to go back to private finance. However, the
super-tariff on imports of luxuries is one thing with which
you will feel at home, I am sure. Quite suited to your
temperament, Sir Henry."

In one of Scott's novels a gentleman named Front de
Boeuf pulls out a Jew's tooth every time he wants more
money. Both our national dentists knew that a super-
tariff on anything is the very thing that makes a large
number of well-to-do people want it. People bought
luxuries in this country and growled at the high cost of
necessities. Most folk feel rather proud of a big price for

192 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

a coat or a gown or a Chesterfield, if they can get even by
skimping on the price of butter and potatoes. Low-value
money and visions of Utopia had played far worse havoc
with the people than legalized liquor had ever done. And
one of the worst features of the situation was that the bulk
of our luxury buying was done in the country which had
the only remaining standard of value on the exchanges.
Canada had convenient access to the country which alone
had a surplus of factory goods. Our tremendous buying
average in the American market was even used as propa-
ganda in the interest of keeping the peace with Britain.

Hence the devil of exchange and Drayton's dilemma.
The things Drayton said to this country even before he
presented his first budget were as comfortable as what the
doctor prescribes when you are overfed. On went the
unpopular luxury tax and sales tax. The general principle
was that the more people bought, the more they got out
of living, and the more they should pay for the privilege.
It was not merely a tax on improvements, but an impost
on being alive. Accustomed as we had been to war taxes
which never came off, this was a sanctioned way of ' ' passing
the buck" such as we had never known. The advantage is
that when we pay 14 cents for a box of matches that used
to cost five cents, we can read "5 cents War Excise Tax
Paid" on the wrapper.

Sir Henry Drayton had no superb suavity with which to
beguile those who made complaints. He heard the bowlings
of all the babies in the national dormitory and went ahead.
He did not impress us as a financier, but as a plain doctor
of homely common sense. He said in public many things
which threw much instructive light upon our buying and
selling. He spoke some blunt but kindly truths even in
the United States at whose supremacy in our markets his
policy was aimed.

"The men who save the world," says The Onlooker,
"are those who work by rule of thumb ; who do the day's

HON. SIR HENRY DRAYTON 193

work by the day's light and advance on chaos and the pain-
ful dark by inches ; in other words, the practical men."

Such a motto might be Dray ton's crest. He is very
practical ; too much so to be an interesting personality
to the average man. But by his dull and diligent practi-
cality he has done rather more than his bit in helping to
re-establish Canada. He would, if he could, cut our
imports from the United States in half in order to rectify
exchange. Whenever he dies the Canadian $ par on
exchange will be found graven upon his heart.

Drayton's tariff tour was one of the most characteristic
things he ever did In this, however, there may have been
an element of politics. A travelling tariff commission
taking evidence in almost every village with a smokestack
from coast to coast must have had some real object. But
Sir Henry had cleaned up most of the possibilities in direct
taxation ; it was time he tackled the tariff, even though he
knew it was largely a show to satisfy the people that the
most patient investigator in the world at the head of a small
court had taken evidence on what every Tom and Dick
had to say for and against in any part of the country out-
side of the Yukon. Had it been practicable to hold a session
on Great Bear I/ake. to 'determine the trade relations be-
tween the copper-kniving Eskimos and the meat-swapping
Yellow Knife Indians, Sir Henry would have done it.

Such vast patience is phenomenal even in Drayton.
One almost fears that he is becoming interested in a Federal
election. If so, the end is in sight. The day we partyize
Sir Henry we shall lose one of the oddest and rarest personal
identities we ever had. But we can better afford to lose
his personal identity in his party service than to lose both
in putting into the Finance Department in 1922^some
idealistic experimenter in the efficacy of Free Trade.

THE PERSONAL EQUATION IN RAILROADING
EDWARD WENTWORTH BEATTY, K.C.

THE main thing that E. W. Beatty, K.C., did to help win
the war was to become President of the C.P.R. And he
did it well. A glance at this polished pony engine of a
chief executive suggests that he has never done anything
but well, and that he is the kind of man likely without
preachments to stimulate well-doing in other people.

I first met this self-controlled master of executives not
long after he became President. He was most cordial ; as
Shaughnessy had been austere. Under such a direct
impression it seemed that I had at last found a man who
would make the inexorable old C.P.R. become a golden
door to humanity. Of course I was mistaken. That kind
of man is born often enough, but he seldom stays with his
birthright. I knew that the railway of railways was no
school for the humanities ; but this university graduate,
Chancellor of Queen's, distinguished counsel and potential
eminent judge, bachelor, Canadian born, every inch an
athlete and as rugged as Carpentier, seemed to my -aroused
imagination one who would be as much bigger than the
stodgy C.P.R. as that system was greater than others of
its kind.

Beatty has not been at his new job long enough yet to
prove what I suspect — that I was wrong. But he has been
long enough with it to know that the surging ideals and
aspirations of a young, healthy man in his own office are
pretty rudely shaken down by the practical operation of a
great system in a time of financial difficulty.

194

EDWARD WENTWORTH BEATTY 195

We talked for nearly an hour. He seemed to have the
time and the interest. His big office was as quiet as a
library. His desk was almost devoid of signs of labour.
Not a paper to be seen that required immediate attention ;
every item neatly disposed ; himself smoking — a fairly
strong pipe ; scarcely a telephone call to interrupt. He
seemed the sculptor's embodiment of strength in reserve ;
a man who never could be tuckered or peevish or unable
to detect either the weakness of an opponent, the penetra-
tion of a critic or the need of a man who came to ask him
for advice. There was a big instant kindliness about him
that would have won the cordiality of the stolidest of inter-
viewers, as we talked about railways, government ownership,
the needs of journalism and the value in business of the
personal equation — his own phrase which he repeated so
often that it seemed to contain something of prophetic
intention. He paid his venerating respects to the founders
of the C.P.R., but he seemed to have more enthusiasm for
Lord Mountstephen than for Van Home.

I heard him say some strong, sincere things about the
uselessness of rich men who would sooner use their money
on the gratification of vanity than upon public service. ( He
meant that. He repeated such things at various inter-
views. In doing so he proved that he himself had always
made a god of very hard work, discipline and self-denial,
for the sake of giving his own personality a square deal,
without regard to the money he could make. He had the
strength and he used it. As solicitor and chief counsel he
became almost a machine to win cases for the railway.
He must win, and know how to lose. Fighting a corpora-
tion's battles is a good way to believe that the system can
do no wrong. But I don't think Beatty was ever blind
to the native defects of the C.P.R.

Railroading is a great university of character. Nothing
else in our practical affairs attracts such a variety of men.
None of our railwaymen have climbed to the peak of the

196 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

railway operation business quite so successfully and so
Canadianly as E. W. Beatty. Most other transportation
magnates we have imported from either Scotland or
the United States. This one is Canadian from his
cradle up. He embodies the best characteristics of
the average Canadian in a very high degree. He is
an amateur athlete whom hard work has never been
known to make weary. At the end of any perfect
day of hard work he has as much strength in reserve as he
had in the morning when he came to it. Even in his
talk he wastes never a word, states everything clearly and
in forcible language, but is seldom curt at the expense of
courtesy. He does not talk like any big American executive
whose equal or superior he may be in administration. He
copies nobody. The day's work has always been his
exemplar. He has no desire for mere personal success.
Years ago he could have made more money by exporting
his brains to the United States. But he preferred Canada
where he has made less money, justly earned more fame,
and where he can continue to do more work that counts
for efficiency in himself and in other people. He is the kind
of man — like Arthur Meighen — who inspires other men to
go in with him on a heavy task to get it done in a big way.
Beatty 's type of mind, though somewhat dry and legal
and at times judicial, is also capable of an immensely quiet
enthusiasm that transmits itself to other people. He
invites discussion, but not familiarity. Not personally
careful just to maintain traditions, he. profoundly respects
the men who created them — and goes ahead to transact
business now, and to hand out decisions immediately, that
get to-day ahead of yesterday and as near as possible to
the day after. He believes in the square deal in action
and in the high common sense of a decision. There is no
public question upon which his opinion might not be sanely
valuable, though one would never expect him to succeed
as a leader in politics. As a business reorganizer of McGill

EDWARD WENTWORTH BEATTY 197

University he is bound to consider a college as a "going
concern' ' . As Chancellor of Queen's, he upsets all traditions
as to the dignity of pure scholarship.

It seemed like a long stride from being Chief Railway
Counsel to becoming Chief Executive. But to his practical
personality the stride was only, a step. On an average
this is no lawyer's job. Judges in the United States can
preside over big corporations. The chief executive of the
C.P.R. works. He must know the system, its men, its
technique. Railroading is a complex of specialities. A
good president must enter into the spirit of the man who
builds a locomotive and of one who constructs a timetable.

It fell to this first Canadian President that the road
ever had to shoulder a load which would have made the
wizard Van Home read up Hercules. Beatty holds the
record for getting through with a programme that would
have puzzled either of his two eminent predecessors in that
office. Shaughnessy at the same age might have done it.
Van Home never. Yet Beatty never could have built the
C.P.R. His brain has no wizardry in it. He is a co-
ordination of facts that knows not the meaning of magic.
He is the most matter-of-fact man in any high executive
position in Canada. The task he undertook was all cut out
for him. Fate decreed that he should take it. He never
dreamed of refusing. And what a task !

The greatest trouble Beatty had to face when he became
President was too much traffic, too little rolling stock, an
almost tragic scarcity of labour and the McAdoo award in
wages. Railroading costs were at an apex before even
munitions costs began to be. The collapse of railways in
the United States drove a vast amount of traffic over
Canadian roads. The two younger transcontinental sys-
tems were on the verge of receiverships. The brunt of the
burden fell upon the old C.P.R., which at that time, in
spite of the McAdoo awards was making a heavy profit.
The cash value of traffic handled was colossal. War work

•\

198 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

was wearing the railways down. New locomotives and
cars were hard to get. Orders could not be placed outside.
Canada's railways had to depend on Canada. Ships could
not wait, though submarines could. Freight must move.
Two hard winters nearly paralyzed all the systems. No
new lines were being built. The old lines were wearing out.
Canada had the longest hauls of any nation in the world.
Our systems were built for the long haul. The railway
systems of other countries were demoralized with wastage,
low repairs arid enormous traffic. Even in short-haul
England of the easy climate, there was railway paralysis.
But England had great gasoline highways and coastal routes
when Canada had neither. It is said in a report of that
period, "General Superintendents in charge of some of the
"key" divisions of the big roads have had to work from
12 to 20 hours a day to keep roadbed, rolling stock and
crews up to top mark." 22,000 Canadian cars were "lost"
in the United States in one winter. What war left of the
railways winter did its best to debilitate. Industry stole
transportation labour at high wages and rolled out vast
quantities of material that had to be moved, when even
C.P.R. efficiency seemed to be just about obliterated from
the chart of the world's work.

This was no time for any man to pray that he might be
made chief executive of the greatest transportation system
in the world ; nor a time for Lord Shaughnessy to continue
in that office. The work was now too heavy for the
autocrat and for a man whose eyesight was bad. A suc-
cessor had to be found. The directors did it almost auto-
matically. There was but one man to consider ; and he
had no experience in any of the mechanical departments.

Beatty was the man. The old autocrat himself had
said so ; and he knew. Shaughnessy had taken the road
from its wizard creator, and made it the size and efficiency
that it was. There was almost apostolic succession.
Stories that the Montreal directors favoured one man, the

EDWARD WENTWORTH BEATTY 199

Toronto directors another, and that Shaughnessy gave the
casting vote, were mere fabrications. Yet Beatty stated
that never in his long years of experience with the system
had he a clear ambition to climb up its ladder. He never
wanted anything but a large day's work — and he got many.
But, when he was made Vice-President, he must have
known that he was the man. Vice- Presidents on the
C.P.R. are not necessarily presidents to be. One of
Beatty's friends travelling with him up from Three Rivers
once bought him a picture postcard with the legend, ' ' No
mother ever picks her son to be a Vice-President." Beatty
smiled it off. He probably knew. This was one of the
rare bits of humour that illustrated the Shaughnessy
regime. His lordship, fond enough of Irish jokes outside,
was never humourous inside the system. All the humour
in Canadian Pacific was supposed to have died when
Van Home left it.

But now and again a gleam of human insight came from
the grim efficiency of the great system, and at least upon
one occasion it flashed from the legal department. When
the Railway Commission was almost a new thing under
that remarkable square-deal chairman, Joseph Pitt Mabee,
the town of Trois Rivieres, Que., had a suit, through its
Board of Trade, against the C.P.R. , involving discrimina-
tion in rates. The counsel for the plaintiff was a French-
Canadian who could read, but not comfortably speak,
English. The further he went the more bewildered the
chairman became, until he ventured to interrupt :

"I have a suggestion to make to my hon. friend who is
having difficulty in getting me to understand the case."

The suggestion was that the solicitor for the rail way, who
had made a special study of the Board of Trade's argument
for the sake of demolishing it, should himself present that
side of the argument in the clear, concise English of which
he is a master ; that wherever necessary the French
counsel should correct the statement ; and that afterwards
Mr. Beatty should proceed to demolish the argument

200 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

which he himself had put up. The counsel was agreeable.
Mr. Beatty rose to the occasion. His statement of the
case was so satisfactory to the counsel for Trois Rivieres
that he afterwards wondered how Beatty was ever able
to demolish it and win the case.

Beatty has no hobbies. He cares for no art, collects no
curios, has no great house, drives no big cars ; cares not
at all for society ; thinks more of the Amateur Athletic
Association and the Navy League and the boys of the
Y.M.C.A., the athletic equipment of Queen's University
and the success of Sir Arthur Currie as President of McGill.
He never travels for pleasure. When he goes over the
C.P.R., expect results. The average Montrealer does not
even know where he lives. He is said to spend forty
minutes a day, indoor weather, at basketball. In summer
he camps. Snapshotted in a sweater he looks like a com-
promise between Babe Ruth batting a home run and
Hofmann playing the piano.

When Beatty was first a young lawyer in Montreal he
was so lonesome for the city he came from that he used to
go down to the station to see the Toronto train pull in.
He did not dream then that some day he would be the
man that pulls all the trains in ; that from his desk he
should have a periscope on the world — every day — the
greatest intelligence department in America. When he
was a school lad in Thorold, afterwards at the Upper
Canada "Prep." (where he got so bad a report that his
father was advised to take him out of school), he had no
idea that he would be Chancellor of Queen's University.

The system and the man. Determining which most
affects the other is like the old problem of the hen and the
egg. But here, anyhow, is a great system. No man
venerates it more than Beatty. He does not even consent
to call it a corporation ; prefers to think of it as an asso-
ciation, imbued with enthusiasm and loyalty. Now and
then he publicly discusses national ownership ; none can
do it better. He did it at Thorold soon after he was ap-

201

pointed. He argued it in Ottawa with Cabinet Ministers.
He did it in Winnipeg. One suspects that Beatty's ability
to do this was one of his qualifications for the presidency.

A year before Beatty became president a man high up
in the system predicted that the C.P.R. would spend a
million dollars to campaign against Bolshevism. He
failed to foresee that the stolid old bulwark of things as
they are would never need to do any such thing. All it
needed to spend was Beatty who, within six months of the
time he changed the sign on his door, had convinced the
system that a sort of new optimistic vitality had got hold
of it. There was once a cynical proverb around those
offices : "It's cheaper to buy editors than newspapers."
One hears very little of it now. The annual meeting of the
Directors may be fine copy for the Montreal Gazette, but the
•yearly banquet of the officials is a matter of real public
interest, especially to the young President. There is a
psychology in this1 — "association" — that is not a corpora-
tion. How does he gauge it ? From the officials. He
does not visit the Angus shops ; though if he did he would
be welcome. It was an old axiom of Van Home that what
the head is, so also will the system be. Beatty extends the
axiom — to include the officials. He would have them radiate
optimism, not particularly caring that they get it from him.

For the past two years optimism has been needed.
C.P. reports are not what they used to be. Even the
stock exchanges tell the tale. But in comparison with
American lines, with other Canadian systems — ah ! here is
always some comfort. Trust Beatty ,to miss no chance of
intimating that he would much prefer to have real com-
petition from Government roads. He fervently hopes for
Government ownership to succeed. C.P. cannot thrive
on weak competition. He has no fear that any sane Govern-
ment will try absorbing the C.P.R. Even farmers, he
thinks, would soon settle down to a sense of responsibility.
The old pioneer is a hard organization to make into a tail
that does not wag the dog. Steadily he has advertised to

202 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

the public that the system is still the handbook of effi-
ciency ; let Government roads imitate. National owner-
ship, being impersonal, somewhat Bolshevistic, and very
vague, cannot develop the intensive "super-loyalty" of
the big private system vested in a board of directors, and
the chief.

Since ever he became chief Beatty has made this clear ;
for a purpose. Did I omit to say that he is the first C.P.R.
president without whiskers ; the first with a college degree ;
the first Canadian born, the first lawyer, the first bachelor
and the first man from Toronto who .had occupied that
position ; the youngest of all the presidents ; that he used
to be an expert at college Rugby ; that at Upper Canada
" Prep." he was much addicted to pugilism ; not to mention
the discarded tilt of his Fedora ? If so it is because the man
himself sets no value on these things. His faith is in the
collective personality, called the Canadian Pacific, built
up on the Personal Equation.

But Ottawa — what of that ? Almost ever since Ottawa
was, the C.P.R. has been said to own it. Governments of
either party have never been inhospitable to the benign
octopus — centipede it became — that had its origin in the
Parliament of Canada and wrecked one Tory Government.
The penalty of transcontinental railways is that they
require to have mortgages on governments. Presently the
worm turns. But that usually costs more money than the
mortgage. We are now paying off the mortgages of two
great systems. The C.P.R. mortgage was paid long ago.
The President of the C.P.R. is usually regarded as second
only to the Premier in point of national management.
But Premiers and governments come and go ; the Presi-
dent stays on. Suppose that in the year 19 — - there
should be a Cabinet mainly of farmers. Alberta has a farmer
government. Saskatchewan with a "Liberal" government
has a Cabinet mainly of farmers. Manitoba sometimes
has to remind herself that Premier Norris is a kind of farmer.

EDWARD WENTWORTH BEATTY 203

Ontario has a farmer Premier and more than half a Cabinet
of farmers.

This is the age of the farmers' innings. Suppose that a
Cabinet of super-Agriculturists at the Capital some day
should not agree with Mr. Beatty that farmers when they
get responsibilities measure up and settle down to con-
servatism. Such a Cabinet might not remember that the
C.P.R. had really done so very much for the prairies in
comparison with what it has got from the West. It might
decree that a lawyer President should be called upon to
elucidate why he judges that so efficient a Personal Equation
as the C.P.R. should not be "nationalized", if not govern-
ment-owned, for the good of the whole people, and especially
of the people whose traffic creates most of the revenues ?

This is merely supposing. In any case Mr. Beatty
would be master of the occasion. The lawyer who argued
against himself and won at Three Rivers might be able to
put up a more convincing argument to Ottawa Farmers
than Lord Shaughnessy did to the Union Government when
he offered to amalgamate the C.P.R. with the Government
roads providing the management should be C.P.R. and the
dividends guaranteed.

But of course this is a merely hypothetical argument.
There may never be a Farmer Administration in Ottawa.
And if there ever should be, we may trust to conservative
and progressive old C.P.R. to do its share of injecting a
"sense of responsibility" into a Farmer Cabinet to help it
measure up and settle down, even if some farmer should
buy C.P. shares enough to get himself elected as a director.
As it stands to-day in the estimation of the travelling public,
who may or may not care a copper about the personality
of its rugged and efficient lawyer president, the Canadian
Pacific is the one greatest proof that Canada needs no
revolution which will interfere with the morale of that
system. In fact so long as the C.P.R. holds its own an
economic revolution in Canada is impossible.

A BOURGEOIS MASTER OF QUEBEC
SIR LOMER GOUIN

EARLY in January, 1917, a remarkable dinner was held in
Toronto, the first of its kind ever held in that city of
Orange Walks. Protestants and Catholics sat side by side.
The}' applauded the same sentiments. Orator after orator
dug into the mines of national idioms. They cracked
jokes and told stories and worked up climaxes. The three
hundred rose again and again with glasses of orangeade,
and Apollinaris, toasting — Quebec, Ontario, and United
Canada. They waved napkins and cheered and sang again
and again "For he's a jolly good fellow". A Methodist
minister sat at the back of the room next a Congregationalist
preacher and pretended to unwrap a de luxe cigar. Orange-
men sat at the same table with Catholics. Macs hob-
nobbed with 'eaus. They autographed one another's
menus. The books of songs were bilingual — French and
English. "God Save the King" was sung in both lan-
guages. "O Canada" was done in French. Methodist
orators vied with French speakers. Col. George Denison
sat next Gen. Lessard. They fraternized as soldiers. The
Methodist local-preacher Premier of Ontario sat with the
Roman Catholic Premier of Quebec. Sentiment ran high.
But no French-Canadian was so emotional as N. W.
Rowell, who glorified the heroes of Courcellette ; and no
Anglo-Canadian was quite so stolid, serious and impressive
with homely common sense as Sir Lomer Gouin, the Premier
of Quebec. This man spoke slowly, massively, almost
gutturally like a Saxon, in fluent but accented English.

204

HON. SIR WMER GOUIN 205

He was far less excitable than the Premier of Ontario on
the same subject :

THE RACE UNITY OK CANADA

PREFIGURED IN
THE BONNE ENTENTE

Three hundred public-spirited men of whom eighty
came from Quebec were as one family on this.

At one in the morning the concomity broke up. Not
a drop of vin or liqwur in any form had been served. The
enthusiasm was, therefore, as natural as the tide of the St.
Lawrence, which in the form of the great lakes and Niagara
does its best to put its arms round the neck of Ontario
before it cuts through the heart of Quebec. To the pure
imagination it was somewhat as though a procession of
St. Jean Baptiste had suddenly dreamed it was an Orange
Walk.

This unusual Entente was held between the rancours of
the bilingual dispute of 1916 and the Quebec revolt against
conscription in 1917. Those present who doubted the
sincerity of passionate speakers anchored a timidly stead-
fast hope to the practical, broad-angled Premier of Quebec,
who, had he sat between Mr. Bourassa and the Premier of
Ontario, would have inclined his ear to Ontario.

Nothing is more certain than that four French-Canadian
leaders, had they been given or had they asked for the
opportunity and had acted together, could have put a
different face on Quebec's relation to the war. Four men
namable in that capacity are, Sir Lomer Gouin, Sir Wilfrid
Laurier, Ernest Lapointe, and Cardinal Begin. Of these,
Gouin was at that time the most able. For ten years he
had been uninterruptedly Premier of Quebec with a moral
guarantee that he could occupy the Premiership by an
overwhelming majority until he should be gathered to
his fathers.

Again and again rumour slated Sir Lomer for Ottawa.
He wisely declined. He had a peasant's attachment to

206 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

"le pays" and its white villages. In Quebec he was the
Chief of Ministers, the little elected father of his country.
In Ottawa he would have been perhaps a grand Minister of
Public Works building docks in Halifax, customs houses in
British Columbia, post-offices on the prairies, armouries in
Ontario and court-houses in Quebec. Yes, there would be
surely armouries in Ontario.

I met Sir Lomer but once, in his office in the Parliament
Buildings. There was no particular reason for seeing him
except the pleasure of encountering a descendant of the
people who so gallantly fought under Montcalm so that
posterity could enjoy a city in part exclusively English and
for the most part idiomatically French. A few evenings
previous I had talked on the Terrace to a glowing National-
ist, a young expert in cynical idealism, who spoke very
curtly about the Premier. An ardent patriot, he talked
freely and interestingly, as we gazed out at the blue-hazed
domes of the noble hills that mark the valley of St. Lawrence.
The roofs of Old Lower Town were sizzling in heat. Drowsy,
lumber-laden bateaux and ocean-liners crept and smoked
about the docks. Beyond the grey-scarped citadel the
vesper bells of parish after parish clanged a divine discord
into the calm of the great river.

"What do you think of Gouin ?" I asked him.

A cynical smile flicked over the Nationalist's face. For
a moment he did not answer.

"Pardonnez-moi," I mumbled. "I am Anglais."

"Oh !" he said, sharply, laughing. "Have you seen
the Montcalm suite in the Chateau here ? Do so. The
C.P.R. discovered an old bed and some creaky chairs said
to have been used by the great general. They placed them
in a suite of rooms which they rent to curiosity-hunting
Americans who sentimentalize over history at twenty-five
dollars a day. Such is Quebec when she is commercialized
into a highway for tourists."

"But what has that to do with Sir Lomer Gouin ?"

HON. SIR LOMER GOUIN 207

"Directly — nothing. Sir Lomer is not even a director
of the C.P.R., or of the Bank of Montreal, though one never
knows what he may do with his money and his talents
when he gets tired of manipulating elections."

' ' Oh, you mean that Gouin — does not reflect the idealism
of Quebec ; its love of the land that bore our fathers, its
poetic isolation among the provinces ? "

He blew a shaft of cigarette smoke.

"Sir Lomer," he said, "is Chairman of the Board of
Directors of the Province of Quebec. His chief duty is to
go about inspecting and improving properties and to sit at
directors' meetings declaring provincial dividends instead
of deficits."

I remarked that since Quebec is so prosperous and so
large and populous with so many cradles, the Premier need
not perhaps vex himself deeply about ideals such as the
French language in schools outside the province.

"What !" was the reply, as a glass banged upon the
table. "Would you cage us in here like Indians on a
reservation ? Has the French-Canadian nation no rights
outside Quebec ?"

"What would you do ?" I asked him. "What could
you do ?"

"Secede !" he exclaimed. "Become the Sinn Fein of
Canada."

"What about the Pope of Rome ?"

"Has as much to do with Quebec," he laughed icily,
"as the President of France. If the Pope should issue
instructions to the bishops of Quebec, asking the clergy
to educate the people of Quebec on their duty to go to war
or to vote for either of the old line parties, the people would
openly disregard them. We would as much resent the
interference of Rome in our affairs as the American colonies
did the tyranny of George the Third."

Here was the superb inconsistency of the French mind
wedded to a single magnificent idea.. This Nationalist

208 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

admitting the possibility of secession, made sure that it
would not be to the United States which puts the French
language on a par with Choctaw. When I suggested as a
recipe for national unity that French and English be
learned by both English and French all over Canada, he
flouted the idea of French-Canadians learning more
English than they needed in business, and of English-
Canadians learning French at all. He fervently held to
the Keltic notion of making a preserve of the French-
Canadian race, language, literature and customs whatever
may become of the religion ; yet he objected to penning
the race into a reservation like the Indians. He observed
that in 1911 the Nationalists bucked reciprocity with
the United States.

"I think we should beccjme an independent republic,"
he said as he plopped a fresh cigarette. "We have the
main part of the St. Lawrence. No, you will not find
Gouin say so. Gouin is a Tory prefect. He plays politics,
not nationalism."

I observed that the band was about to play.

"Ha !" he exclaimed, stretching his legs with a yawn.
"And the concert will conclude with that amiable farce,
'O Canada,' followed by 'God Save the King.' "

This Nationalist interview is given at some length
because it illustrates much of what Sir Lomer Gouin is not,
and if he were would not openly say so, because he stands
for a majority the watchword of which is "Stop, Look,
Listen". I went at once to see the Premier. He was
closeted with confiding — perhaps confederate — priests, and
with simple habitant folk who stood, not in awe but in
affection, of the Premier. He might have been himself a
father confessor.

Talking to him I found Gouin peculiarly on his guard ;
broad-faced, heavy-jawed, slow of speech, almost devoid
of gesticulation, he was as unamiably dispassionate as a
bank manager. There was no militant passion of the

HON. SIR LOMER GOUIN 209

minority in this man ; no heroic tilting against windmills ;
no expression of ideals ; no suggestion of a delightful
outlaw. He was amazingly practical, with no inclination
to discuss freely the native peculiarities of either race. He
understood Ontario — as a politician only ; England as a
democracy and a form of government. He had no absorbing
idiosyncracies and made no attempt to pose or even to
be interesting. After the bounce of the young Nationalist
he was as tame as a grandfather's clock.

I felt that Sir Lomer was asking himself — what did the
stranger want ? He would have been infinitely more at
ease discussing with a bishop how to prevent a strike in a
cotton mill ; or with a political outposter what to 'do to
keep some seat for the Administration. If I had made
to him such a statement as once I had made with such
volcanic results to Bourassa, that nine- tenths of the popu-
lation in a village like Nicolet could speak no Anglais, he
would have been eloquent. Had I observed that 70 per
cent of the operatives in a great Quebec industry cannot
read and write French, that Ontario has a policy of good
roads comparable to that of Quebec, that Orangemen do
not dominate Toronto, that the Ontario farmer is a better
producer than the habitant, or that Protestant clerics do
not interfere in politics, he would have bristled with infor-
mation to set me profoundly right. But he created no
atmosphere of free discussion with a stranger. He was
coldly aloof, yet earnestly endeavouring to say something
worth while.

What I really wanted to tell Gouin was that he was
personally very much like the late great Tory, Sir James
Whitney. But he did not warm up to personal comment.
The bilingual question was too complicated. The atmos-
phere of the Bonne Entente was lacking. Gouin and my-
self were in different envelopes. He was the Premier.

From what is said of him I am sure most of the fault
was my own. I did not understand him. He was too

210 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

much the Premier ; the master executive. The Nationalist
was almost right ; Gouin suggested the dividend and the
census. He was the chief executive of a Province larger
than almost any country in Europe but Russia, and with a
population about half that of Roumania, of whom about
one-sixth are the Anglo-Saxon minority. He seemed to
know Quebec from Montreal to the edge of Labrador
almost by telegraph poles. You recall that the French in
Canada evolved the modern census with its intimate pene-
tration into the affairs of the people, some time before the
Germans did it. The Premier of Quebec was a handbook
encyclopaedia of Quebec. He knew the precise location by
the roads of almost any white village, pulp-mill, water-
power, mine, timber limit ; knew as much as a man can
about the number of horses and cattle and cradles to a
township ; could talk with enthusiasm about the pioneer
arts of the habitant — the rugs, the baskets, the furniture,
the hand-made churns, the open-air bake-ovens. He
could give the address and the full name of many and many
a priest.

But beyond this there is a Quebec which Sir Lomer
Gouin did not know, because he himself with his bourgeois
excellences and his great good citizenship has not the
Gallic sparkle in his mentality. He never deeply knew the
soul of Quebec. He was too much concerned with its
practical and useful politics to be conscious of its passions.
From the shrug of his shoulder, and a certain twinkle in his
eye when he mentioned diplomacy with clerics, one surmised
that among the clergy he was the master among politicians
who must walk warily. But he was too stout, too thrifty,
too much of a high type of budgeteer to be spiritually
informed of the crude but basically beautiful passions that
undercurrent all peasant communities. There was no
poetry in Gouin. No fire. Little imagination.

"Those Nationalists ?" he repeated shrewdly, slowly.
"Yes, I know their talk. Oh, they are not so dangerous,

HON. SIR LOMER GOUIN 211

but a troublesome minority. I think — I know Quebec
better than they do. You have, I daresa}', Nationalists
in Ontario ?"

What he perhaps expected was some statement about
Orangemen, who of course are nearly all Imperialists. Yet
these very Orangemen represent an intense phase of Cana-
dian life ; the backwoods era, the simple industries, the
old villages, the quaint settlements of the U.K. Loyalists
as picturesque on the Upper, as the dormer-windowed
villages of the French are on the Lower St. Lawrence. To
these men the Empire is as visual, as to the intense Que-
becker it is nebulous. And as the politician in Ontario
has to regard carefully the Orange vote, so the Premier of
Quebec had to be wary of the franchises of his emotional
friends, the Nationalists. He was somewhat afraid of the
minority as all masters of majorities are. Clearly — it was
Gouin's main business to continue being elected. Had he
gone out on behalf of enlistments, to educate his people,
even to speak for France, he would have been in danger of
converting Gouin Liberals into Nationalists.

Ontario cannot fail to make an asset of Gouin's anti-
Nationalism. He was never for any of the violent doctrines
propounded by my friend on the Terrace. He would not
oppose Quebec going to war. I am sure he God-speeded
the 22nd who died at Courcellette. He was the Premier
of a free Province. Those men had freely gone. Others —
the majority — had freely stayed. But an election was
coming ; where everybody would be free to vote.

Then there were the clergy ; most of them friends of
Gouin. The Cardinal at Quebec had been interviewed by
Sir Sam Hughes on aid to enlistments. Gouin could have
told Hughes that he would fail ; that Begin, though not a
Nationalist, was a reactionary. The bilingual controversy
was still acute. Gouin could not have gone out or sent
emissaries out, to reason with French-Canadians about
marching with a Province which had denied the French

212 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

language rights in contrast to the Government's own claim
that it had given rights to the Anglo minority in Quebec.

Conscription was coming. It was a precarious time.
The master of Quebec had to move cautiously. His
loyalty to Britain was never questioned. His faith in a
United Canada was never doubted. Had Quebec been all
for Gouin instead of Gouin all for Quebec, the Premier's
way would have been easier. Better let well enough alone ;
encourage those to enlist who really wanted to go — because
Quebec was a free country.

Then there was the Laurier influence. Had the old man
gone in with the Premier to help the Ottawa Government —

Impossible. Neither of them was asked before Coalition
came on the heels of conscription. And when conscription
came, the minority of Nationalists opposed to the war
became the majority of Quebeckers who preferred not to
comply with the law. From disregarding the law to
rebellion, to Nationalism was not far. Gouin had the
balance to hold.

The Cardinal's attitude on conscription made Gouin's
position still more difficult. His letter to the press bluntly
put the Roman Catholic Church above temporal law.
One heard of no rebuke from the Premier of Quebec to the
Cardinal. A Cardinal may be above politics.

Sir Lomer was playing the game of safety, when from
his own temperament and position and unbacked by other
leaders he could do little more. He stood for the law and
did not hinder its operation. But if there was a chief
executive in Canada who wished the war were righteously
over, it was Sir Lomer Gouin. No Premier had such a
predicament ; so much at the end to lose ; so much at first
to have gained — if only he could have foreseen, as nobody
did, that conscription was coming and that law would be
more awkward than liberty.

The Premier of Quebec had experience in keeping his
Government immune from agitators. It was not alone

HON. SIR LOMER GOUIN 213

the Nationalists who had made him uneasy. On the other
extreme there had been for some time one Godefroi Lang-
lois, former editor of La Patrie, and later founder and
editor of Le Pays, whose platform was compulsory State
education away from control of the clergy and in defiance
of the Archbishops. Gouin did not endorse Langlois.
How could he ? Le Pays, when it condemned clerical
schools, attacked the Administration. Politically Gouin
was right in opposing Langlois. Nationally he was playing
provincial. Langlois had a mission, in line with a broader,
nationalized Canada ; the same mission which is now
being reflected in the National Council of Education.

So, between the reactionism of Bourassa and the radi-
calism of Langlois, Gouin was the compromise ; and Lang-
lois was conveniently given an official post in Europe.

Gouin has compromised his whole political career.
With the leverage of enormous success in elections and
administration, he never had the vision to declare himself
in favour of a bigger Quebec than could be got by extending
its boundaries to Ungava.

He was too old to begin. Quebec to him was a vast
prefecture to be administered ; not a vision to be realized.
Ontario — except politically — was almost as far away as
British Columbia. He was seldom in Toronto. Montreal
was as a rule the last west for this voyageur., He seldom
or never went to the Maritimes. He knew the people down
there regarded the bloc Quebec as a denationalizer. He
had little or no desire to see the prairies. He wanted
Quebec to prosper. He delighted to see pulp mills and
cotton factories and power plants and railways and trolleys
vibrating along the St. Lawrence. He loved to dream of
the great unpeopled hinterland — all Quebec ; of the other
hinterland — all the rest of Canada ; of the transcontinentals
converging at Montreal ; of the steamship lines terminating
there ; of a land where there are few empty cradles or idle
factories or wasting farms.

214 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

All these things Gouin, growing stout and somewhat
heavy of face, loved to behold ; and out of that grew all
the vision he seemed to have. In this enormous prefecture
within the Empire he beheld a far more comfortable State
than the Nationalist dream of a separative Quebec ; glad
when he could find time to motor grandly and amiably out
among the villages and be greeted as le grand seigneur of
politics, even when he lacked the grand manners of the
eminent patrician.

At any conference of Premiers in Ottawa he held him-
self somewhat aloof, studying the lot, respecting them all,
cordial with all, anxious to do all that constitutionally in
him lay to further co-ordination. But Gouin always saga-
ciously knew that there was no Premier in the pack who
already had so much, with so little to ask, from Federalism
as he. His was the pivotal province of Confederation,
the grand compromise of Old Macdonald with Cartier ;
the basic sixty-five members of Parliament, unchangeable
except by ripping up the B.N.A. Act, an instrument of
Empire. He could wink the other eye and reflect that
from the political concessions of the Act in official bilingual-
ism and a fixed representation, in the outlet of the St.
Lawrence, in the possession of the historic city, in the
control of ocean navigation, in a solid clergy, in funda-
mental virtues of thrift and an established peasantry — he
and his had more than any of the others could ever ask.

"Ah !" he said eloquently, with a fine twinkle of his
eyes to the interviewer at Quebec, ' ' you have not seen our
Province ? Then you must come down again, when I am
not busy, and let me take you to see — all we have down
here !"

A POLITICAL MATTAWA OF THE WEST
JOHN WESLEY DAFOE

FIRST impressions are always tyrants. The first time I
heard John Wesley Dafoe talk he was in his large sanctum
of the Manitoba Free Press, in the summer of 1916. He
was without a collar, his shirt loose at the neck, and his
hair like a windrow of hay. He reminded me of some
superb blacksmith hammering out irons of thought, never
done mending the political waggons of other people, and
from his many talks to the waggoners knowing more about
all the roads than any of them. The wheat on a thousand
fields was baking that day, and the 'Peg was roasting alive.
Since that I have always pictured Dafoe sweltering, terribly
in earnest, whittling the legs of the Round Table and telling
somebody how it is that west of the lakes neither of the old
Ottawa parties has now any grip on the people.

Dafoe talked that way in 1916. He was beginning to
lisp a little along that restless line of thought in 1910. And
in 1940 he may be sitting in that same sanctum with walls
of heavy books on two sides of him, telling somebody just
how it came to be that an economic cyclone on the prairies
once caught up all the Grits and Tories and nothing was
ever heard or seen of them again.

When Kipling wrote, ' ' Oh, east is east and west is west,
and never the twain shall meet," he had never met Dafoe.
Some directive angel planted him at Winnipeg shortly after
Clifford Sifton crowded the gate there with people going
in that they might choke it again with wheat coming out ;
and while people went in and wheat came out through this
spout of the great prairie hopper, Dafoe dug himself a little

215

216 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

ship canal which as it grew bigger sluiced the political
rivers of the West into his sanctum before he lifted the
lock and let them on down to the sea at Ottawa. The
West as he saw it was a place of coming mighty changes.
His own party was pushing the transformations. The
prairies were due to become the mother of great forces.
You could not be always herding people into a land like
that from South, east and west and not come within an ace
of fostering some revolution.

And of all cities west of the lakes, Winnipeg was the
clearing-house, as much for policies and programmes as for
wheat and money and people. No political cloud ever
gathered on the prairies that did not get blown into Winni-
peg before it burst. Dafoe stood ready for them all. He
believed that no change had happened yet to the Liberal
party comparable with the changes yet to come. He saw
that party chaining itself to tariffs and big interests and
he said :

"Believe me, that won't forever do. There's some-
thing just short of a revolution going to happen to this
party before the West gets done with it ; and if the party
isn't ready for the West, so much the worse for the party."

Just to get ahead of mere chronology, the bane of many
a good man's life. In 1919 the most complete imitation of
a little Moscow ever seen on this continent was set up in
Winnipeg. For many weeks it looked to some hopefuls as
though the Wheat City would reconstruct the whole econo-
mic structure of the nation to suit the ideas of a violent
minority. The main recorded issue was "collective bar-
gaining". The real issue was direct action in the form of
the sympathetic strike. By its expected control of urban
centres the Soviet organization aimed to throttle big
utilities, finance, shipping, railroads, telegraphs. The
United Grain Growers were to be but a helpless giant in the
hands of Jack Proletariat. Parliament was to be super-
seded by Direct Action. The A.F.L. was to become

JOHN WESLEY DAFOE 217

obsolete. Trades Unions were to be taken over and
painted red. Citizens in starched collars were to become
comrades in shirt sleeves, or enemies. Political parties
would be reconstructed. The "workers" would own the
country. The British Empire would be shaken into
Soviets. The Army and the Navy would be international-
ized. The real Capital of Canada outside of Winnipeg
would be, not London, but Moscow. The International
would supplant national anthems. Public opinion would
be exterminated except as revised by the Red leaders on the
Red River at its junction with the Assiniboine.

In the unfolding of this Great Adventure we pause here
to observe that it was a newspaper which behind the
Citizens' Committee administered a black eye to this
attempt to make Winnipeg the Soviet headquarters of
North America and 120 millions of people. The name of
the paper was the Manitoba Free Press.

And the Free Press was seeing Red. What business
had the Red Flag in a city like Winnipeg at all ? If any-
where in Canada, why not in the industrial, big-interest
East — in Montreal or Toronto ?

"One revolution at a time, please," we almost hear the
Free Press saying. ' ' Now the war is done the West has to
settle the fate of Government at Ottawa in its own way.
And the way of the West is not with the Red Flag ; not
with Direct Action. This city is a headquarters of evolu-
tionaries, not of outlaws. You people of the Strike Com-
mittee are trying to get the spot-light when you've no
business anywhere except right at back stage."

A perfectly straight argument, though not couched in
those words. Dafoe and his associates were profoundly
busy with what to them was a ten times greater issue than
any form of Soviet anywhere in Canada. As a matter of
record the paper did admit that the metal workers had a
right to strike for collective bargaining.

"But no other Union here or elsewhere," it thundered

218 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

"has any right to a sympathetic strike to help the metal
workers. This city is not going to be throttled by a thug
minority, who want to exercise governing power as a revo-
lutionary usurpation of authority."

A minority always leads. Majorities follow. The
position of the Free Press was, that it is only a minority
able to command a majority that should rule ; and the
Soviet was no such minority — while the Free Press was.

A clear grasp of this is necessary in the business of
judging Mr. Dafoe and his coming influence upon Canadian
affairs. What Dafoe enunciated about the strike will have
a strong bearing in the case upon what he thinks about the
Agrarians. The judge must get a fair judgment. But
of this later.

Dafoe was, so far as we know, the first editor in Canada
to advocate from the beginning of the war a Coalition
Government. This was natural. The Free Press had no
faith in the Borden administration of Bob Rogers, owner
of the Winnipeg Telegram. By the summer of 1916 it was
into a Coalition campaign. A year later when the Premier
came back from England declaring for conscription and
inviting Laurier to join in a Coalition, the Free Press
supported him.

Why this anxiety ? We must pull off a bit of the
makeup to find out. The Free Press was a Liberal paper.
It supported Laurier in the West. But the older it grew
the more clearly Dafoe and his associates saw that the man
who had created the two new Western Provinces could not
hold them. Other gods were now arising. Their organ
was the Grain Growers' Guide ; their parliaments were in
grain growers' conventions ; their policy was radical
Liberalism. The Liberal organ of a Wheat City could not
consistently antagonize this radical movement. The far-
mers must be studied. So far as they could strengthen
Liberalism by becoming a Radical wing, they must be
encouraged. At the point where they developed an extreme

JOHN WESLEY DAFOE 219

left away from the party they must be checked. The Free
Prses which was yet to fight an economic revolution must not
itself be revolutionary.

This leads up to policy in Empire. The paper had gone
against Borden in 1911. It was against the taxation Navy
of Borden even though it could see the danger of war ahead.
It was opposed to the whole super-Tory idea of a cen-
tralized British commonwealth of nations. It "hung the
hide" of Lionel Curtis and his Round Table propaganda
clubs to the Canadian National fence. It argued for "a
progressive development in Canadian self-government to
the point of the attainment of sovereign power to be fol-
lowed by an alliance with the other British nations", who
it was assumed would do likewise. For years before the
war the Free Press had talked of this evolutionary Empire,
deeply regretting that Mr. Bourassa had coined the word
"Nationalist" and made it obnoxious..

Winnipeg seldom does things one half at a time. In
the summer of 1917 J. W. Dafoe was one of the most as-
tounded men in Canada. The other one was Sir Wilfrid
Laurier. That was the year of the famous Liberal Con-
vention. Had such a Convention happened in Chicago
with such a man as Roosevelt as the centre-piece, its doings
would have been cabled the world over. In its small way
the Winnipeg Convention was more sensational than the
Big Strike two years later. Mr. Dafoe was in Ottawa that
summer. He was needed there. The Premier had come
back from England primed with a policy of conscription
to be enforced by a possible Coalition Government, an offer
of which was made to the Opposition leader. Since early in
the war the Free Press had argued for coalition, but opposed
conscription until after the United States entered the
struggle because of the inevitable exodus of slackers across
the border.

There was a strong conscriptionist group of Liberals in
Ottawa. We must assume that Mr. Dafoe, though not a

220 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

member of Parliament, was strongly behind them ; his
presence in Ottawa indicates that his counsels were needed
in view of the attitude to be taken by Western Liberals.
It was the conscriptionist group of Liberals in Ottawa that
decided upon the Convention, whether on the advice of
Mr. Dafoe is not generally known. The intention was to
create a Western Liberal group free from Laurier control,
prepared to consider coalition — involving conscription — on
its merits. So far, the policy of the Convention was in line
with the previous programme of Mr. Dafoe But the
Liberal machine in the West — which was not Mr. Dafoe's
party at all, because for some time he had been working on
the principle that both the old parties as such had lost their
grip on the West — went out and captured the delegates.
The Convention was suddenly stampeded for Laurier, a
result which Mr. Dafoe never expected but against which
he had strongly urged the Liberal Unionist leaders. The
Free Press thereafter thundered against the Convention
as entirely misrepresenting Western Liberalism. The sub-
sequent South Winnipeg convention shewed that the Free
Press was right. Almost the entire strength of Western
Liberalism swung into the Union movement and the Coali-
tion, and the Free Press became a temporary, though inde-
pendent, supporter of the Union Government for the purpose
of winning the war.

Now for the larger front stage view ; how does Mr.
Dafoe's attitude in the defeat of the Winnipeg Soviet idea
of government and his former campaign against Laurier
Liberals match with his attitude towards the Farmer
Movement as embodied by Mr. Crerar ? The leader of
the Agrarian movement is a friend of the Free Press for
much the same reason that the strike leaders in 1919 were
a foe to it. Crerarism in the West looks for the support of
that paper in its drive upon Ottawa. From his experience
outwardly to the public, and intimately behind the scenes,
always concerned with building up a new Liberalism on

JOHN WESLEY DAFOE 221

the wreck of the old, Dafoe endorses Crerar and his move-
ment. When Crerar went into the Government the Free
Press favoured his going. Mr. Dafoe clearly states that,
"if the Union movement could retain its Liberal elements
and produce an economic and taxation policy acceptable
to Western opinion, we could continue to support it." In
contemplating such a miracle, did he expect that the ultra-
Tories would lop away from the Union, making a "rump"
party to match the Laurier Liberals, and leaving the Union
Government free to make an alliance with the Farmer
Group ? This we do not profess to know. In a political
age like this almost any sort of alliance may be made for
the purpose of capturing Parliament. But a permanent
alliance between Western Liberalism represented by Mr.
Crerar and the Government by Coalition looks now as
fantastic as a Coalition between Lloyd George and de
Valera. Mr. Dafoe probably knew that the Government
and Mr. Crerar would lock horns over the tariff — since
any species of protection and free trade never could sleep
together. When Mr. Crerar left the Government on the
budget issue, the Free Press ceased its active support of
the Government and moved its guns to a detached position.
When Meighen became Premier and in his programme
speech at Stirling outlined his policy, Dafoe definitely
declared himself as no longer in support of the Union
Government. As he could not support the Laurier Liberal
party, which he had formerly opposed, the only thing left
was to make an active and open alliance with Mr. Crerar.
Such ^ a mobile course of action is incomprehensible
unless we keep in mind the fact that Mr. Dafoe has long
found it impossible to support either of the old parties.
The Coalition was a new one which he consistently sup-
ported on its merits and up to a point. The point was
reached. Unionism and Agrarianism were incompatible.
Therefore Unionism was a Tory institution ; and the only
Liberal programme left for the Free Press was to form

222 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

an alliance with Mr. Crerar and his great group of class-
conscious Agrarians.

By this time, if he reads this, Mr. Dafoe will have ob-
served that we are trying to corner him on the question :

If you were opposed to a Labor Soviet which aimed at
making a little Moscow of Winnipeg, what are you going
to do about a Farmer Soviet that aims to capture Ottawa ?

Already he has begun to answer. He uses a label for
the party led by Mr. Crerar and evolved with the aid of
Mr. Dafoe :

The National Progressive Party.

A good name, even if not new. What is behind the
label ? That the party so named has now taken over all
the Liberal economic traditions in the West and after the
next general election will become the real Liberal Party of
Canada. In the opinion of Dafoe, Mackenzie King should
keep out of the West in the coming election in order to let
Mr. Crerar romp home with three-fourths of the -entire
representation in Parliament. He alleges that Laurier
destroyed the old Western Liberal party in 1917 ; that
King has not revived it — though Mr. Fielding might have
done so ; that Western Liberals have become Progressive
except in the cities, where some have become Unionists.
In making this statement he probably reckoned on Michael
Clark becoming a Progressive. But Michael Clark has
turned out to be one species of even Free Trade Liberal
which Crerarism cannot absorb.

Let us concede that here is one of the most absorbing
problems in Canada. If Dafoe backs Crerar in the effort
to get that preponderant majority away from Meighen and
King, then he is afterwards committed to Crerarism.
Dafoe cannot afford to take Crerar and abandon the
traditions of the Free Press. If he is so keen about real
"nationalism" in this country as to regret that Bourassa
made the word obnoxious, he has surely decided that the
policy of the N.P.P. must be to build up a true national

JOHN WESLEY DAFOE 223

life in Canada. And the man who was Canada's press
representative at the Peace Conference, with such excep-
tional facilities for focussing Canadian national sentiment
among other nations, will not dare to countenance in Mr.
Crerar and his followers any policy that will open the gates
for the United States to walk in and walk over this nation
as twenty years ago his Free Press associate, Clifford Sifton,
opened the doors to let Europe inundate us with a polyglot,
un-national flood.

No Canadian journalist has shouldered so perilous a
responsibility. Dafoe knows what a struggle it is to pre-
serve national identity on a basis of one to twelve against
us. Born in Ontario and experienced in the East as few
editors have ever been, he surely knows the value of not
surrendering our national birthright for a mess of free-
trade pottage.

If he knows this as well as we think he should, will he
uphold the Free Press as the constant critic of Mr. Crerar
if he attempts to denationalize this country ; or will he
accept a portfolio of Minister of the Interior in the Cabinet
dominated by Messrs. Crerar and Drury, and in his haste
to establish the new Liberalism of the National Progressive
Party help to strike out the meaning of the word "National"
in the label ?

Can a man who fought a Direct Action Strike because
it aimed at revolution, consistently endorse, lock, stock
and barrel, a movement which aims at a revolution by
Indirect Action through Parliament ?

Is government by a "National Progressive Party"
Agrarian Group with a business-farmer Premier and a
farmer-dominated Cabinet any less of a group government
in principle than the One Big Union, even though it does
not tie up the nerve centres of the country by a minority
general strike, but merely throttles Parliament, which is
supposed to be the national brain, by the use of the group
minority in voting ?

224 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

Mr. Daf oe has already begun to answer. Again we see
him sweltering in his sanctum, his hair like a windrow of
hay, as he dictates something like this to his stenographer :

"Your logic is good except that your major premiss is a
case of being off to a bad start. The National Progressive
Party is not a group ; it is a business majority. It con-
tains the people who produce the majority of the nation's
wealth for consumption and export and therefore enable
the nation to pay its bills. It is Liberal because it advo*
cates free-trade and is opposed to big monopolies, and there
is no other Liberalism in Canada left worthy the name.
The N.P.P. is the new Liberalism, not for the West alone,
but for the whole country. It depends upon the franchise
of the people, not upon the strike action of revolutionary
groups. Agriculture, not industry, is the basis of Canada's
economics. Even labour as embodied in the Trade Unions
does not aim at revolution. Only the Reds want that.
And the Reds are a hopeless minority. The farmers are
not as yet a popular, though they are an economic, majority;
but the future of this nation depends upon a voting as well
as a producing majority of farmers."

This may not be the exact way in which Mr. Dafoe
would state the case, but it expresses the fact that sound
economics are at the root of all ideas which have to do with
fair government. And it suggests that J. W. Dafoe with
his Free Press has more to do than the Grain Growers1 Guide
with what the people think about the N.P.P.

For this reason we hope that Mr. Dafoe, the judge and
the advocate as well, will always stay "behind the scenes"
to keep Mr. Crerar on the right track if ever he gets the
right of way.

HEADMASTER OF THE MANCHESTER SCHOOL
MICHAEL, CLARK, M.P.

THE eminent headmaster of the Manchester School in
Canada is one of the few M.P.'s who know how to build a
wheat stack. He farms in the spot north of Calgary where
the poplar bluffs begin to mark that you are in the black
loam of wonderful crops at a maximum distance from
Liverpool. It is an art to build a wheat stack. Michael
Clark — so we believe — knows exactly how many tiers to
lay before he begins the "belly" ; how to fill up the middle
so that the butts of the sheaves droop to run off the rain ;
and how high to go with the bulge before he begins to draw
in with the roof. All day long as he worked on his knees,
not in prayer, he had mental leisure to think about one
vast, fructifying theme ; which of course is Free-Trade as
they had it in England ; unrestricted trade according to
the Manchester School. And when he got his stack done
he could tell to a ten-dollar bill how much tariff the rail-
ways and steamships would levy on that stack by the time
the wheat got to Liverpool.

During the War, Clark was a win- the- war Liberal.
He broke away from Laurier on conscription, which he
openly supported. In July this year he was scheduled in
the press — another of those wish-father-to-the-thought
news items — to join Messrs. Drury and Crerar in an anti-
tariff tour of Ontario. He did not go. He probably never
had the slightest intention of going. Michael Clark had
other wheat to stack. An Alberta election was coming.
It came. When it was all over Alberta was in the grip of
the Agrarians. Liberalism by constituencies Vas swept

225 o

226 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

out as clean as a barn floor at fanning-mill time. And
Michael Clark sat down to think it over. He had half
expected that tornado. But he refused to like it. The
farmers had stolen his own programme of free trade and
by means of it had stampeded his Province for the sake of
using it as a spring-broad to make the grand jump into
the Federal arena. The apostle of free trade, himself as
good a farmer as any of them, was now regarded as a chip
on the Agrarian stream at high tide.

Wherefore Michael Clark, after certain "conversations"
with Mr. Crerar, wrote the letter which, if Mackenzie King
is as wise as he is hopeful, will be used to flood the country.
Hoardings and electric signs in the interests of true-Liberal
ism should blazon abroad such sentences as these :

"The House of Lords, the Family Compact, the Manu-
facturers' Association and the junkers and militarists of
Germany are each and all examples of group government."

"Class consciousness is none the less class selfishness,
and therefore doomed to die, because it suddenly appears
in Farmer and Labour parties."

"The apostles of progress must unite upon common
principles, sincerely held to resist reaction, which is ever
present like a dead weight to drag down the aspirations of
the race for freedom, justice and democracy."

"These were the things for which sixty thousand Cana-
dians died in the recent war I have been fighting

'class' for forty years. It would be quite impossible for
me to turn my back on my past and the right in this
election."

Our political history contains no declaration of indepen-
dence more significant, manly and sensational. Repudia-
tion of the Free Trade, group-governed, National Pro-
gressives by Michael Clark, the farmer and the apostle of
Canadian Free Trade, is the first truly emancipating note
that has been struck in all this pre-election barrage of
group against group. Michael Clark may be no bigger

MICHAEL CLARK 227

as a Canadian for such a stand, but he is true to his own
form as one of the rarest and manliest Radicals that Canada
ever had. And his declaration should be of immense value
to the Government, which confesses that its real fear is,
not of Liberals, but of Agrarians.

The headmaster of the Manchester School in Canada
has had a multitude of pupils ; none more brilliant than
Mr. Crerar, who seems to have made Free Trade a species
of bondage. In no other land could Michael Clark so well
have demonstrated the virtues of Free-Trade. On those
plains, buffaloes worth multi-millions of dollars in trade
annually migrated across "Parallel 49" into Montana
and back again into the Territories. The prairie schooner
trekked northward over the border carrying migrants in
search of homes when there was no government official to
turn them back or to question the terminus of their travels.
The freight wagons creaked up from the south into Mac-
Leod and past it into the valley of Saskatchewan, carrying
goods made and bought in the land of the Western Yankee
long before the great antidote to Free Trade, the Trans-
continental Railway, put those crooked trails out of business.

Clark was spouting free-trade on the prairies at a time
when many men in the West scarcely knew that trade had
any restrictions except in the matter of beverages. He
was an apostle of Cobdenism almost before the Territories
were baptized into party politics at all ; when Regina was
the home of a Territorial County Council that had neither
Tories nor Grits. He was farming and prophesying com-
mercial union before James J. Hill began to compete with
the protective C.P.R. for trade north and south instead of
the long-haul east and west. Before ever a real Agrarian
began to head out on the plains he was contending like a
tribune of the plebs, that unrestricted reciprocity between
two halves of a great productive continent, of which one-
half contains nine-tenths of the people, was not a prelude
to annexation away from the grand old Empire. And when

228 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

he got into Parliament the voice that had been so mighty
in the trail-side school houses and the little town-halls
became more potent than ever as "Red Michael" went full
tilt in the House against the high protectionists.

High courage was here. Bucking bronchos from the
West who had gone to Ottawa were duly corralled, haltered,
hobbled, surcingled and thrown, finally harnessed and
driven by either of the old parties. In breaking a political
broncho the Liberal party was as good as the other. But
the House is full of insurgents now, lining up into a tyran-
nized and tyrannous group organizing as a party. In Clark's
inaugural days, and for years after, there was but one
real solo voice calling like a trombone from a high tower for
Free Trade as the Kingdom of God which, if they would
first seek it, all other things would be added unto them.

French psychology traces certain forms of insanity to
the fixed idea. There have been times when Parliament
has regarded Michael Clark as a melancholy victim of this
big idea that warped his whole political mentality. But it
was a grand form of insanity. Nobody ever heard Clark
in the House who did not realize that here was a fine British
rebel whose brain should be a great hope to his party. The
old chief knew that. He kept his ear towards Clark when
he was sometimes deaf to his ministers.

Clark was the mountain peak which the party had left
for its fleshly sojourn in Egypt. The Liberal party in
Canada had once been a free trade party — somewhat before
Clark's time. In free trade and the universal franchise had
been its life. But Liberalism before 1896 was one thing ;
afterwards another. Laurier in practice knew that Clark
was magnificently wrong ; in theory superbly right
Therefore he indulged and adrru'red him ; sometimes playing
with him, conscious that Liberalism was the only show in
which Clark could be a national performer.

In truth Michael Clark was for long enough a man
without a party. But from the benches of the Liberals

MICHAEL CLARK 229

he could stand and preach his Manchester doctrines to
Hansard and the nation, even when the party yawned and
held dangerously on to the tariff.

It was always a tonic to hear Clark in the House. Like
Carlyle he breathed a certain inexorable vitality into public
affairs. To meet Clark in the corridors was to get a breeze
that swept like a chinook across the frozen waste of old-
line politics. In the gloom of the lobby this apostle of red
hair arid rubicund visage was a beacon light. I have met
him so, of a Saturday afternoon when the House was out
of session, and when the member for Red Deer was ripe for
a free talk to any stranger. A great friendliness possessed
him always. He could laugh at the besetments of party
and the tyranny that opportunism imposes on great minds.
He himself was free. He wanted others to be free. He
could stand for half an hour in one gloomy crypt of those
corridors in the old Parliament and talk of the power of
being that kind of Liberal.

It was the wheat that helped to keep Clark where he was
on the outpost of Liberalism. When his old leader became
enswathed with election bandages, Clark looked out upon
the landscapes of the wheat, not so long ago the limitless
pasture of the free-trade buffaloes, and felt again the vision
of the life that is Liberal but is sometimes called another
name.

Alberta was leaping to a great life. Almost in the middle
of it north and south is the town of Red Deer. All about it
were the settlements of "nationals" emancipated from
bondage in Europe. What was the use, quoth Clark, of
bringing such people to a country of free homestead land, of
alleged free institutions and making them the slaves, first
of political machines, second of protected interests in the
East ? If enslaved people were to become free in a new land
why should the wheat and the oats and the cattle which
they raised not be made free to move for a market as
naturally as the wind blows across the borders ?

230 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

This may not have been the precise order in which such
ideas generated in the mind of Michael Clark ; but it is the
way those ideas confronting such a man strike a contem-
porary. I have lived in the land where Clark lives, though
not at Red Deer, and remember well the burning desire of
twenty years ago in that far northwest for economic emanci-
pation. Then at any meeting, no matter what, any little
dinner to a citizen no matter whom, men rose to talk about
the need of conquering the isolation of the country. They
remembered the tyranny of the old Trading Company into
Hudson's Bay. They clamoured for more people, more
farms, more towns, more railways, more life — from the
East. And when it came they said the East was a tyrant,
an economic monster to bleed them white. Clark, as one
remembers him best, has not been so much a foe to the
East as he has wanted to be a friend to the South.

But a new oligarchy was arising on the great prairies.
As official Liberalism got its grip on the three Provinces
and became itself a tyrant, while unofficial Toryism in
league with the big railways got a stranglehold on British
Columbia, and when even "Honest" Frank Oliver ceased
to be an independent I/iberal and became a red-taped
Minister of the Interior, Clark the Free Trader in Parlia-
ment found himself striking hands with a sect mainly of
Liberal Radicals first called Grain Growers, next Agrarians,
and by some the very devil. With official Liberalism as
expressed by Scott, Sifton, Cross, Norris and Martin he
had only superficial sympathy. These men were more or
less on masquerade. The Agrarians were barefaced, one-
faced Radicals who would open the borders, and abolish
the customs houses, and set up a sort of Western political
autonomy whose root idea was that trade should be as free
as grasshoppers. These people were not raising Old Flag
wheat.

How far Clark fell in line with all the doctrines of the
United Grain Growers, I do not know. But one thing

MICHAEL CLARK 231

clear about this insurgent is that he has always stood four-
square for the British connection — and for all that it
means to Canada. Clark is a Britisher. He still has his
English accent. You would spot him at once as a trans-
planted Englishman. He is prouder of being a Briton in
Canada than he ever would have been in England. Clark
never forgot — Manchester and Cobden. He stood among
the wheat and saw the Empire.

When the War came and his adopted Province of
Alberta for a long while held the lead in enlistments for
war, no man was happier in the grim outlook than the
member for Red Deer. The War to him was a great
emergence of Liberalism the world over when Peace should
bring Free Humanity, Free wheat, Free trade. Why not ?
His son went to the war — and he lost him. His speech
on the Military Service Act was in many respects the best
of all in that debate, not in rhetoric, but in logical virility.
It was a howitzer broadside, slow, deliberate, but every
shot a hit. His old leader had already declined a belated
offer of Coalition and was now opposing conscription and
arguing for amemdment by Referendum. In all his life he
never got from a political foe such a searchlight on his soul
as his once devoted follower gave him in this speech.

Laurier had previously executed the Nationalist dodge
of taking refuge behind the Militia Act, asserting that
it was right to enforce that Act calling out the Militia for
the defence of Canada ; to which Clark replied :

"England is fighting this war wherever she sees the
turban of a Turk or the helmet of a Teuton. She is fighting
it in Egypt, Mesopotamia, in Macedonia, in Belgium —

most of all in France America, whose independence

had been fought in a struggle of blood for sound fiscal ideas
was now immortalizing her reunion with Britain, her old
enemy If organized labour was opposed to conscrip-
tion, so much the worse for labour, whose own trades unions
were a form of conscription ; in England he had never

232 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

named either lord or labour with a capital L. . . . Canada

should be in the war to her last man and her last dollar

As to the referendum amendment, it was fathered by the
man who down to his attitude on this question had gone
into history as the greatest of all Canadians, but who had
applauded Pugsley when he argued against extending the
life of this Parliament, and who in the matter of sending
men to fight, in organizing the whole nation for war, in con-
serving national unity, and in making an election a smaller
matter than the honour of a nation was opposed to the
Government. If the amendment should carry, and the
Referendum show a majority against the Government
measure by omitting the soldier vote and piling up the vote
from the Province which had given birth to the Referen-
dum, then when the author of that measure should be
returned to power on a no-conscription issue what chance
was there for Canada to win her part of the war with the
lion Laurier and the lamb Oliver lying down together — and
a little child — Macdonald from Pictou — leading them ? "

Not as a climax, but as a mere personal note midway in
his speech, he had said i

" I have a little toddling grandson on my farm out West
to-day whose father was killed with a gunshot wound in his
neck two weeks ago. I say to you, sir, on my soul and
conscience I support this Bill, because I believe it to be a
part of the necessary machinery which can save that little
fellow, born a Canadian, and thousands of others like him
from ever going through what his father and his uncles
have gone through."

Parliamentary debate has risen to much higher levels
of oratory, but seldom to such a height of accusing vindica-
tion and personal affection for the accused from whom an
insurgent is driven to sever his allegiance. Clark can
always make some sort of big human speech with a natural
knack of getting at the vitals of a subject in simple, dignified
language and a searching logic — once you admit his major

MICHAEL CLARK 233

premiss. That one speech flung into bold relief, almost
as the No Man's Land under a flare of a great barrage, the
issues between men who for so many years had been political
confederates.

A couple of years later I again met Clark when he was
speaking guest at an Empire Club luncheon. His topic
was — the Empire. His brand of political ideas was vastly
different from those of the average man in his audience, and
he knew it. The Club had invited him, because he was
Michael Clark. He said not a word about trade. He
uttered no propaganda. He talked simply and strongly
about the race that had made the Empire which to him was
a commonwealth of neither trade nor conquest but of
liberating ideas.

I don't think that any of the Chamberlain-Foster school
could have uttered quite so broad and noble a tribute to the
inner vitality of the British League of Nations. And not
even Mr. Rowell could have surpassed it for breadth of
view on that subject. Clark looked at the Empire from
within outwards. He saw in it the expression of a great
race of people working the leaven upon other races ; a
mighty confederacy of free nations.

Red Michael has been a great informing Liberal, and a
big illuminating Canadian. Whether grandly right or
magnificently wrong, he is never uninteresting ; a man
who could come off a stack of wheat, wash himself up bare-
armed, and in Sunday clothes but seldom well-dressed and
never groomed, step on to a platform over in the school-
house or the town hall and make a great speech to men who
believe in the simplicity of a big mind that thinks hard on
the welfare of the majority. John Bright would have loved
such a man. Even John Macdonald might have loved him.
And the one regret among those who value the power of a
big free nature in a nation is, that owing to some fatalistic
streak in his genius, Michael Clark has not risen to the
inspiring height from which the country might get the best

234 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

that he has to give. Never cured of his insurgency in
Parliament, he has become an uncompromising conformist
to one big and bigoted idea that universal Free-Trade is
the need of the world, and especially of Canada. He per-
sists in the delusion that what has been good for Britain
must be good for Canada ; not only is Canada at war when
Britain fights, but when Britain has no tariff Canada must
have free trade.

All which is freely forgiven this stalwart on account of
his challenge to the group who took his Free Trade luggage
and attempted to label it National Progressive. The Free
Trader who could watch that caravan of adventurers going
down the trail and stoutly tell them all to keep on going
to the devil, deserves well of his country. Michael Clark's
advocacy of Progressivism might have got him the promise
of a Cabinet position. His rejection of it is the proof that
the free-man who believes in great parties can never be
bound by a class-conscious group. "Better a dinner of
herbs . . . ." Michael Clark, whether M.P. or not, is
free to consider himself if need be a party of one man —
without a platform, but not devoid of a cause.

Whatever Michael Clark knows about the benefits of
Free Trade and its effect upon the exchanges, he knows
peculiarly well the danger of unrestricted reciprocity in
sentiment between Canada and the United States.

THE SPHINX FROM SASKATCHEWAN
HON. J. A.

THE Hon. J. A. Calder has never seen the Sphinx. But he
has a looking glass. He has never been in Egypt. But
he has lived a long while in Saskatchewan. A man who
can continue to know as much as he knows about the con-
fessional side of government, and who can say so little, has
some claim to be considered — Canada's political Sphinx.

Such a reputation is sometimes enviable. The average
public man babbles. Often he talks to conceal thought or
as a substitute for action. The mental energy needed to
turn end for end what some of these garrulous people say,
in order to decipher just what they mean, is usually more
than the wisdom is worth. Calder spares us. He tells us
nothing. His silence may be golden, or it may be just a
habit ; but from the known character of Calder it is never
the omniscience of stupidity.

A Sphinx in action may sometimes give himself away.
It is not usual for a Sphinx to do anything except to conceal
the riddle. Calder has all his life been a busy man. He is
still in middle age. All but fourteen years of his life up till
1917 he spent in the West, most of it in the part now known
as Saskatchewan. Ten years ago he was furtively dis-
cussed as successor to Laurier. He is now a Unionist-
Liberal. To give him work in the administration com-
mensurate with his ability — or somewhere near it — a new
department was created in Immigration. Now he is slated
for the Senate !

Little was heard about Calder's department. He had
a publicity bureau which did not spend vast amounts of

235

236 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

money on diffusing information. The department is said
to contain a moving picture section, some of whose
films probably creep into Canadian movie houses. But
nobody ever saw a picture of J. A. Calder on a screen. He
had a Canadian novelist as chief of publicity. That novelist
might have yearned for the chance to immortalize his
chief in a story, but so long as he is in the pay of Mr. Calder's
department he will continue to yearn. And not even he
has been given to understand why when a reconstructed
Liberal like Mr. Rowell left the Cabinet at the appointment
of Premier Meighen, the Minister of Immigration stayed
on. One might surmise that the man who, a decade ago,
looked to some people like an Klisha to Laurier, would
run again in Moosejaw as a National Liberal Conservative
with the expectation of re-entering the Cabinet, probably
as Minister of the Interior. But he was suddenly and hum-
drumly designated for the Senate.

Apparently the Sphinx is not a great deal concerned over
the fact that his action in the case would throw some light
on the sort of government we may expect, and the kind of
man we are privileged to conjecture Mr. Calder to be.
He seems to take very little interest in what any one thinks
about him. He accompanied the Premier on his Western
trip. Now and then he made a speech. He was heckled.
He was in the land of his critics, where he was unofficially
known as "Jim". What did he mean by staying in a
Government which was supposed to have finished its work
in 1919 ? Was he coming back as a Liberal ? Had he no
longer any fellow-feeling for the farmers among whom he
had lived for so long ? The Sphinx did not directly say.
He was publicly and conventionally endorsing the Premier,
who nvas well able to speak for himself on behalf of the
administration.

Calder was headmaster of Moosejaw High School when
he was twenty-three, in the year 1891. He must have
learned reticence then. Up in Edmonton, a few years later

HON. J. A CALDER 237

one heard considerably of Goggin, the speechmaking
educationist of the prairie; rarely or never of Calder, who
about that time was Inspector of Schools for the Terri-
tories, not yet provinces. The silent young inspector must
have looked like the reincarnation of Socrates as he drove —
sometimes a four-horse team on a buckboard — through the
sloughs of the Northwest No prairie doctor with a radius
of fifty miles, none but a pioneer missionary like McDougall
or Robertson, ever had so glorious a chance to study what
the life of a new country was going to be, as this inspector
toiling hundreds of miles over a land, where, if he stopped at
three school-houses a week, he was doing a good average
in bad weather.

Regina had no party politics then. All it had was the
mounted police and a leg-boot legislature. Every man
was then a trailsman. In Calder's time as Inspector, there
were only 400 miles of railway north of the C.P.R. main
line — the two branches to Prince Albert and to Edmonton.
It was only in the last year or two of this buckboard and
broncho inspectorate that there were even any Doukhobors
in that part of the world to bring back the days of Adam
and Eve. He saw all the "nationals" beginning to arrive.
He could put his finger on a gaunt anemic map of the Terri-
tories and point out just where there was beginning to be
some nucleus of a foreign settlement. He could talk a
little Cree and he learned the jargon of several countries in
Europe. He saw the farmers arise, and railways begin,
and little villages dot the skyline, and here and there an
elevator, when a box car was looked at by a trailsman as
a small boy gapes at a circus parade.

Calder lived in Regina when politics was born. He
shares with Frank Oliver the memory of the day when
Nicholas Flood Davin was the wonder orator of the West,
and when freight-carters from Winnipeg to Edmonton via
Saskatoon, which was then a temperance colony, carried
demijohns of whisky on traders' permits to make every-

338 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

body at home ingloriously drunk, including the mounted
police. He recalls the day when the first lieutenant-
governor was inaugurated in Regina and what Frank Oliver
said about it. Four years he was Deputy Commissioner
of Education for the Territories up till the inauguration of
two new Provinces when, travelling on a thousand miles
of new railway and over the old main line of the C.P.R.,
Laurier paid his first visit to the Great West and discovered
as one of its greatest potentialities J. A. Calder, who under
Premier Scott became Provincial Treasurer and Com-
missioner of Education.

To people outside Saskatchewan — even in Alberta, he
was very little known — Calder has always been a some-
what nebulous figure ; to some critics, a rather suspicious
character ; but always — clever. Being a Sphinx he never
courted popularity and seldom got it. Scott was brilliant,
popular and impulsive. His chief executive in Education,
Railways and Telephones and Premier de facto during more
than half of Scott's term, was cold and calculating. The
West prefers warm-blooded politicians. Calder suc-
ceeded in spite of his manner, or his mask, or whatever it
may have been ; and he did it by a penetrating knowledge
of the country, a superb capacity as administrator and a
talent for keeping out of trouble. He was no man for
prima donna scenes. Even the Education Department,
a witch's cauldron of troubles over the Separate School
question in the new provinces, never entangled him in
theatricals. He was unpopular with the Opposition as
soon as the new Government began, because he was regarded
as a Civil Service interloper. What business had a school
inspector in politics, and in a Cabinet ?

Calder demonstrated that best when he handed over the
educational cauldron to Scott and became Minister of
Railways and Telephones. Here was a department of
utility administration in which he shone. He had great
political executive ability. When Scott was absent more

HON. J. A. CALDER 239

than half his time through illness, Calder was Premier.
There was no other man to choose. The liquor problem
was more his to handle than the Premier's. Calder did
not share the popular enthusiasm for Government-dispensed
liquor. He knew the weaknesses of officials and the historic
thirst of the prairie. The Opposition constantly accused
him of being in league with the liquor'men. Calder made
no denial or affirmation. He was Mephisto enough to let
people wonder whether he was one thing or the opposite.

A man who knew Calder twenty-two years ago gave,
not long ago, some impressions of the Minister in connec-
tions with the liquor administration.

"About two weeks after Saskatchewan went dry," he
said, "I was spending a night in one of the larger towns in
the Province. Among the other guests at the hotel was a
member of the Government. In the lobby an interesting
argument waged throughout the evening, the Minister of
course, defending the action of the Government in closing
the bars. Among other things he told us about the relief
work carried on by the Dominion and Provincial Govern-
ments in certain districts where there had been crop failures,
in order that the destitute settlers might earn or borrow
enough to keep themselves and their families through the
winter. He emphasized one mistake the Government
had made in not first closing every bar in the districts
affected, because there were many instances where every
dollar that had been earned or borrowed had been spent in
the bars on the very day that it was received, by the men
whose families it was intended to save from freezing and
starvation.

"I was telling this afterwards to one of the leading social
reformers of Saskatchewan, and a smile played over his
face as I was speaking. When I had finished he said :

' He didn't tell you the whole story. We recognized
the necessity of closing those bars before^thatjrelief work
was started, and urged it so strongly*on the Government

240 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

that they agreed to do it. The Orders-in-Council were
drawn up and ready to be signed when Calder, who had been
absent from the Province on business, returned and im-
mediately it was all off".

Calder has a sister who is one of the leading social
workers in Regina. She has a profound regard for her
talented brother Jim.

The liquor did more than even Separate Schools to
disrupt Government forces in Saskatchewan. Calder was
no hypocrite to weep over the moral issues in prohibition.
He was not a profound governmentarian or a champion of
enforced morality A Government might own and operate
telephones, but not so well consciences. The liquor ad-
ministration turned out to be a mess in Saskatchewan,
largely because the administration did not unanimously
believe in the thing that, the majority seemed to want.
Calder was no more to blame than anybody else, except
that he was highest in the Government when the Premier
was away.

The reformers said that Calder was pro-liquor in the
administration. He seemed to have no opinions about
that — at least for publication. Ideals often run away with
communities. If he had only spouted a little now and
then he would have given people a chance to bring some-
thing home to him, and himself a chance to get near the
people. Two or three scandals came up in departments
over which he had control. Commissions were appointed
to investigate ; they always exonerated Calder. Even in
the search-light on liquor — as many as four, one after
another — no technical blame attached to the silent Minister.
Calder may have had a contempt for either commissions or
public opinion. A Sphinx is as a rule not much of a burning
avenger of wrongs to the community. Besides Scott was
continually running into emotional trouble. The Premier
de facto had the balance to keep. He must work while
other people talked.

HON. J. A. CALDER 241

A German-born but thoroughly loyal detective engaged
by the Borden Government to report upon seditious activi-
ties of the German element who were so badly disgruntled
over the Wartime Elections Act, repeated to the writer
more than once with great vehemence that Mr. Calder had
a special interest in the Regina Leader, which was used to
get votes for the Administration, particularly among the
German element. Governments had been known to own
newspapers before Calder ever began. The Leader was
naturally a Government organ and may have needed pap.
This is a form of patronage hard to uproot.

When Scott finally retired the chief administrator did
not succeed him. Martin was picked, a safe, genial and
popular man. The Sphinx , it is said, might have had the
post ; but he preferred to stay behind the scenes. Before
that he had been much talked about as a possible successor
to Laurier — but with not much hope of succeeding. There
are probably a number of reasons why Mr. Calder did not
take the Provincial Premiership. Dig them out of Calder
if you may. He has never explained. He leaves it to his
commentators.

We are privileged therefore to conjecture that :

Mr. Calder was pretty well sick of Saskacthewan politics
and was looking hard in almost any direction for a good
way out;

Mr. Calder could see far enough into the near future of
prairie politics to know that Liberalism was becoming a
label for something else ; and he was not disposed to come
out as an Agrarian Liberal ;

Mr. Calder wanted a chance to begin politics all over
again, because with all his practical success he felt that
he had travelled some wrong trails.

Possibly all of these had something to do with the case.
At the Winnipeg Liberal Convention in 1917 he was a
coalition-conscription Liberal. He worked against the
Liberal machine that captured the Convention by a fluke

242 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

for Laurier. Before that he was known to believe in
Union Government. It was only common sense to make
him one of the Prairie triumvirate — Calder, Sifton, Crerar,
who carried the West into the Union. Cloudy as his
career has been, for no reason that anyone specially cared
to name, he might in Ottawa be a big force for the Govern-
ment. He was a behind-the-scenes actor. He knew
something about the art of winning elections and convert-
ing immigrants into voters. He was practical. He would
be needed in Ottawa — more than he could see any use for
his talent in Saskatchewan with its farmer-dominated
Cabinets.

Alberta has gone Agrarian. All Saskatchewan needs
is a change of label. Some psychological morning Premier
Martin will get up and rub out "Liberal" after his name,
buy a big farm and set up as a National Progressive. Pro-
vincial Legislatures are things to be captured. The old
parties shrewdly used them in the Ottawa game. The
new ones are just as apt. Too long these Western elective
bodies have been on the switch. It is time to shunt them,
once more, on to the main line that leads to Ottawa — with
a different company label on the cars.

By no exercise of the imagination can one behold Jim
Calder becoming a Grain-Grower Progressive. The thing
is anomalous.

On the other side of the Sphinx he is credited by those
also who know him well in Regina with going to Ottawa
purely as a patriotic duty. He wanted some work to do
for the whole country bigger than any he had done in
Regina. The authority formerly quoted in fhis article
had this to say about Calder in 1917 when Calder took
office in Ottawa :

"About the time of the Winnipeg Convention I was
talking with the same man whom I have already quoted,
and we were discussing the enigma which Calder's character
and public record seemed to present. I knew that my

HON. J. A. CALDER 243

friend was not especially a friend of Calder's, so his words
seemed to carry greater weight.

" 'There is no person in Canadian public life,' he
said, 'who has been trying more conscientiously and con-
sistently to be good than Calder. I will not say that his
motive may be higher than that of political expediency ;
but he has been and is more scrupulously careful to do
nothing that may reflect in any way upon his honour and
integrity. I believe that he has set before him the highest
possible ideal of public service and that he is doing every-
thing he can to live up to it.' '

A prominent citizen of Regina who has seen a good deal
of Calder, both in his home city and in Ottawa, has the
same opinion : adding that Calder never bamboozles a
deputation with suave words or false hopes ; what the
Cabinet thinks about any particular programme of a
deputation he already knows and suggests that a typed
memo, which he will present, will be as good as waiting days
for a personal appeal. In 1919 he informed the writer
that he proposed to enact much-needed reforms in immi-
grating Canada, especially as to the quality of new-comers.

Why has Mr. Calder never made a big study of this
absorbing question ? When the Premier went to the
Imperial Conference with his mind pretty well made up
on the Anglo- Japanese Alliance, why had he not in his grip,
to show the Conference, one common sense, powerful little
book signed by Hon. J. A. Calder, Minister of Immigration,
giving a complete exposition of Japanese life in Canada ?
When we are all talking about the good entente with the
United States why can't we get from the Immigration
Department in Ottawa a hand-book giving a complete
picture of what Americans have done in the West ?

However, the Sphinx may have the best of reasons for
not doing these simple things. But there is scarcely a
Department of administration that does not regard itself
as a machine for winning elections as much as for serving

244 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

the people who pay for it. Apart from all he has not told
us, I have no doubt Mr. Calder is doing a big reforming
work on immigration in Ottawa.

The Immigration Minister should be our leading socio-
logist. He should be able to diagnose communities. He
might easily begin upon Ottawa. What a study a cross
section of the Smart Set would be, especially upon the
arrival of a new king at Rideau Hall ! There's nothing in
other democracies quite like that. Washington has a
White House, but the inmate is merely an elected servant
of the State. Rideau Hall is an endowment, a gift of the
gods. The 30,000 people of greater and lesser degree in
Ottawa who normally or abnormally live by the Civil
Service are profoundly affected by the arrival, sojourn and
departure of the Governor-General. They are vitally
influenced and entertained by the Parliamentary restaurant,
even without the bar. The social show provided by
Ministers' and members' wives and their visiting friends is
itself a subtle study in the art of getting on in the new
world, which is at the root of all immigration. Bridge for
money and dining out with your friend's wife are within
the reach of any ambitious immigrant. The Smart Set in
Ottawa is an exotic colony all by itself. Montreal and
Toronto and Winnipeg can merely copy it. Some of the
farmers have their eye on the Set ; no, not to abolish it.
Women must have their share in the Government. Petti-
coats and politics are affinities. Farmers are no more
necessarily immune from what is said to have corrupted
the Roman Empire than Tories or Grits. Farmers in fact,
as Mr. Calder knows, are not the hope of the world ; neither
are lawyers nor manufacturers.

Suppose we ask the Sphinx about this. Listen in
imagination to this once Liberal, as with an astounding
burst of candour he says :

"My friend, your description of my make-up may be as
right or as foolish as anybody feels disposed to think.

HON. J. A. CALDER. 245

None of it bothers me. What does bother me is the law of
compensation. Agree with me that the manufacturer had
his drastic innings with Canadian governments ; that
tariffs and protected industries are the result ; that lawyers
— yes, I'm a lawyer — have had a big day in our affairs
because they had the talent for schemes and speeches.
Admit that and conclude — that the very human farmer
thinks his turn is coming, and rather soon. But — some-
body who was never educated as a Tory has got to help the
National-Liberal-Conservative Government to get an even
chance to administer this nation after the upheavals of war,
Somebody who moves silently while others are talking their
tongues loose may be needed to manipulate —

Before the Sphinx could complete his statement of the
case he was politely asked if he would care to inter his
talents in the Canadian Senate, and he suavely answered
that such a thing might be a good way to solve the conun-
drum, even though it would make a thoroughly stupid last
act in the play.

A TRUE VOICE OF LABOUR
MR. TOM MOORE

MANY years ago an Irish poet visiting Canada and voyaging
down the Ottawa wrote a poem of which may people recall
only the lines —

"Row, brothers, row, the stream runs fast,
The rapids are near, the daylight's past."

The Tom Moore about whom this article is sketched
is not a poet. He is, in fact, one of the prosiest public men
in Canada. But we may leave it to any of those who have
known him during the past three years when he has been
President of the Trades and Labour Congress, if many and
many a time he has not felt some such sentiment as —
"Row, brothers, row, the stream runs fast,
The rapids are near, the daylight's past."

Since Mr. Charles Draper first became Secretary of
that Congress he has never known a period when so much
was expected of a President by way of limitless patience,
statesmanship and self-control as has been shown by Tom
Moore. The rapids were always close to this man, and
there were rocks under the rapids. It took steady piloting
by the captain to keep the crew of the labour ship from
getting holes in her bottom and going down.

So far as one has been able to follow the career of Moore
at the head of the Congress, and as reported in the public
press, he stands now and always for adherence to the prin-
ciple of Union in evolution. He believes in labour getting
ahead ; but not by the method of upturning everything
that is established just to see what kinds of crawling things
there may be underneath.

246

TOM MOORE 247

When we reflect that Canada is not primarily an indus-
trial so much as an agricultural country, it is startling to
remember that two years ago it was the home of the only
organized attempt ever made in America on a scale of
efficiency to establish something closely resembling a
Soviet government. The big Winnipeg Strike was a lurid
menace to the solidarity of labour in Canada. West of
Winnipeg, once the Red River Soviet had been set up,
there was a chain of inflammable centres to link up with
the revolution. Calgary was the scene of one convention
which had sent a cable of sympathy to Moscow. British
Columbia was full of seething susceptible elements, re-
garded by some of the Reds across the border as the real
centre rather than Winnipeg, of the One Big Union idea.
The mines of Alberta were dominated by swaggering
foreigners who owed no allegiance to the British or any
other flag except the Red emblem. Long ago under the
influence of the clergy and the Archbishop of Montreal,
Quebec had created a Canadian Labour movement in-
tended to cut Canadian labour away from the American
Federation. This was a phase of the Nationalism that
had its headquarters in Quebec, but had spread in various
strange guises to other parts of the country, when none of
the clergy or intellectuals behind the movement dreamed
that the One Big Union insurgent against the A.F.L. would
be the most theatrical result. Once get the O.B.U. idea
rampant in Quebec with its scores of big industries and its
thousands of poorly educated workers, and the Red move-
ment was due to spread faster than the United Farmers'
programme had ever done.

In the propagation of the Red programme Ontario, and
especially industrial Toronto, was regarded as the buffer
state. But if the Soviet had succeeded in Winnipeg and
further West, then the whole weight of that success march-
ing upon Ontario, with Quebec bringing up the eastern
end, would form a sort of nutcracker device from which
Ontario would have had a hard time to escape.

248 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

This was the dazzling formula propounded at a time
when every nation in the world was in a state of ferment,
and when the vast loose-jointed nation known as Canada
was in a condition of instability unknown since it became a
Confederation. The apostles of the Red programme had
all the advantages of being able to sling the paint on to the
canvas of the future without caring overmuch about the
drawing. Men in large numbers everywhere seemed ready
to grasp at and embrace the unusual. People who for
years had been ground down by high prices for the com-
monest necessities, considered seriously the question of the
"salariat" joining forces with organizing labour under a
banner that might be red. Civilization, physically shat-
tered by the war and hysterically stampeded by the doc-
trine of self-determination of peoples — a high form of
Bolshevism — stood ready to inquire whether the theories
being tried in Russia were not, after all, right, no matter
what butchery might be perpetrated in working them out.

Revolutionary ideas were everywhere.

Everything prepared the public mind.

A barrage of propaganda had been set up — and kept up.

Legitimate Trades Unionism itself in Britain had sub-
scribed to The Aims of Labour put forth by Arthur Hen-
derson, who foreshadowed barricades and bayonets in
London streets if the proletariat did not get their "rights".

Canada did not surely escape. We had the Winnipeg
flare-up, which was watched by legitimate labour across
the border. The A.F.L. was challenged for authority in
this country. It came to the peculiar pass, that in order
to maintain the solidarity of Canada as constituted by
Government under the Old Flag, the legitimate leaders of
labour had to fall back upon the one continental organiza-
tion which makes brotherhoods, not across the seas, nor
so much across Canada, but across the border.

It was Ontario's opportunity ; the steady old Province
of some bigotry, great industry, many labour unions, and

TOM MOORE 249

more or less fixed ideas regarding the function of Govern-
ment. The office of Tom Moore is in Ottawa. There the
President of the Trades and Labour Congress is in close
touch with the I/abour Department, with the Labour
Gazette, with the Government in Council. We shall never
know just how much of the steady conservatism of Moore
at the first Congress following the Winnipeg strike, as well
as at other Congresses later, was developed and held steady
by association with Government.

But whether or no, even though it was nothing but
loyalty to the established brotherhoods of the A.F.L. or a
deeper loyalty to his own ideas of the case, the rock-steady
influence of Tom Moore at the conventions was the one
biggest hope of the indirect action element winning out.
He was not opposed to Socialism. He has to work with
Socialists — of many sorts. The whole basic idea of the
Federation of Labour is a degree of Socialism. But it was
the Marxian brand of Socialism born in Germany and
transplanted to Russia to which Moore was opposed.
He saw no field for this in Canada. He believed that
Canada had a right to freedom of action. At least if it
came to a choice between authority from the Gompers
organization in the United States, and the Lenine tyranny
in Russia, the course was clear. Time and time again he
was bombarded and machine-gunned by the Red elements
in Congress and Convention. As often he solidly stood
his ground, based upon the older idea of labour getting its
rights through negotiation and later through the ballot.
' ' Row, brothers, row, the stream runs fast,
The rapids are near "

But the daylight was not yet past for this Tom Moore.
He could see ahead.

"I have seen Moore," says a close observer of him for
two years, "faced by labour opponents in a number of
Western cities. In all the howling he has never lost his
temper or his dignity."

250 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

It would have been so much easier for this man to lose
his temper, except that he knew it would be harder at the
end when he had to face his own steady rank and file
accusing him of poor chieftainship. It would have been
so much easier to compromise with the preachers of glitter-
ing formulae, except that in the settling up he would have
to justify himself to those who suspected him of defection.

Moore stuck to the commonplace business of wages and
hours and agreements. He had no head for the poetry of
Utopias. He knew, as he knows, that wages are the chief
item of cost in all commodities, and that no matter what
form of capitalism you choose, whether embodied in a
Soviet or in a close corporation of dividends, wages of
labour must be paid. He knows that prices of living and
of labour are almost convertible. Amid all the howling
and pa^aning for a better day, for the new life, for the
heaven upon earth, for the glorification of the proletariat,
he could stand hard and fast by the common necessity of
sticking to an agreement and as fast as possible bettering
conditions.

We have heard independent observers say that the Reds
have always shown a grasp of the new life, while the Trades
Union men were crawling along with the uninspired pro-
gramme of wages and hours ; that the Reds were the
sacrificing idealists and the Unionists the selfish Tories
who wanted nothing more than to slowly improve their
condition. Well, the logic of events seems to show that in
the long run the Moores have the gospel. One scarcely
cares to think what might have happened in Canadian
industry and common living had Tom Moore given way to
the Reds who came at him from almost every quarter.

At the 1920 Congress Moore had the old-fashioned
courage to ask the new Premier of Canada, Arthur Meighen,
to address the delegates. Of all men, the man who pro-
secuted the leaders of the Winnipeg Strike was the last to
say anything to organized labour about milleniums or

TOM MOORE 251

about anything more Utopian than a common agreement
between labour and capital for the good of all. Moore had
no fear. He believed that he was right. Had he invited
Mackenzie King he would have got a speech with more in
it about the philosophy of Industry and Humanity, and
perhaps more to the point in the practical study of the
labour question. By inviting the Premier, Moore paid
respect to government. Even Mr. Crerar might have
made a more sympathetic speech. But in the Moore
philosophy there is no radical connection between Crerar
and Labour. In the organization of the Drury coalition
between Labour and the Farm he can see one way of getting
the rights of each incorporated into legislation.

But the Government is the final thing. Statesmanship
is bigger than programmes painted on the clouds. There's
a vast deal to be done yet in this country for the enfranchise-
ment of labour in industry as it is franchised in government.
There are pig-headed Tories of industry who will have to
illustrate tombstones before some of the old spirit of
repression of labour will die out in the nation. But the
die-hards are fewer every year. Some wages had to come
down to get everything else down. But we believe also, as
Moore probably does, that wages which are the chief item of
cost in all commodities ought to be as high as production
will stand aud pay reasonable profits on investment ; that
collective bargaining is sound as applied to individual
industries, but a form of bigoted tyranny when extended to
the whole group or to the sympathetic strike ; and that
the slogan, "Union is Strength", does not mean levelling
efficiency to the lowest common denominator.

The day may come in the recorded minutes of Trades
and Labour Congresses in Canada when a man of broader
and more constructive vision may be needed to build the
brotherhood out into labour statesmanship. But for the
past few years, and for the few to come, Canadian labour
and common weal may well arise to thank Tom Moore,

252 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

who, when the rapids were near and the rocks were under
the rapids, kept his craft rowing into safe water. Tom
Moore of Ireland was a poet. Tom Moore of Canada is
not. The play on the names is only an accident. The
parallel holds. May we never again need such a man in
this country, to be sure that Labour does not run us all on
the rocks under the Red rapids.

A MAN WITHOUT A PUBLIC
SIR WILLIAM MACKENZIE

A FEW years ago, before Stefansson reported on the blond
Eskimos, the first Eskimo movie ever taken was shown in
Toronto to a small audience who waited an hour for the
film, which did not begin until a thick, grizzly man with
shrewish, penetrating eyes came in with his party.

"Sir William Mackenzie, late as usual," whispered one.
' ' He never arrives on time at a public function, often sleeps
at a play, and sometimes when his family invite musicians
to his home he plays bridge in a distant room so as not to
hear the music."

"Oh, yes," nudged the other ; "but Sir William, you
see, owns this film. It was taken by his own exploration
party."

"Oh ! Then the last scene will probably be Eskimos
laying railway ties."

"Oh, no. Digging up mineral deposits. Iron — Sh !"

It was a wonderful film full of epical energy and primi-
tive beauty ; picturing one of the feAV kinds of people in
Canada that Mackenzie had never been able to link up to
civilization. The room was hung with costumes, curios
and weapons of these folk, all of which were afterwards
presented to the Royal Ontario Museum by Sir William,
who was never enormously interested in ethnology. And
that exploration of the far North was the last act in the
complicated drama of William Mackenzie's great dis-
coveries in Canada.

A study of Mackenzie is useful under the head :

WHAT DID YOU — NOT — DO TO WIN THE WAR ?

He was appointed in 1915 on an "Economic Coramis-

253

254 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

sion" which seems to have practised a rigid economy on
what it did for the country, because it was never heard of
again. However, it was No. 1A of the 46 war-time com-
missions, and because Mackenzie was a member it should
have a memorial.

There is one man in Germany something like William
Mackenzie, who. makes money almost by magic out of
utilities and buys up concerns in other countries with
money which he made in his own. His name is Hugo
Stinnes. Mackenzie is a bigger man and a higher type
than Stinnes ; but each man regards his country as a
commercial asset to be developed ; each is a wizard of a
species of applied finance. For years Mackenzie was of
speculative interest .in Canada to people who had never
even seen his photograph. He was the man who had a
second headquarters in Ottawa and a branch office in every
provincial legislature except Prince Edward Island. We
almost had Provincial Premiers lullabying to their Cabinets :
"Hush ye, hush ye, do not fret ye,
The Black Douglas shall not get ye."

Mackenzie seemed to arise about twenty-five years ago
from some magic mountain and to stride down upon the
plains with the momentum of a Goth army. He was a
contractor who became for ten years a demigod. Some-
times before the war when people saw him on the street
they paused to watch him walking as though a black bear
had suddenly wandered down from Muskoka.

"By Jove ! Mackenzie's back again."

"And is that William Mackenzie ?"

"Did you never see him before ?"

" No, sir, I never saw him before."

"Well, take a good look. He's just going to lunch.
That man brought back sixty million dollars this time
from Threadneedle Street. A gang of reporters met him
at Montreal to get the good news — more money for Canada.
Great game ! He got forty millions a year ago or so."

SIR WILLIAM MACKENZIE 255

"Who's that benign man with him ?"

"That's a Provincial Premier. His province wants
more railways and the Government has to guarantee more
bonds "

"Oh, then he sells bonds with Provinces for security ?"

"That's the big idea. Why, what's wrong with it ?"

"Oh, I guess it's all right."

' ' Of course it is. Railways can't be built out of earnings
of lines built last year. Traffic's too thin ; has to be de-
veloped. Mackenzie's building lines for a real population
Canada, my boy, is a terrific country to railroad. The
C.P.R. got land and cash grants. Mackenzie takes Govern-
ment-guaranteed bonds. The whole country is on the
same road. We import people on to homestead land and
we have to borrow money to set the people up so that
they'll become real Canadians —

"Yes, especially at election time. But tell me — who
finally owns these railroads ?"

"Well, you've got me. Nobody has figured that out
yet. Everything is too new. All I know is that Govern-
ments are behind Mackenzie, and the 'people elect the
Governments, and the people want the roads, and if they
don't get 'em the Government probably goes out. Any-
how I take off my hat to Sir William Mackenzie as a great
man."

Nine- tenths of Canada used to think that Mackenzie
was a great man. The more he borrowed in England on
Government-guaranteed bonds, and the more he invested
in Mexico and South America, and the greater number of
street railways, power plants, transmission lines, ore
mountains, new towns, smelters, docks, ships, whale
fisheries, coal mines and land companies that he and his
able partner Mann were able to octopize, the greater the
country thought both these men were — and especially
Mackenzie.

Toronto Board of Trade once gave a dinner to these

256 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

men to celebrate the fact that by the building of the new
line to Sudbury at a cost of about fifteen millions, Toronto
was at last actually located on a Mackenzie road and had
a right to be made the headquarters of the system. A
deer in some places could have jumped from that line to the
new line of the C.P.R. built at the same time — and about
the same cost. There was no farmer in Ottawa to prevent
the C.P.R. from getting a charter to double-track this line.
It was the same year that Mackenzie inaugurated the
Canadian Northern line of steamships, the two Royals,
and for lack of tidewater was compelled to dock them at
Montreal under the shadow of the C.P.R., who of course
did not join in the civic welcome. And in the same year
people were talking — as they are now again — about Toronto
and Port Arthur becoming ocean ports. The wonder was
that Mackenzie did not see to it. But he was fairly busy,
tying Halifax to Vancouver by the Yellowhead Pass, and
giving Provincial Cabinets new ideas about government.

Without a doubt William Mackenzie had a mandate
from this country to do a great work — and he overdid it.
Bankers and other financiers agreed that he had found new
ways of investing creative money. Scarcely a teacher of
geography but admitted that Mackenzie was changing the
map of this country so fast that a new one became necessary
every three years. New towns sprang up at the rate of a
mile a day of new railway built by Mackenzie. Every
new town became a monument to this man's faith in the
future of Canada. Even the old city of Montreal, preserve
of the C.P.R., lent its mountain to Mackenzie for a tunnel
and a "Model City" on the hinter side.

There was always money to be had. A map of Canada
in Mackenzie's satchel when he went to England to see
money lenders seemed under his talk as big as the whole
British Empire. It was not common Empire patriotism
to refuse either the money or the guarantees for the bonds.
The whole of Canada backed Mackenzie's notes. It was

SIR WILLIAM MACKENZIE 257

he, not Sir Thomas White, who invented the principle of
Victory Loans whereby the nation becomes your banker.
Between building a new line and operating a line built last
year, there was no system of accounting that could audit
his books. The centipede became so vast and complex
that no banker could begin to understand it. Mackenzie
never made the effort. He was developing Canada.

The Saskatchewan valley was the one great trunk
Eldorado, the greatest discovery of natural resources ever
made in Canada. The settlers in that valley wanted more
people, the people wanted the railways, the Government
needed the voters, and Mackenzie wanted settlers, people,
voters, Government and all. If a Government was ob-
streperous, Mackenzie might lend a heavy hand to help
turn it out at the next election. It was not proper for a
Government to obstruct him. He was the over-man.

In no other nation has there ever been a man who could
play such a prodigious and prodigal game with the re-
sources of the whole country. Mackenzie mobilized the
nation before the war. Millions of people in Canada used
to regard him as a sort of magnified Daniel Drew — the father
of Wall Street and watered stock and corrupt-contract rail-
ways. But Mackenzie was a broader man than Drew, with
a much higher sense of honour. Drew admitted that he
was a wonderful Methodist, that he had been a profiteer of
the Civil War, and that he had starved a railway of rails so
that it killed a large number of people in an accident.
Mackenzie was no Methodist ; and he never was a profiteer
from any emergency of the people. He wanted Canada to
prosper. All his profits must come from greater wealth in
Canada, which he did much to produce.

Mackenzie had more faith in Canada than most of the
politicians had. He wanted a great Canada, chief Dominion
in a great Empire, The best way to conserve a nation's
wealth, he said once, is to develop its resources. We never
had such a developer. He never was a born railwayman,

258 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

any more than he was a pure financier. He was a colossal
exploiter of national resources by means of borrowed
money. In the era before Mackenzie we had Clergue at
the Soo. Clergue was a pigmy forerunner of Mackenzie.
What Clergue did in Algoma the other man aimed to do for
the whole country, And he almost did it.

Asked once why he gave so much leeway to men like
Mackenzie and Mann, Sir Wilfrid Laurier is reported to
have said :

"Well, what other kind of men could you have to do
such remarkable work ?"

Beaverbrook said at a dinner in Canada not long ago :

"I never was a William Mackenzie. I created nothing
as he did."

The debacle of Mackenzie railways was never con-
templated by Mackenzie. He did not even imagine that
it was possible — except that he was prophetically troubled
by the ambition of Laurier to create a third transcontinen-
tal. He had the right of way in this. He and Mann had
developed the Canadian Northern out of a little stub line
in Dauphin, Manitoba. The thing grew because it served
the people, and the people lived in a fertile country that
needed a road to market. The whole basic idea of the
Mackenzie roads was to give more and more people a road
to market. The original idea of the Grand Trunk Pacific
and the National Transcontinental was to rival the Cana-
dian Pacific monument to John A. Macdonald by erecting a
railway monument to Wilfrid Laurier.

The race of the railways just about broke the nation's
neck. It was not all the fault of Mackenzie that the race
ever began, or that it was carried on to insanity. He was a
practical philosopher to perceive that a Government is an
elective corporation capable of manipulation in the interest
of an all-Canada enterprise needed and wanted by the
people. He was a master cynic to surmise that when the

SIR WILLIAM MACKENZIE 259

future came to balance the accounts, Father Time would
be a very bewildered assignee.

The war was very ill advised. Mackenzie had no use
for war. He never could see in the predicament of a nation
any chance to profit for himself. He wanted perpetual
prosperity. It never occurred to him, perhaps, that some
day critics would arise to say that the country called
Canada had done more for William Mackenzie than he
had ever done for the country ; and that when the parent
utility of the cycle which he had helped to create was
declared bankrupt, he had no rights in the case whatever
and never should have been paid a dollar of indemnity for
the common stock.

But as the country had submitted to Mackenzie's sys-
tem of building railways, so it was compelled to be content
with the Royal Commission method of adjudicating what
the builders should get out of the wreck.

Financiers and politicians and common citizens may
wrangle till doomsday about the ethics of this debacle.
They will never get anybody to understand it. The thing
is an economic outlaw like its author. Mackenzie as a
common storekeeper would have been sold for taxes. As
a railway builder he staged the greatest pageant of
industry ever known in Canada, and when the show went
off the road because it was no longer able to pay its bills,
took what he could salvage of the properties and left other
men to wrestle with the reconstruction.

We shall never have another Mackenzie. Bigger men
may arise. More unusual characters may stalk out of
obscurity into places of eminence and power. But there
never again can be an era like the Mackenzie epoch, because
that kind of experience is suffered and enjoyed but once in
a nation's lifetime. He still has big interests, some of them
gradually being taken over by governments and municipal
corporations. But he has shot his bolt, and it was a Jovian
big one. No doubt he is enormously rich. That does not

260 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

matter. Canada no longer cares whether he is rich or
poor. Once a demigod in our national ledgers, he is
now a grizzled relique of his former energy. He used to be
a despot feared by those who had to work under him,
admired for his superhuman audacity and power to get
what he wanted just because he knew why and when he
wanted it, and capable of inspiring an almost insane loyalty
to a man-made system that never was anything at all but
an economic mirage. He is now just William Mackenzie,
more or less a citizen, now and then interviewed laconically
by a reporter who never can extract anything but arid
commonplaces from what he says to the public.

Because, to William Mackenzie there never was any
real public. What he cared about was the prosperous
nation upon which he could build and build without limit
till he died. When the nation came to a crisis in the war
he did nothing to help it, except to let the Railway War
Board pool his lines for traffic and the Government com-
mandeer his ships. The man who years before had been
regarded as the greatest doer in Canada, when the country
and all Mackenzie's works along with it came to the great
test, never so much as lifted a personal finger to help in
the work that had to be done. Mackenzie had done his
work in prosperity. In the great predicament he had no
function. The nation paid him his ducats and let him go.

This, if we are concerned about the man value of Canada,
is a tragedy. For there was in William Mackenzie some-
how, with all his ruthlessness and audacity and semi-pirati-
cal creed, the element of a kind of great man. There is in
his uncommon face the look of a man who with less excess
of one quality might have become a wonderful citizen.
Nature made him vastly selfish on a scale big enough to
devise a totally new scheme for over-capitalizing Canada.
She denied him the commoner human qualities that
make a man a constructive citizen whether his country
is in weal or woe.

SIR WILLIAM MACKENZIE 261

The epic which Mackenzie and his partner achieved in
this country out-bid in dimensions, variety and the use of
practical imagination, even the work of Rhodes in South
Africa. It was a feat of economic and financial engineering
which but for its peculiarly selfish energy and ruthless
characteristics, might have become a monumental con-
tribution to the human welfare of Canada. No man of
common brain or conventional ethics could have been the
dynamic head of such a work. For years, decades, this
astounding adventurer exercised his precarious despotism
over the country that he might make its prosperity a factor
in his own success. In gambling with its securities he hoped
to multiply its wealth without diminishing its happiness.
The constructive imagination and tireless energy that he
expended on his great cycle of utilities, had it been spent by a
poet would have produced epics and dramas. But in all
the things he did and the words he said, there is no record
of any sentiment of sacrifice for the good of a nation.

William Mackenzie had his day, while Governments
rose and fell. His day is done. The public which he
dazzled and outwardly despised has no credulity left for
any further hero-worship of such a man. "Well, what does
Mr. Mackenzie want now ?" was the oft-repeated query
of the bewildered Laurier to Mackenzie agents in Ottawa.
No Canadian Premier will ever ask such a question again.
Ottawa has no further possibilities for William Mackenzie
of any interest to the public. The kind of prosperity
created by such men as he is played out in Canada forever.

The forecast than Mackenzie and Flavelle might form
a new two-man junta to operate National railways was too
absurd even to merit denial. Such a partnership would
merely revive the old Schoolman debate of the Middle
Ages — What happens when an irresistible force meets an
immovable object ? The two mentalities are incom-
patible. For twenty years the chief common ground
between them was the Canadian Bank of Commerce, of

262 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

which Sir Joseph is a director, who long ago discovered
that the total assets of the bank were but a turbine in the
Niagara of Mackenzie finance.

And William Mackenzie who built the conspiracy of
enormous interests with which his name is identified, was
never meant to be a railway operator at all. One might
as well expect Lloyd George to be a successful manager of
Sunlight Soap and of Lord Leverhulme.

THE IMPERIAL BRAINSTORM
LORD BEAVERBROOK

LORD Beaverbrook could stroll into an Arab camp and in
five minutes be psychologically persona grcUa as the man
who could make something out of almost nothing. He
could learn the Arab language, adopt their customs, inter-
pret their ideas, transact their tribal business, and go away
without an Arab to admit that the strange new chief — or
whatever they might call him — would ever learn to be
a true Arab.

This man without a congenial country has an unlimited
talent for adapting himself to the necessities of time, place
and opportunity. He has little or no power to assimilate
himself to the real life of the people. He trailed like a
comet through the land of his birth and left it in a mirage
of finance before Canada had made him a citizen. He went
to England where in a few months he had made himself
intimate with public affairs ; and in ten years, "with all
his honours thick upon him," he has not yet become an
Englishman.

Once only I met this extraordinary man, at close
range, for a number of hours. He was a most absorbing
study ; and he knew it. There never was a moment when
Beaverbrook could not consciously estimate the effect of
his actions upon some other man, or group of men. As an
actor he is not a mediocrity.

A personal friend vividly describes meeting him at a
small semi-private dinner in a Canadian city. The osten-
sible occasion was a mere complimentary affair to his lord-

263

264

ship. The psychological objective was — something else.
There began the conjecture. What was it ?

It must be inferred. There are some men who study
the effect of themselves upon a group. The group method
of psychology is essentially Beaverbrookian.

A number of speeches had been pre-arranged for this
dinner on behalf of various interests. At the close of the
talks Beaverbrrok was asked to respond to a toast of his
own health. He did so in a perfectly amazing confessional
of a speech, saying things which he said he felt sure no
journalist present would publish. He was asked questions.
Each question meant one more speech. He made four in
all, occupying much more than an hour of time in a most
graphic and humanly interesting account of things that
had happened behind the curtain in British politics, shrewd
estimates of the signs of the times, forecasts of coming
events and vivid delineations of great men whom he had
intimately met in various parts of Europe.

In all this there was not a trace of embarrassment or of
suspicion. The little dynamo with the prodigious head
and -the baby mouth and the intense, deepset, restless eyes
stood by his chair, and with knuckles on the table much of
the time, talked down into the flowers directly in front of
him. He spoke sometimes in a husky, low voice, now and
again in a smothered shriek, again in a tragic whisper. He
was in a small gathering and he seemed to know that
though the dingy, mysterious room was somewhat high,
he had no need to lift his voice to the shrill impetuous
discord that is said to characterize his speeches in Commons
or Lords. He was carried away by some indefinable
atmosphere. What it was he scarcely knew. After the
dinner he shook hands with people, delivered himself of a
number of snappy brusqueries, laughed a good bit and,
almost the last to leave the charmed precinct where he had
unbosomed himself among "congenial" souls, he wandered
out.

LORD BEAVERBROOK 265

Next day, lying poseurishly on a lounge in his room at
the hotel, he said to a confidante who had been with him
at the dinner :

"Bunting !" (that is not the true name) "Will you
kindly repeat to me some of the things I seem to have said
last evening. I know I talked an unconscionably great
deal. What on earth did I say ?"

As it had been a perfectly abstemious occasion, one
imagines that Beaverbrook at the dinner was sincere,
though playing the actor, and that in his room he was both
theatrical and insincere.

This man has a confusing, but in his own mind seldom
confused, orbit of his own. He was a conundrum in
Canada. He is an enigma in England. That he still
considers himself a Canadian, because he was born here,
fortuned here and voluntarily exiled from here after he
had completely mystified a large number of people as to
his working psychology, is proved by the fact that he
continues to come back here. He also professes to be
manning the Daily Express with Canadians. He has been
for ten years the intimate of Bonar Law, also a distinguished
Canadian of sorts. And a few months ago there was a
rumour, which no one remembers him to have refuted,
that he was a likely candidate for the Governor-Generalship
of Canada. Of course if ever Rideau Hall should take
Beaverbrook for a tenant, it will be time to take refuge in
a Canadian republic.

It is easy to think disagreeable things about Beaver-
brook, because he is so enormously interesting, so patholo-
gically unusual, and altogether so brilliant and resourceful
a phenomenon. I have called him the Imperial brain-
storm. A dozen other titles would fit him as well. There
are times when one almost imagines himself mingling an
element of real liking for the man with one's unfailing
admiration of his remarkable ability. But always when
you feel like that cordial handshake and talking to him

266 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

with brusque familiarity, there is the intuitive feeling that
one of the two, perhaps both, might live to regret it.

You cannot absorb the atmosphere of such a man.
Whatever the sterling qualities of his character, the approxi-
mate miracles of his achievements, the warlike strategy of
his career, you judge him at last by that indefinable but
inexorable law of common congeniality. To live at close
range with Beaverbrook, to become part of his daily scheme
of vibrations, to work either with, or for, or even over him
as a regular part of one's programme would be to a normal
man a penalty almost amounting to a crime.

Though of course tastes differ, even in companions.
There are people who rather like hobnobbing with Beaver-
brook. Some are interested in his idiosyncrasies, as
though he were a good subject for a novel. Some enjoy the
sensation of playing moth to a social flame. Others —
perhaps — have a deep respect for his money which, like
Carnegie's, is supposed to be a perplexity to himself to
know how to spend it that he may die poor.

Well, the noble lord has his idioms. Discussing the
details of the little dinner already referred to a flippant but
devoted critic said :

"I think he would enjoy speaking right in front of that
huge fireplace. He would consider it Napoleonic."

As to the social orbit of Beaverbrook, one may suspect
that it is a rather exotic atmosphere in which the sense of
true human equation is lost in a jumble. A man who can
entertain almost simultaneously, at his country home,
financiers, politicians, authors, and actresses from his own
theatre at Hammersmith, may be regarded as a shrewd
social mergerist but scarcely as a subtle entertainer of con-
genial souls. As for the discomfort of knowing what to do
with his money, Beaverbrook has never complained ;
during his latest visit to Canada he was offered and he
refused the purchase of two bankrupt newspapers each of
which thought that the acquisition of such a side line to

LORD BEAVERBROOK 267

the Daily Express might enable him to do some of the good
in this country which he failed to achieve while he lived here.

Estimating this man by the superficial but rather subtle
qualities by which he has achieved success, it seems a sort
of irony to think what he might have done and did not do
for the country of his birth. What did he ever do for
Canada ? Before the war — nothing He made huge
fortunes here. He created mergers here. He started
consolidated companies here that in time fought their way
into the appreciated valuations of the stock market. He
became Canada's greatest adventurer in creating a sort of
"wealth" from the merging of small, sometimes decrepit,
concerns under a new name and new issues of stock ; just
as Mackenzie was our greatest adventurer in creating
wealth from borrowed money Beaverbrook worked mainly
with small groups to whom he left the task of raising most
of the capital. Thus his personal gains came neither from
the immediately increased earnings of companies which
he amalgamated, nor directly from the pockets of the share-
holders. Beaverbrook never made a dollar by defrauding
a director or luring unsuspicious dollars out of the pockets
of common people. That species of tactics so often prac-
tised by men who are near criminals was quite beneath him.
The laboratory where he got his results was the stock
market, which of course has its own codes of ethics and
plays its own remorseless game of making or breaking men.

His career here had most of the elements of romance.
Son of a poor parson born in a cross-roads Ontario hamlet,
brilliant but erratic student at Dalhousie University, down-
at-the-heels insurance agent in Halifax youthful merger of
two small banks at a time when he was unable to pay for
his own clothes — we have here symptoms of a career which
might have turned into a character of high value in Cana-
dian politics, public service or social reform.

But Nature thrives on migrations. Even a man some-
times takes better root when he is transplanted. The

268 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

Beaverbrook that England has is a more unusual character
than the Max Aitken that Canada lost. Canada to be sure
had lost enough brilliant men to other nations and imported
enough able men from abroad. It was time to produce
and to keep our own. There was national work for them
all to do. Aitken came up in the boom time of Canada.
He fitted the time. A nation's financial adversity was no
occasion for him. He followed the wake and profited by
the experiences of builders of railways, industries, banks
and provinces. Every move forward of the country in
commercial expansion was a nudge ahead for his chariot of
fortune. He was the most successful "bull" factor Canada
ever had. But in all probability, were he to be flung into
one of the demoralized nations of democratized Europe
he could make money even in disaster.

Before he was thirty-five Max Aitken had become a
multi-millionaire. He worked much as clever but humbler
men have invented formulae to beat bookmakers at the
races. Having done all this, at so early an age, what was
left ? Superficially we should have said — public life. He
had the money, the talent, the leisure. Canada had the
need.

But Max Aitken never so much as became a pound-
keeper in Canada, not because he had not the opportunity,
but because he had the shrewd sense to feel that the land
where he had made "his pile" was not the land in which
to serve his country. To serve a nation means as a rule
to deal directly with the public. Max Aitken had never
dealt with the public. Neither does he yet — except in-
directly through a big daily newspaper of phenomenal
circulation. On his last visit to Canada he was invited to
public functions. He consistently declined; not because
he shunned popularity or hated the limelight, but because
he would not have felt comfortable. In one of his speeches
he pointed out that the securities which he put on the
market years ago were all now listed as paying ventures.

LORD BEAVERBROOK 269

It was more comfortable to make that remark as a returned
celebrity than to have made it as a citizen.

His own story of why he went to England, and stayed
there, is ingenuous. He said that he went in order to do
business ; that he tried to talk business ; that the public
men with whom he had conference insisted on talking
politics ; that he succumbed and stayed, winning a seat
in the Commons, and almost before an ordinary man could
have said "Jack Robinson", he was hobnobbing with men
the calibre of Bonar Law, Lloyd George, Northcliffe.

Only fragmentary accounts of Beaverbrook's political
history in England have as a rule drifted over here. To
show what an amazing story it is, nothing can be better than
to quote a curiously apt summary written for two
Canadian periodicals by Arthur Baxter, who for some
years now has been a sort of Boswell to Beaverbrook.

In 1910 captured the seat for Ashton-under-Lyne.

In 1912 a vigorous and successful attack on Lloyd
George concerning finance matters in the House.

From 1911 to 1914 he entered parliamentary intrigue
and gradually his home at Leatherhead became a Mecca
for puzzled politicians.

During this time somebody made him a Knight.

The Irish situation was more than threatening ; the
tariff issue was causing bitterness ; Austen Chamberlain
with a minority following was fighting Walter Long to lead
the Tories and on this troublesome sea Sir Max Aitken's
barque bobbed up and down with the skipper's eyes keenly
alert. He saw the possibilities in Bonar Law. When
Chamberlain and Long created a deadlock, Beaverbrook
advocated Bonar Law as leader of the Tory Party. To
make his voice heard more distinctly he purchased the
Daily Express and backed his candidate with a powerful
but (then) not very profitable newspaper. Law has the

270

reputation for modesty, but his fellow-Canadian led him
to the barrier, started him off and when he stopped running
he found himself leader.

For some time it had seemed as if Asquith's Coalition
Government would survive the war, but late in 1917 it was
obvious that the old ship was leaking badly. Carson was
the first to propose scuttling the frigate. The others
argued that even a sinking ship was better than no ship at
all, so the Irishman went overboard and sailed away on
his own raft. Bonar Law representing the good old Tory
element kept on working the pumps ; Mr. Asquith kept
on assuring the crew that all they needed was to "wait and
see " ; and Lloyd George was wondering whether he had
better take a hand at the pumps as well or throw both
Asquith and Bonar Law into the sea.

At this juncture a sail was sighted. It was Max Aitken's
barque that "hopped aboard" and took in the spectacle of
his old Maritimian sweating at the pumps ; and noticed
with a critical eye the extremely able appearance of that
able-bodied politician, Lloyd George.

Beaverbrook thought the situation over — swiftly. He
saw that the genial Micawber on the Bridge could not be
routed as long as Bonar Law and Lloyd George stuck to
him. But even if they could be persuaded to heave the
skipper overboard, could they sail the ship and keep the
crew loyal as well ?

He decided that Carson had to be brought back to the
fold, so jumping into his little craft he scoured the political
sea and returned shortly with the uncrowned king of Ireland
on board.

But Lloyd George, Bonar Law and Sir Edward Carson
loved each other as much as three Prima Donnas. They
all agreed that Asquith was sailing to disaster, but they
weren't sure that they didn't prefer disaster under the Old
Chief to prolonged life in each other's company.

Beaverbrook had seen a vision and he knew that Lloyd

LORD BEAVERBROOK 271

George was the only man in England capable of forming a
ministry that would last six months. Day after day the
Canadian stuck to his task and gradually the three men, all
smarting from old political quarrels, agreed to send an
ultimatum to the skipper that they demanded a sailing
committee under the leadership of " Piricher " Lloyd George.

In other words they demanded a War Cabinet with the
Welshman as Chairman.

Finally, in desperation, Lloyd George called for a
mutiny. Bonar Law summoned all the Tory crew around
him. They went to the bridge and told the Skipper that
they were sorry to break the news to him, but it had been
decided that, all things considered, he had better walk the
plank.

Mr. Asquith was dismayed, blustered, then resigned —
defying the mutineer Welshman to do any better. His
Majesty called on Bonar Law to form a cabinet ; the
Canadian declined with thanks but mentioned the name of
a certain Welshman as a likely candidate for the job. The
Welshman was asked — and accepted. Two days later his
Cabinet was formed. Carson took over the pumps ; Bonar
Law went up to the bridge and Lloyd George delegated to
himself the rank of Commander and Pilot of Britain's ship
of State.

And that is the story of Beaverbrook's tremendous con-
tribution to winning the war. He secured most of the
Labour Party, the Tories, and Carson for Lloyd George ;
without them the Prime Minister could never have formed
a government.

Sir Max Aitken wanted more than a Peerage for his
work ; he had hoped for a position of tremendous power,
but the Government made him a Lord and he went back to
Canadian publicity.

Imagination tries to conceive of any Englishman coming
over here to merge Borden, Laurier and Crerar. Imagination

272 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

fails. Not even Aitken could have done it. That he
succeeded in England where he must have failed in Canada
must have reasons.

1. Experience in mergers.

2. Prestige as a Canadian.

3. Advantage of being — Max Aitken.

•'$ The first we understand. The second involves the
Empire. Aitken was — if anything that could be labelled —
a Tory. He had no trouble becoming a Unionist. His
success with Bonar Law made it possible in getting rid of
Asquith. He could call Carson "Edward". He could
think as fast as Lloyd George. It was a time for quick
thinking — and action. He had opened all the heavy doors
in Montreal — and closed them upon all but those he wanted
inside. He tried the same thing in England. His audacity
was inspired. Something had to be done. Somebody must
be the middleman. Aitken had an uncanny faculty for
sizing up situations ; for manipulating men ; for inter-
preting ambition — because no man in England had an
ambition surpassing his own. He could play political
chess and absorb superficial culture at the same time.
Books, plays, authors, artists, manners, accent — all were
grist to his mill. He was an astute actor. He could
assume a virtue; simulate anxiety; hover about closed
doors on tiptoe; speak in the awed whisper; in the event of a
crisis peer tragically into men's faces.

England knew she had taken a queer character to
bosom ; a child who was growing up at Gargantuan speed,
an enfant terrible of sudden and prodigious experience ; a
creature who could sit up o' nights and plot and organize
and cabal and next morning rub out the wrinkles at tennis,
amiable if he beat his opponent, growling and savage if
beaten, ready for a campaign in the afternoon, a speech in
the evening and a conference at midnight Or he could
plunge into polite arts, talk familiarly of literature with
duchesses, undergo a surgical operation to-day and sit up

LORD BEAVERBROOK 273

for correspondence to-morrow. He has a brain whose
recipe for complete rest is "change of work "! Barring
Lloyd George and De Valera, he has perhaps the most
unusual brain in Great Britain.

No Canadian, already a millionaire, had ever done these
things. Not even Gilbert Parker had so amazingly culti-
vated the accent. Greenwood, diligent and talented, had
been slow and determined. Aitken — opened the heavy
doors. As in Canada, he was at last able to close out all
but those who could play the game of the hour. This Cana-
dian could not only talk, but act, Empire ; not merely ape,
but superficially assimilate, England ; and he understood
the United States — because he was temperamentally some-
thing of an American.

His success on the surface is incomprehensible. The
one key to it is his persistent cultivation of Bonar Law, who
in the Coalition was the great prop to the Premier. Beaver-
brook hugely admires Lloyd George. He reverences
Bonar Law. The Premier and himself had too many points,
though not characteristics, in common to become running
mates. Intimately congenial to the Unionist leader,
Aitken was never allowed to become indispensable to the
Premier. His brief term as member of the War Cabinet
terminated almost suddenly. Was it voluntary ? Or
ambitious ? What did this Warwick want as reward more
than the peerage which may have been designed to chloro-
form an electric battery ?

We are not told. Once during the second year of war he
offered to raise and equip and command a battalion from
New Brunswick. His offer was not accepted. He went to
Sam Hughes. "Sam," he said, "I want a job in the
Canadian Army !"

He got it. Aitken's work as Eye Witness to the Cana-
dian troops and the publication of "Canada in Flanders"
was the performance of a man who in the great crisis of war
had found a sudden and sincere interest in his native land

274 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

that he had never exhibited while he was a citizen of this
country. He showed a grasp of the human as well as the
technical side of war. A man who could so rediscover his
own nation could surely do something new in helping to co-
ordinate the Empire. He has an astonishing knowledge of
great public men in all countries, a thorough commercial
knowledge of Europe and A'sia, and — may we say a genius
for a sort of secret diplomacy ? His war record demon-
strates most of these qualities. His Canadian War Me-
morials are a proof that he understands how to make his
own country useful to British artists.

What then did Beaverbrook expect as reward for his
political services, beyond a peerage and the sublime sense
of having "done his duty" where he saw it ?

Governor-Generalship of Canada ?

Ambassadorship to the United States ?

Secretaryship of State for the "Colonies "?

Or the Chancellorship of the Exchequer ?

There is really nothing else left for an ambition like this
except the Premiership of Great Britain. Brilliant, plot-
ting, crafty and phenomenal, this young man has still the
spirit of the corsair. England has not absorbed him. But
there is a general election pending over there. The Coali-
tion is not on Gibraltar. Party cleavages are rife. Labour,
Liberals, Socialists, Syndicalists, Bolshevists and old-line
Unionists are all pitching camps about the Premier's
Verdun. When the battle really begins will Gen. Beaver-
brook be in the citadel, or working in a headquarters tent to
merge any three of the common enemy into a force that will
haul down the Coalition flag ?

"Why do you think Lloyd George will come back as
powerfully as ever ? " he was asked here, after his admission
that for the time being the Premier was in the doldrums
of unpopularity.

"Because — he always does !" was his cautious reply ;

LORD BEAVERBROOK 275

in which one almost detected the suspicion that he might
not ; and if so — what ?

These are some of the unpredicables. Even the answer
Beaverbrook himself might give to-day might be challenged
by his action of to-morrow. But this man has always
succeeded in finance when a country was prosperous, and in
politics when the nation was confronted by emergency.
He is still too ambitious to adjourn permanently to Leather-
head, Surrey ; too young to write his memoirs. England
is a new world. And it may be — unless he has already
alienated his personality from his genius — that one of its
picturesque discoverers will be Lord Beaverbrook.

Meanwhile he remarks that most of his friends are in
Canada. One misses at least a fumbling guess, if in the
days to come he will not value those friends, whoever they
may be, more than he ever did when he was making millions
here or merging politicians over there. Such a man seldom
moves his forces just for parade. As Aitken used this
country to get himself preferment in England on account
of the Empire, so it may be suspected that he has used
England — not impossibly — to reclaim in this country what-
ever credit he lost some time before he left it.

Meanwhile until the Government of Great Britain finds
some better function for this phenomenon, we recommend
that he be made the official economic investigator of the
Empire. Up to the present this has been a pastime for
leisured travellers like Lord Southesk, Sir Charles Dilke,
and Rider Haggard. A man with Beaverbrook' s ability to
analyze economic conditions and gain the confidence of men
in high positions could be of incalculable value in getting
a thorough survey of the commercial and political resources
of a commonwealth which as yet nobody seems to under-
stand. After that the Government might well make him
Viceroy of India, where he might apply his talent for
group-coalition to the great problem of constitutional
Home Rule.

CONCLUSION

A Canadian newspaperman once flippantly asked the
late W. T. Stead :

"What do you think about continentalism in North
America ?"

The answer came just as flippantly :

"Every nation has a right to go to the devil in its own
way. Canada should not be denied the privilege."

There was a blunt candour about the reply that even
from an egotist like Stead meant infinitely more than the
soothing-syrup idealism dispensed by some of the visiting
prophets to this country. Stead did not mean that in
establishing independence of the United States, Canada
should cut the painter from the Great British Common-
wealth. But he was a trifle cynical about the young nation,
just as Disraeli was fifty years ago when he said that "these
colonies would yet be a millstone about Britain s neck".
Neither of them was more cynical about us than we usually
are about ourselves, never in theory, but in practice.

Most of the men sketched in the foregoing pages, as
well as hundreds of others in public life, realize that Par-
liament and Legislatures have a hard time to keep them-
selves from going to the devil, and that so far as they go
along that road the nation travels with them. As an
experiment in nationhood we have some peculiar and
original weaknesses, as well as strengths. Belgium, for
instance, could be tacked by Atlas overnight on to one of
our northward coasts, or set down as an island in some of
our northern waters, when only a geographer would notice
the difference. Belgium has a king and two million more
people than Canada. We have slightly more territory

276

CONCLUSION 277

than the United States, when New York State alone has as
many people as our whole country. We are as big as
many Britains and we have enough railway mileage to
make Britain a spider-web, when our population is about
one-fifth of hers and our ultimate authority in democratic
government comes from Downing Street. Yet there are
prophets among us who predict that we shall yet be the
pivot of the Empire.

Once you begin to speculate about the future of this
country there is no end. And the past of the nation has
rather little to do with estimating its future. We have
been a wide-open immigration country. In twenty years
we have transformed outselves by a foreign policy with
which Britain had nothing to do. Twenty years more and
we could do it again with even more disastrous results.
In 1867 the great compromise known as Confederation
tied four and a half millions of people into a political unity.
In half a century we doubled our population ; built 30,000
miles of transcontinental and branch lines of railway ; made
ourselves a race congress imitation of the United States ;
enacted a National Policy of protective tariffs that failed
to protect us from ourselves ; created an Oriental problem
on the Pacific, exaggerated a race problem on the Ottawa,
and developed an American-penetration system clear across
the country ; sent a small army to help establish a similar
government and dual problem to our own in South Africa
and a huge army to Europe to help make the world safe
for the kind of democracy of which we consider ourselves
a fair sample ; created a small army of millionaires and had
bestowed upon us about an equal number of knighthoods
as well as a number of peerages, and four years ago peti-
tioned the King through Parliament to abolish the practice;
gave a first mortgage on the country to one great trans-
continental railway, and a second and a third to two more
?rhi vli we have since nationalized into government owner-
ship because the roads were bankrupt for the present and

278 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

built for the future, which is yet a long way off ; developed
a cycle of quite remarkable big industries and federalized
banks which a large element of our heterogeneous democracy
now consider a menace to the nation ; and on the prairies
which, shortly after Confederation, we bought for a few
millions sterling from the Hudson's Bay Company, a
Liberal Government, never contemplated by the Fathers
of Confederation, carved out two new great Provinces which
for ten years have tried to kill the Tory Party which gave
the Northwest its birth, all Liberalism that does not go
back to the furrow, and aims to abolish even the moderately
successful economic system by which we have come to our
present state of comparative prosperity.

If that is the kind of thing that Stead meant by ' ' every
nation going to the devil in its own way" it must be con-
ceded that we have lost no time over the going We are
among the forward nations, even though we are less radical
than Australia. No young nation ever accomplished
visibly and materially so much in so brief a period. We
had the enormous scientific resources of the 20th century
to give us momentum. Perhaps we were a little too fast on
the down grade. We still take some inspiration from looking
at the map to reflect that no other part of the British
Empire occupies so strategic a position as Canada. We
note that Canada is not only the natural interpreter between
Britain and the United States — which it took some of our
far-seeing statesmen a long while to discover — but that we
are also a transformer between the power-house at Downing
Street and the one at Tokio ; that we are fair on the high-
way of traffic and travel between London and Yokohama ;
that we have room within a reasonable time for as many
people as are now living in Britain, and that if we are not
too awfully anxious about going to the devil we can make
that population one of the most potential in the world for
its size, not only in producing things to eat and wear and
export, but in helping to hold the British Commonwealth

CONCLUSION 279

steady long enough to let the old thing work out its big
share of the world's salvation.

Such is the outlook. Meanwhile we have our innate
defects, the first of which arises from the vastness of geo-
graphy and the littleness of politicians. Little politics in
Canada are pocketed away in sections. Some of our native
born are the most parochial. There are groups in Canada
as un-national as Eskimos who in some respects are our
best citizens because they owe nothing to, and expect
nothing from, any Government.

People shout about assimilation, not knowing to what
pattern, if any, foreign peoples should be assimilated. The
missionary goes abroad and extracts from the heathen even
the nobilities of his own faith and leaves him often the
miserable animosities of a creed. Political and social
missionaries in Canada make the same mistake about
foreigners. It is a great thing to Canadianize a race. But
we ought to begin by Canadianizing some of our native-
born.

Even our public men- believe in political servitude. A
man goes to Ottawa burning with zeal to inaugurate politi-
cal liberation. Six months or a year produces sleeping-
sickness. He is given a hyperdemic of conformity. He
gravitates into the formula of a group. His message is
muzzled. If not, it too often breaks loose in a tirade on
behalf of some section littler than even any of the groups
in Ottawa.

Big men do not, as is often said, go into Parliament.
There is a great reason. The wonder is that the few big
men we elect stay there so long. Government is supposed
to be business. But the business takes a long while to do
— even badly. Ottawa is the place where the national
field-glasses too often get turned wrong end about.

We are seldom honest about public men. A man's
own party praises, the opposite party damns him. In an
old nation this intellectual strabismus is pardonable. In a

280 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

young nation it is a form of political suicide. We too often
wait for a man to make a great speech before admitting
independent of party, that he is anything great as a man.

Because Canada is so vast, political leaders find it
necessary to enunciate one doctrine here, another one there.
This is an old trick ; playing the lights on stage when the
spot-light is reserved for the big local issues. We are
constantly besieged by " national policies". Man)' of them
have very little to do with national citizenship. Most of
them sketch out milleniums that are never realized. We
are a people of extremisms. When national prosperity is
the objective we tolerate, and even idolize, any man who
is bold and big enough to capture the country with his
special-interest programme. Then the delirium is over,
heyday is done, and the nation wakes up to classify as
public plunderers the very men whom it once regarded
as the economic saviours of the country.

Our faculty of national criticism is not as yet strongly
developed. Thank heaven, we are not cynical ; but it is
better to be a hopeful cynic than a disgruntled idealist.
Men will arise with specious programmes by means of
which they can hypnotize a group and aim at capturing the
country. Progress carries on by means of such men and
such groups. But the devil himself stands behind the
stage bush to prod these zealots into the limelight and the
next moment to lead the claque in the gallery. We are
carried away by the act, afterwards find that we have been
duped and hold indignation meetings after the show is
safely ten miles down the line.

Like all other nations we have had our share of "the
new time coming". During the war we had all the old
parties dead and buried along with patronage and race cries
and public graft. But while the preacher was busy over
the funeral rites a number of chief mourners were some-
where "making hay". A nation's adversity is too often
some man's opportunity. In moneymaking this is even

CONCLUSION 281

worse than in politics. It is too easy to shout and to shed
tears. We deplore the past, suspect the future and work
hard to make ourselves solid for the present.

Many men in Canada do not regard public life as public
service. There is little or no preparation for doing the
nation's business. Men are log-rolled into Parliament and
pitchforked into Cabinets. The work they are expected
to do has little or no relation to the work for which nature
and experience intended them. It is regarded a simpler
matter to administer a great State department than to
manage a big industry.

Ottawa is the natural objective of all those who "want"
something. When interests camp on the trail of Govern-
ments and of Parliament, the interest of the nation is going
to suffer — and it always has. We are paying in taxes now
for the lobbying that went on ten years ago. No Govern-
ment is ever considered so patriotic and humanly powerful
that i'; can resist the inroad of "big interests".

Bigger interests arise. In a storm of newly patented
virtue they declaim against the "big" ones. They fail to
admit that they merely want to usurp instead of to magnify
Government. The political machine of the country is
regarded as a part of the machine by which special interests
prosper. In its efforts to repudiate such a connection
Governments resort to the trick of clamouring on behalf
of "the people".

Presently even the people lose faith in Government.
They come to believe only in class-conscious groups. No
nation can be big whose parties are small. No parties can
be great whose platforms are for the good of a class or the
veneration of what "my grandfather" used to think.

Elections are eternally war. A general election has for
a sure sign the prediction on the part of the Opposition that
the Government intend to "put one over" in order to grab
another lease of power. Experience has taught us that the
prediction is too often true. It does not teach us that it

282 THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

is time to abandon the expectation or the practice. Men
who in party bondage have helped to win elections by re-
distribution after a census, and to award patronage to the
victors, arise years later in Opposition to denounce such
practices when carried on by the present Government.
The pot usually succeeds in calling the kettle black. Hence
a bad black eye to political sincerity.

The average parliamentarian knows very little about
Canada ; much about his own Province, or his own con-
stituency, or his own group. Politicians do not even travel
except on business. A country of vast and variegated
human interest, of wonderful charm even for scenery, with-
out considering people at all, is the home of a large number
of people burning to do national work who know little or
nothing about the life of the nation, historically or other-
wise.

President Harding solemnly predicts that the United
States will produce a race of supermen. He does not say
how. He merely observes the need. He knows that his
countiy has gone the pace that will take generations of
coming back before any superman nation can begin to be.
In Canada we have not gone so far that we cannot easily
come back. But we have no vision of any future for this
nation except a larger instalment of what we have been.

We talk about being a nation when we ignore the very
disadvantages that militate against true nationalism. We
bluster about national sentiment and spend our money on
paying to have ourselves Americanized. When we are
tired trying to explain that, we fall back into dithyrambics
on the Old Flag and the great British Empire.

But if we are ever going to be anything but a national
and polyglot sandwich between the United States and
Great Britain, it is time we paid some respect to the innate
democracy of the British idea by developing our own
national identity. Our strategic position in the Empire
will be worth no more to us than our great native resources,

CONCLUSION 283

or our bilingual nationalism, or our pioneering history, or
all combined, unless we elect to make the biggest and best
we have dominate our national life. This is a big country
that must become a great nation if those who aim to lead
it will abstain from little ways. We need more poetry in
our public affairs. More imagination in Parliament.
More vision in the Administration. More faith in the
country. Less sectionalizing propaganda everywhere. If
we rise to the measure of opportunity, we may yet prove
that when the Fathers of Confederation hung our national
future on a great compromise and a transcontinental rail-
way they were not talking in their sleep ; and that when
Empire statesmen look to our leaders for counsel we shall
not send unto them any man who represents a class-
conscious economic group instead of a nation.

It is true that Governments have always capitulated
to groups. We have sacrificed a great deal for the sake of
protection when that was merely a tariff to keep certain
industries from obliteration. But a nation cannot be
forever built upon smoke-stacks and blue-books. We
can better afford to have continental free trade and spiritual
freedom as a nation, than a high tariff and bondage to an
industrial-financial-transportation group. But if we gobble
the bait of free trade, and find ourselves on the hook of
economic and national domination by the United States,
our last state will surely be worse than our first.

This book is DUE on the last date stamped below

MAY 2 o 1935

Form L-9-15m-7,'32

Bridle ~

B76m

_

The masques

of Ottawa.

UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY

A 000887017 2

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v 'WEARY