START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA*** E-text prepared by Al Haines Transcriber's note: "Domino" is the pseudonym of Augustus Bridle (1869-?) THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA by "DOMINO" "_Wherefore are these things hid_? * * * * * _We will draw the curtain and show you the picture._" --SHAKESPEARE. 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 wonderland 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 Mephistos of strategy up there: some prophets of eloquence: some dreamers of imagination: giants of creative energy scheming 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 worthwhile 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 beginning, 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 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. 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 statistics, 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 THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN PREMIER-- RT. HON. SIR ROBERT BORDEN A POLITICAL SOLAR SYSTEM-- RT. HON. SIR WILFRID LAURIER THE GRANDSON OF A PATRIOT-- HON. WILLIAM LYON MACKENZIE KING NUMBER ONE HARD-- HON. T. A. CRERAR THE PREMIER WHO MOWED FENCE CORNERS-- HON. E. C. DRURY EZEKIEL AT A LEDGER-- RT. HON. SIR GEORGE FOSTER A HALO OF BILLIONS-- RT. HON. SIR THOMAS WHITE CALLED TO THE POLITICAL PULPIT-- HON. NEWTON WESLEY ROWELL AN AUTOCRAT FOR DIVIDENDS-- BARON SHAUGHNESSY THE PUBLIC SERVICE HOBBYIST-- SIR HERBERT AMES THE SHADOW AND THE MAN-- HON. SIR SAM HUGHES THE STEREOPTICON AND THE SLIDE-- LIEUT.-GENERAL SIR ARTHUR CURRIE A COAT OF MANY COLOURS-- SIR JOHN WILLISON WHATSOEVER THY HAND FINDETH-- SIR JOSEPH FLAVELLE, BART. NO FATTED CALVES FOR PRODIGAL SONS-- HON. SIR HENRY DRAYTON THE PERSONAL EQUATION IN RAILROADING-- EDWARD WENTWORTH BEATTY A BOURGEOIS MASTER OF QUEBEC-- HON. SIR LOMER GOUIN A POLITICAL MATTAWA OF THE WEST-- JOHN WESLEY DAFOE HEADMASTER OF THE MANCHESTER SCHOOL-- MICHAEL CLARK, M.P. THE SPHINX FROM SASKATCHEWAN-- HON. J. A. CALDER A TRUE VOICE OF LABOUR-- TOM MOORE THE MAN WITHOUT A PUBLIC-- SIR WILLIAM MACKENZIE THE IMPERIAL BRAINSTORM-- BARON BEAVERBROOK CONCLUSION 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 without a general election. There may not be as much finality, but there is sometimes as much wisdom, in the choice of a leader by a small group as in his election by the people. Majorities frequently 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 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 certainty 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. The little blank spots in Meighen's temperament are things that people like to talk about; 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 mind, 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 shave 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 never 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 without scruples. That uniform may not misbecome constricted 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 Commonwealth 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 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 surmised. In any case White was off the ship. The choice came down to two. Here again it was a 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 itself 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 advocate a Canadian envoy to that Capital. 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 heterogeneous 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 boomerang 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, 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 periodically 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 temperamentally 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 Conference 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 momentous occasions; nor accustomed to realizing how small the greatest men and the most impressive human arrangements 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. He 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 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 Conference 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 monopoly 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 improbable 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 business." "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 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 democracies. 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 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, is 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 magnificently 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?" "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 mediocrity 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 equipment of R. L. Borden to have supplied the lack of it in some of his heterogeneous followers. But it was morality 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 necktie 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--subconsciously 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 personalities of the wild flowers so dear to his soul, and the perversities 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. He did not abhor the calcium; he merely did not know what to do when it was on. During the tour which preceded 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 programmes 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 day'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 anything 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 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 epigram. 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 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 evolution Sir Robert ever would have recreated his party even on Imperial issues; or convinced the West that Conservatism was not merely anti-agrarian; or shewn Quebec that Conservatives in the second decade of the twentieth century are better Laurentians than the Liberals by preserving 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 sympathetic 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 characters 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 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 perpetrate 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 assurances 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 warning 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 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 permitted 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 informing 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 explained that being a native son of Canada, whether you were English or French by extraction, did
{'title': 'The Masques of Ottawa by Augustus Bridle', 'source': 'Project Gutenberg', 'lang': 'en'}