If it were fair or adequate to so quote, I should be very much tempted to draw the history of Lorne Murchison’s sojourn in England from his letters home. He put his whole heart into these, his discoveries and his recognitions and his young enthusiasm, all his claimed inheritance, all that he found to criticize and to love. His mother said, half-jealously when she read them, that he seemed tremendously taken up with the old country; and of course she expressed the thing exactly, as she always did: he was tremendously taken up with it. The old country fell into the lines of his imagination, from the towers of Westminster to the shops in the Strand; from the Right Hon. Fawcett Wallingham, who laid great issues before the public, to the man who sang melancholy hymns to the same public up and down the benevolent streets. It was naturally London that filled his view; his business was in London and his time was short; the country he saw from the train, whence it made a low cloudy frame for London, with decorations of hedges and sheep. How he saw London, how he carried away all he did in the time and under the circumstances, may be thought a mystery; there are doubtless people who would consider his opportunities too limited to gather anything essential. Cruickshank was the only one of the deputation who had been “over” before; and they all followed him unquestioningly to the temperance hotel of his preference in Bloomsbury, where bedrooms were three and six and tea was understood as a solid meal and the last in the day. Bates would have voted for the Metropole, and McGill had been advised that you saw a good deal of life at the Cecil, but they bowed to Cruickshank’s experience. None of them were total abstainers, but neither had any of them the wine habit; they were not inconvenienced, therefore, in taking advantage of the cheapness with which total abstinence made itself attractive, and they took it, though they were substantial men. As one of them put it, they weren’t over there to make a splash, a thing that was pretty hard to do in London, anyhow; and home comforts came before anything. The conviction about the splash was perhaps a little the teaching of circumstances. They were influential fellows at home, who had lived for years in the atmosphere of appreciation that surrounds success; their movements were observed in the newspapers; their names stood for wide interests, big concerns. They had known the satisfaction of a positive importance, not only in their community but in their country; and they had come to England invested as well with the weight that is attached to a public mission. It may very well be that they looked for some echo of what they were accustomed to, and were a little dashed not to find it—to find the merest published announcement of their arrival, and their introduction by Lord Selkirk to the Colonial Secretary; and no heads turned in the temperance hotel when they came into the dining-room. It may very well be. It is even more certain, however that they took the lesson as they found it, with the quick eye for things as they are which seems to come of looking at things as they will be, and with just that humorous comment about the splash. It would be misleading to say that they were humbled; I doubt whether they even felt their relativity, whether they ever dropped consciously, there in the Bloomsbury hotel, into their places in the great scale of London. Observing the scale, recognizing it, they held themselves unaffected by it; they kept, in a curious, positive way, the integrity of what they were and what they had come for; they maintained their point of view. So much must be conceded. The Empire produces a family resemblance, but here and there, when oceans intervene, a different mould of the spirit.
Wallingham certainly invited them to dinner one Sunday, in a body, an occasion which gave one or two of them some anxiety until they found that it was not to be adorned by the ladies of the family. Tricorne was there, President of the Board of Trade, and Fleming, who held the purse-strings of the United Kingdom, two Ministers whom Wallingham had asked because they were supposed to have open minds—open, that is to say, for purposes of assimilation. Wallingham considered, and rightly, that he had done very well for the deputation in getting these two. There were other “colleagues” whose attendance he would have liked to compel; but one of them, deep in the country, was devoting his weekends to his new French motor, and the other to the proofs of a book upon Neglected Periods of Mahommedan History, and both were at the breaking strain with overwork. Wallingham asked the deputation to dinner. Lord Selkirk, who took them to Wallingham, dined them too, and invited them to one of those garden parties for the sumptuous scale of which he was so justly famed; the occasion we have already heard about, upon which royalty was present in two generations. They travelled to it by special train, a circumstance which made them grave, receptive, and even slightly ceremonious with one another. Lord Selkirk, with royalty on his hands, naturally could not give them much of his time, and they moved about in a cluster, avoiding the ladies’ trains and advising one another that it was a good thing the High Commissioner was a man of large private means; it wasn’t everybody that could afford to take the job. Yet they were not wholly detached from the occasion; they looked at it, after they had taken it in, with an air half-amused, half-proprietary. All this had, in a manner, come out of Canada, and Canada was theirs. One of them—Bates it was—responding to a lady who was effusive about the strawberries, even took the modestly depreciatory attitude of the host. “They’re a fair size for this country, ma’am, but if you want berries with a flavour we’ll do better for you in the Niagara district.”
It must be added that Cruickshank lunched with Wallingham at his club, and with Tricorne at his; and on both occasions the quiet and attentive young secretary went with him, for purposes of reference, his pocket bulging with memoranda. The young secretary felt a little embarrassed to justify his presence at Tricorne’s lunch, as the Right Honourable gentleman seemed to have forgotten what his guests had come for beyond it, and talked exclusively and exhaustively about the new possibilities for fruit-farming in England. Cruickshank fairly shook himself into his overcoat with irritation afterward. “It’s the sort of thing we must except,” he said, as they merged upon Pall Mall. It was not the sort of thing Lorne expected; but we know him unsophisticated and a stranger to the heart of the Empire, which beats through such impediment of accumulated tissue. Nor was it the sort of thing they got from Wallingham, the keen-eyed and probing, whose skill in adjusting conflicting interests could astonish even their expectation, and whose vision of the essentials of the future could lift even their enthusiasm. One would like to linger over their touch with Wallingham, that fusion of energy with energy, that straight, satisfying, accomplishing dart. There is more drama here; no doubt, than in all the pages that are to come. But I am explaining now how little, not how much, the Cruickshank deputation, and especially Lorne Murchison, had the opportunity of feeling and learning in London, in order to show how wonderful it was that Lorne felt and learned so widely. That, what he absorbed and took back with him is, after all, what we have to do with; his actual adventures are of no great importance.
The deputation to urge improved communications within the Empire had few points of contact with the great world, but its members were drawn into engagements of their own, more, indeed, than some of them could conveniently overtake. Mr Bates never saw his niece in the post-office, and regrets it to this day. The engagements arose partly out of business relations. Poulton who was a dyspeptic, complained that nothing could be got through in London without eating and drinking; for his part he would concede a point any time not to eat and drink, but you could not do it; you just had to suffer. Poulton was a principal in one of the railway companies that were competing to open up the country south of Hudson’s Bay to the Pacific, but having dealt with that circumstance in the course of the day he desired only to be allowed to go to bed on bread and butter and a little stewed fruit. Bates, whose name was a nightmare to every other dry-goods man in Toronto, naturally had to see a good many of the wholesale people; he, too, complained of the number of courses and the variety of the wines, but only to disguise his gratification. McGill, of the Great Bear Line, had big proposals to make in connection with southern railway freights from Liverpool; and Cameron, for private reasons of magnitude, proposed to ascertain the real probability of a duty to foreigners on certain forms of manufactured leather—he turned out in Toronto a very good class of suitcase. Cruickshank had private connections to which they were all respectful. Nobody but Cruickshank found it expedient to look up the lost leader of the Canadian House of Commons, contributed to a cause still more completely lost in home politics; nobody but Cruickshank was likely to be asked to dine by a former Governor-General of the Dominion, an invitation which nobody but Cruickshank would be likely to refuse.
“It used to be a ‘command’ in Ottawa,” said Cruickshank, who had got on badly with his sovereign’s representative there, “but here it’s only a privilege. There’s no business in it, and I haven’t time for pleasure.”
The nobleman in question had, in effect, dropped back into the Lords. So far as the Empire was concerned, he was in the impressive rearguard, and this was a little company of fighting men.
The entertainments arising out of business were usually on a scale more or less sumptuous. They took place in big, well-known restaurants, and included a look at many of the people who seem to lend themselves so willingly to the great buzzing show that anybody can pay for in London, their names in the paper in the morning, their faces at Prince’s in the evening, their personalities no doubt advantageously exposed in various places during the day. But there were others, humbler ones in Earl’s Court Road or Maida Vale, where the members of the deputation had relatives whom it was natural to hunt up. Long years and many billows had rolled between, and more effective separations had arisen in the whole difference of life; still, it was natural to hunt them up, to seek in their eyes and their hands the old subtle bond of kin, and perhaps—such is our vanity in the new lands—to show them what the stock had come to overseas. They tended to be depressing these visits: the married sister was living in a small way; the first cousin seemed to have got into a rut; the uncle and aunt were failing, with a stooping, trembling, old-fashioned kind of decrepitude, a rigidity of body and mind, which somehow one didn’t see much over home.
“England,” said Poulton, the Canadian-born, “is a dangerous country to live in; you run such risks of growing old.” They agreed, I fear, for more reasons than this that England was a good country to leave early; and you cannot blame them—there was not one of them who did not offer in his actual person proof of what he said. Their own dividing chance grew dramatic in their eyes.
“I was offered a clerkship with the Cunards the day before I sailed,” said McGill. “Great Scott, if I’d taken that clerkship!” He saw all his glorious past, I suppose, in a suburban aspect.
“I was kicked out,” said Cameron, “and it was the kindest attention my father ever paid me;” and Bates remarked that it was worth coming out second-class, as he did, to go back in the best cabin in the ship.
The appearance and opinions of those they had left behind them prompted them to this kind of congratulation, with just a thought of compunction at the back of it for their own better fortunes. In the further spectacle of England most of them saw the repository of singularly old-fashioned ideas the storehouse of a good deal of money; and the market for unlimited produce. They looked cautiously at imperial sentiment; they were full of the terms of their bargain and had, as they would have said, little use for schemes that did not commend themselves on a basis of common profit. Cruickshank was the biggest and the best of them; but even Cruickshank submitted the common formulas; submitted them and submitted to them.
Only Lorne Murchison among them looked higher and further; only he was alive to the inrush of the essential; he only lifted up his heart.
Lorne was thus an atom in the surge of London. The members of the deputation, as their business progressed, began to feel less like atoms and more like a body exerting an influence, however obscurely hid in a temperance hotel, upon the tide of international affairs; but their secretary had naturally no initiative that appeared, no importance that was taken account of. In these respects, no less than in the others, he justified Mr Cruickshank’s selection. He did his work as unobtrusively as he did it admirably well; and for the rest he was just washed about, carried, hither and thither, generally on the tops of omnibuses, receptive, absorbent, mostly silent. He did try once or twice to talk to the bus drivers—he had been told it was a thing to do if you wanted to get hold of the point of view of a particular class; but the thick London idiom defeated him, and he found they grew surly when he asked them too often to repeat their replies. He felt a little surly himself after a while, when they asked him, as they nearly always did, if he wasn’t an American. “Yes,” he would say in the end, “but not the United States kind,” resenting the necessity of explaining to the Briton beside him that there were other kinds. The imperial idea goes so quickly from the heart to the head. He felt compelled, nevertheless, to mitigate his denial to the bus drivers.
“I expect it’s the next best thing.” he would say, “but it’s only the next best.”
It was as if he felt charged to vindicate the race, the whole of Anglo-Saxondom, there in his supreme moment, his splendid position, on the top of an omnibus lumbering west out of Trafalgar Square.
One introduction of his own he had. Mrs Milburn had got it for him from the rector, Mr Emmett, to his wife’s brother, Mr Charles Chafe, who had interests in Chiswick and a house in Warwick Gardens. Lorne put off presenting the letter—did not know, indeed, quite how to present it, till his stay in London was half over. Finally he presented himself with it, as the quickest way, at the office of Mr Chafe’s works at Chiswick. He was cordially received, both there and in Warwick Gardens, where he met Mrs Chafe and the family, when he also met Mr Alfred Hesketh. Lorne went several times to the house in Warwick Gardens, and Hesketh—a nephew—was there on the very first occasion. It was an encounter interesting on both sides. He—Hesketh—was a young man with a good public school and a university behind him, where his very moderate degree, however, failed to represent the activity of his mind or the capacity of his energy. He had a little money of his own, and no present occupation; he belonged to the surplus. He was not content to belong to it; he cast about him a good deal for something to do. There was always the Bar, but only the best fellows get on there, and he was not quite one of the best fellows; he knew that. He had not money enough for politics or interest enough for the higher departments of the public service, nor had he those ready arts of expression that lead naturally into journalism. Anything involving further examinations he rejected on that account; and the future of glassware, in view of what they were doing in Germany, did not entice him to join his uncle in Chiswick. Still he was aware of enterprise, convinced that he had loafed long enough.
Lorne Murchison had never met anyone of Hesketh’s age in Hesketh’s condition before. Affluence and age he knew, in honourable retirement; poverty and youth he knew, embarked in the struggle; indolence and youth he also knew, as it cumbered the ground; but youth and a competence, equipped with education, industry, and vigour, searching vainly in fields empty of opportunity, was to him a new spectacle. He himself had intended to be a lawyer since he was fourteen. There never had been any impediment to his intention, any qualification to his desire. He was still under his father’s roof, but that was for the general happiness; any time within the last eighteen months, if he had chosen to hurry fate, he might have selected another. He was younger than Hesketh by a year, yet we may say that he had arrived, while Hesketh was still fidgeting at the starting-point.
“Why don’t you farm?” he asked once.
“Farming in England may pay in a quarter of a century, not before. I can’t wait for it. Besides, why should I farm? Why didn’t you?”
“Well,” said Lorne, “in your case it seems about the only thing left. I? Oh it doesn’t attract us over there. We’re getting away from it—leaving it to the newcomers from this side. Curious circle, that: I wonder when our place gets overcrowded, where we shall go to plough?”
Hesketh’s situation occupied them a good deal; but their great topic had a wider drift, embracing nothing less than the Empire, pausing nowhere short of the flag. The imperial idea was very much at the moment in the public mind; it hung heavily, like a banner, in every newspaper, it was filtering through the slow British consciousness, solidifying as it travelled. In the end it might be expected to arrive at a shape in which the British consciousness must either assimilate it or cast it forth. They were saying in the suburbs that they wanted it explained; at Hatfield they were saying, some of them, with folded arms, that it was self evident; other members of that great house, swinging their arms, called it blackness of darkness and ruin, so had a prophet divided it against itself. Wallingham, still in the Cabinet, was going up and down the country trying not to explain too much. There was division in the Cabinet, sore travail among private members. The conception being ministerial, the Opposition applied itself to the task of abortion, fearing the worst if it should be presented to the country fully formed and featured, the smiling offspring of progress and imagination. Travellers to Greater Britain returned waving joyous torches in the insular fog; they shed a brilliance and infectious enthusiasm, but there were not enough to do more than make the fog visible. Many persons found such torches irritating. They pointed out that as England had groped to her present greatness she might be trusted to feel her way further. “Free trade,” they said, “has made us what we are. Put out these lights!”
Mr Chafe was one of these. He was a cautious, heavy fellow, full of Burgundy and distrust. The basis of the imperial idea inspired him with suspicion and hostility. He could accept the American tariff on English manufactures; that was a plain position, simple damage, a blow full in the face, not to be dodged. But the offer of better business in the English colonies in exchange for a duty on the corn and meat of foreign countries—he could see too deep for that. The colonials might or might not be good customers; he knew how many decanters he sold in the United States, in spite of the tariff. He saw that the tax on food-stuffs was being commended to the working-man with the argument of higher wages. Higher wages, with the competition of foreign labour, spelt only one word to English manufacturers, and that was ruin. The bugbear of higher wages, immediate, threatening, near, the terror of the last thirty years, closed the prospect for Charles Chafe; he could see nothing beyond. He did not say so, but to him the prosperity of the British manufacturer was bound up in the indigence of the operative. Thriving workmen, doing well, and looking to do better, rose before him in terms of menace, though their prosperity might be rooted in his own. “Give them cheap food and keep them poor,” was the sum of his advice. His opinions had the emphasis of the unexpected, the unnatural: he was one of the people whom Wallingham’s scheme in its legitimate development of a tariff on foreign manufactures might be expected to enrich. This fact, which he constantly insisted on, did give them weight; it made him look like a cunning fellow not to be caught with chaff. He and his business had survived free trade—though he would not say this either—and he preferred to go on surviving it rather than take the chances of any zollverein. The name of the thing was enough for him, a word made in Germany, thick and mucky, like their tumblers. As to the colonies—Mr Chafe had been told of a certain spider who devoured her young ones. He reversed the figure and it stood, in the imperial connection, for all the argument he wanted.
Alfred Hesketh had lived always in the hearing of such doctrine; it had stood to him for political gospel by mere force of repetition. But he was young, with the curiosity and enterprise and impatience of dogma of youth; he belonged by temperament and situation to those plastic thousands in whom Wallingham hoped to find the leaven that should leaven the whole lump. His own blood stirred with the desire to accomplish, to carry further; and as the scope of the philanthropist did not attract him, he was vaguely conscious of having been born too late in England. The new political appeal of the colonies, clashing suddenly upon old insular harmonies, brought him a sense of wider fields and chances; his own case he freely translated into his country’s, and offered an open mind to politics that would help either of them. He looked at the new countries with interest, an interest evoked by their sudden dramatic leap into the forefront of public concern. He looked at them with what nature intended to be the eye of a practical businessman. He looked at Lorne Murchison, too, and listened to him, with steady critical attention. Lorne seemed in a way to sum it all up in his person, all the better opportunity a man had out there; and he handled large matters of the future with a confidence and a grip that quickened the circulation. Hesketh’s open mind gradually became filled with the imperial view as he had the capacity to take it; and we need not be surprised if Lorne Murchison, gazing in the same direction, supposed that they saw the same thing.
Hesketh confessed, declared, that Murchison had brought him round; and Lorne surveyed this achievement with a thrill of the happiest triumph. Hesketh stood, to him, a product of that best which he was so occupied in admiring and pursuing. Perhaps he more properly represented the second best; but we must allow something for the confusion of early impressions. Hesketh had lived always in the presence of ideals disengaged in England as nowhere else in the world; in Oxford, Lorne knew, they clustered thick. There is no doubt that his manners were good, and his ideas unimpeachable in the letter; the young Canadian read the rest into him and loved him for what he might have been.
“As an Englishman,” said Hesketh one evening as they walked together back from the Chafes’ along Knightsbridge, talking of the policy urged by the Colonial representatives at the last Conference, “I could wish the idea were more our own—that we were pressing it on the colonies instead of the colonies pressing it on us.”
“Doesn’t there come a time in the history of most families,” Lorne replied, “when the old folks look to the sons and daughters to keep them in touch with the times? Why shouldn’t a vigorous policy of Empire be conceived by its younger nations—who have the ultimate resources to carry it out? We’ve got them and we know it—the iron and the coal and the gold, and the wheat-bearing areas. I dare say it makes us seem cheeky, but I tell you the last argument lies in the soil and what you can get out of it. What has this country got in comparison? A market of forty million people, whom she can’t feed and is less and less able to find work for. Do you call that a resource? I call it an impediment—a penalty. It’s something to exploit, for the immediate profit in it, something to bargain with; but even as a market it can’t preponderate always, and I can’t see why it should make such tremendous claims.”
“England isn’t superannuated yet, Murchison.”
“Not yet. Please God she never will be. But she isn’t as young as she was, and it does seem to me—”
“What seems to you?”
“Well, I’m no economist, and I don’t know how far to trust my impressions, and you needn’t tell me I’m a rank outsider, for I know that; but coming here as an outsider, it does seem to me that it’s from the outside that any sort of helpful change in the conditions of this country has got to come. England still has military initiative, though it’s hard to see how she’s going to keep that unless she does something to stop the degeneration of the class she draws her army from; but what other kind do we hear about? Company-promoting, bee-keeping, asparagus-growing, poultry-farming for ladies, the opening of a new Oriental Tea-Pot in Regent Street, with samisen-players between four and six, and Japanese attendants who take the change on their hands and knees. London’s one great stomach—how many eating places have we passed in the last ten minutes? The place seems all taken up with inventing new ways of making rich people more comfortable and better-amused—I’m fed up with the sight of shiny carriages with cockaded flunkeys on ‘em, wooden-smart, rolling about with an elderly woman and a parasol and a dog. England seems to have fallen back on itself, got content to spend the money there is in the country already; and about the only line of commercial activity the stranger sees is the onslaught on that accumulation. London isn’t the headquarters for big new developing enterprises any more. If you take out Westminster and Wallingham, London is a collection of traditions and great houses, and newspaper offices, and shops. That sort of thing can’t go on for ever. Already capital is drawing away to conditions it can find a profit in—steel works in Canada, woollen factories in Australia, jute mills in India. Do you know where the boots came from that shod the troops in South Africa? Cawnpore. The money will go, you know, and that’s a fact; the money will go, and the people will go, anyhow. It’s only a case of whether England sends them with blessing and profit and greater glory, or whether she lets them slip away in spite of her.”
“I dare say it will,” replied Hesketh; “I’ve got precious little, but what there is I’d take out fast enough, if I saw a decent chance of investing it. I sometimes think of trying my luck in the States. Two or three fellows in my year went over there and aren’t making half a bad thing of it.”
“Oh, come,” said Lorne, half-swinging round upon the other, with his hands in his pockets, “it isn’t exactly the time, is it, to talk about chucking the Empire?”
“Well, no, it isn’t,” Hesketh admitted. “One might do better to wait, I dare say. At all events, till we see what the country says to Wallingham.”
They walked on for a moment or two in silence; then Lorne broke out again.
“I suppose it’s unreasonable, but there’s nothing I hate so much as to hear Englishmen talk of settling in the United States.”
“It’s risky, I admit. And I’ve never heard anybody yet say it was comfortable.”
“In a few years, fifty maybe, it won’t matter. Things will have taken their direction by then; but now it’s a question of the lead. The Americans think they’ve got it, and unless we get imperial federation of course they have. It’s their plain intention to capture England commercially.”
“We’re a long way from that,” said Hesketh.
“Yes, but it’s in the line of fate. Industrial energy is deserting this country; and you have no large movement, no counter-advance, to make against the increasing forces that are driving this way from over there—nothing to oppose to assault. England is in a state of siege, and doesn’t seem to know it. She’s so great—Hesketh, it’s pathetic!—she offers an undefended shore to attack, and a stupid confidence, a kindly blindness, above all to Americans, whom she patronizes in the gate.”
“I believe we do patronize them,” said Hesketh. “It’s rotten bad form.”
“Oh, form! I may be mad, but one seems to see in politics over here a lack of definition and purpose, a tendency to cling to the abstract and to precedent—‘the mainstay of the mandarin’ one of the papers calls it; that’s a good word—that give one the feeling that this kingdom is beginning to be aware of some influence stronger than its own. It lies, of course, in the great West, where the corn and the cattle grow; and between Winnipeg and Chicago choose quickly, England!”
His companion laughed. “Oh, I’m with you,” he said, “but you take a pessimistic view of this country, Murchison.”
“It depends on what you call pessimism,” Lorne rejoined. “I see England down the future the heart of the Empire, the conscience of the world. and the Mecca of the race.”
The Cruickshank deputation returned across that North Atlantic which it was their desire to see so much more than ever the track of the flag, toward the middle of July. The shiny carriages were still rolling about in great numbers when they left; London’s air of luxury had thickened with the advancing season and hung heavily in the streets; people had begun to picnic in the Park on Sundays. They had been from the beginning a source of wonder and of depression to Lorne Murchison, the people in the Park, those, I mean, who walked and sat and stood there for the refreshment of their lives, for whom the place has a lyrical value as real as it is unconscious. He noted them ranged on formal benches, quiet, respectable, absorptive, or gathered heavily, shoulder to shoulder, docile under the tutelage of policemen, listening to anyone who would lift a voice to speak to them. London, beating on all borders, hemmed them in; England outside seemed hardly to contain for them a wider space. Lorne, with his soul full of free airs and forest depths, never failed to respond to a note in the Park that left him heavy-hearted, longing for an automatic distributing system for the Empire. When he saw them bring their spirit-lamps and kettles and sit down in little companies on four square yards of turf, under the blackened branches, in the roar of the traffic, he went back to Bloomsbury to pack his trunk, glad that it was not his lot to live with that enduring spectacle.
They were all glad, every one of them, to turn their faces to the West again. The unready conception of things, the political concentration upon parish affairs, the cumbrous social machinery, oppressed them with its dull anachronism in a marching world; the problems of sluggish overpopulation clouded their eager outlook. These conditions might have been their inheritance. Perhaps Lorne Murchison was the only one who thanked Heaven consciously that it was not so; but there was no man among them whose pulse did not mark a heart rejoiced as he paced the deck of the Allan liner the first morning out of Liverpool, because he had leave to refuse them. None dreamed of staying, of “settling,” though such a course was practicable to any of them except Lorne. They were all rich enough to take the advantages that money brings in England, the comfort, the importance, the state; they had only to add their wealth to the sumptuous side of the dramatic contrast. I doubt whether the idea even presented itself. It is the American who takes up his appreciative residence in England. He comes as a foreigner, observant, amused, having disclaimed responsibility for a hundred years. His detachment is as complete as it would be in Italy, with the added pleasure of easy comprehension. But homecomers from Greater Britain have never been cut off, still feel their uneasy share in all that is, and draw a long breath of relief as they turn again to their life in the lands where they found wider scope and different opportunities, and that new quality in the blood which made them different men.
The deputation had accomplished a good deal; less, Cruickshank said, than he had hoped, but more than he had expected. They had obtained the promise of concessions for Atlantic services, both mail and certain classes of freight, by being able to demonstrate a generous policy on their own side. Pacific communications the home Government was more chary of; there were matters to be fought out with Australia. The Pacific was further away, as Cruickshank said, and you naturally can’t get fellows who have never been there to see the country under the Selkirks and south of the Bay—any of them except Wallingham, who had never been there either, but whose imagination took views of the falcon. They were reinforced by news of a shipping combination in Montreal to lower freights to South Africa against the Americans; it wasn’t news to them, some of them were in it; but it was to the public, and it helped the sentiment of their aim, the feather on the arrow. They had secured something, both financially and morally; what best pleased them, perhaps, was the extent to which they got their scheme discussed. Here Lorne had been invaluable; Murchison had done more with the newspapers, they agreed, than any of them with Cabinet Ministers. The journalist everywhere is perhaps more accessible to ideas, more susceptible to enthusiasm, than his fellows, and Lorne was charged with the object of his deputation in its most communicable, most captivating form. At all events, he came to excellent understanding, whether of agreement or opposition, with the newspapermen he met—Cruickshank knew a good many of them and these occasions were more fruitful than the official ones—and there is no doubt that the guarded approval of certain leading columns had fewer ifs and buts and other qualifications in consequence, while the disapproval of others was marked by a kind of unwilling sympathy and a freely accorded respect. Lorne found London editors surprisingly unbiased, London newspapers surprisingly untrammelled. They seemed to him to suffer from no dictated views, no interests in the background or special local circumstances. They had open minds, most of them, and when a cloud appeared it was seldom more than a prejudice. It was only his impression, and perhaps it would not stand cynical inquiry; but he had a grateful conviction that the English Press occupied in the main a lofty and impartial ground of opinion, from which it desired only a view of the facts in their true proportion. On his return he confided it to Horace Williams, who scoffed and ran the national politics of the Express in the local interests of Fox County as hard as ever; but it had fallen in with Lorne’s beautiful beliefs about England, and he clung to it for years.
The Williamses had come over the second evening following Lorne’s arrival, after tea. Rawlins had gone to the station, just to see that the Express would make no mistake in announcing that Mr L. Murchison had “Returned to the Paternal Roof,” and the Express had announced it, with due congratulation. Family feeling demanded that for the first twenty-four hours he should be left to his immediate circle, but people had been dropping in all the next day at the office, and now came the Williamses “trapesing,” as Mrs Murchison said, across the grass, though she was too content to make it more than a private grievance, to where they all sat on the verandah.
“What I don’t understand,” Horace Williams said to Mr Murchison, “was why you didn’t give him a blow on the whistle. You and Milburn and a few others might have got up quite a toot. You don’t get the secretary to a deputation for tying up the Empire home every day.”
“You did that for him in the Express,” said John Murchison, smiling as he pressed down, with an accustomed thumb, the tobacco into his pipe.
“Oh, we said nothing at all! Wait till he’s returned for South Fox,” Williams responded jocularly.
“Why not the Imperial Council—of the future—at Westminster while you’re about it?” remarked Lorne, flipping a pebble back upon the gravel path.
“That will keep, my son. But one of these days, you mark my words, Mr L. Murchison will travel to Elgin Station with flags on his engine and he’ll be very much surprised to find the band there, and a large number of his fellow-citizens, all able-bodied shouting men, and every factory whistle in Elgin let off at once, to say nothing of kids with tin ones. And if the Murchison Stove and Furnace Works siren stands out of that occasion I’ll break in and pull it myself.”
“It won’t stand out,” Stella assured him. “I’ll attend to it. Don’t you worry.”
“I suppose you had a lovely time, Mr Murchison?” said Mrs Williams, gently tilting to and fro in a rocking-chair, with her pretty feet in their American shoes well in evidence. It is a fact, or perhaps a parable, that should be interesting to political economists, the adaptability of Canadian feet to American shoes; but fortunately it is not our present business. Though I must add that the “rocker” was also American; and the hammock in which Stella reposed came from New York; and upon John Murchison’s knee, with the local journal, lay a pink evening paper published in Buffalo.
“Better than I can tell you, Mrs Williams, in all sorts of ways. But it’s good to be back, too. Very good!” Lorne threw up his head and drew in the pleasant evening air of midsummer with infinite relish while his eye travelled contentedly past the chestnuts on the lawn, down the vista of the quiet tree-bordered street. It lay empty in the solace of the evening, a blue hill crossed it in the distance, and gave it an unfettered look, the wind stirred in the maples. A pair of schoolgirls strolled up and down bareheaded; now and then a buggy passed.
“There’s room here,” he said.
“Find it kind of crowded up over there?” asked Mr Williams. “Worse than New York?”
“Oh, yes. Crowded in a patient sort of way—it’s enough to break your heart—that you don’t see in New York! The poor of New York—well, they’ve got the idea of not being poor. In England they’re resigned, they’ve got callous. My goodness! the fellows out of work over there—you can SEE they’re used to it, see it in the way they slope along and the look in their eyes, poor dumb dogs. They don’t understand it, but they’ve just got to take it! Crowded? Rather!”
“We don’t say ‘rather’ in this country, mister,” observed Stella.
“Well, you can say it now, kiddie.”
They laughed at the little passage—the traveller’s importation of one or two Britishisms had been the subject of skirmish before—but silence fell among them for a moment afterward. They all had in the blood the remembrance of what Lorne had seen.
“Well, you’ve been doing big business,” said Horace Williams.
Lorne shook his head. “We haven’t done any harm,” he said, “but our scheme’s away out of sight now. At least it ought to be.”
“Lost in the bigger issue.” said Williams, and Lorne nodded.
The bigger issue had indeed in the meantime obscured the political horizon, and was widely spreading. A mere colonial project might well disappear in it. England was absorbed in a single contemplation. Wallingham, though he still supported the disabilities of a right honourable evangelist with a gospel of his own, was making astonishing conversions; the edifice of the national economic creed seemed coming over at the top. It was a question of the resistance of the base, and the world was watching.
“Cruickshank says if the main question had been sprung a month ago we wouldn’t have gone over. As it is, on several points we’ve got to wait. If they reject the preferential trade idea over there we shall have done a little good, for any government would be disposed to try to patch up something to take the place of imperial union in that case; and a few thousands more for shipping subsidies and cheap cablegrams would have a great look of strengthening the ties with the colonies. But if they commit themselves to a zollverein with us and the rest of the family you won’t hear much more about the need to foster communications. Communications will foster themselves.”
“Just so,” remarked John Murchison. “They’ll save their money.”
“I wouldn’t think so before—I couldn’t,” Lorne went on, “but I’m afraid it’s rather futile, the kind of thing we’ve been trying to do. It’s fiddling at a superstructure without a foundation. What we want is the common interest. Common interest, common taxation for defence, common representation, domestic management of domestic affairs, and you’ve got a working Empire.”
“Just as easy as slippin’ off a log,” remarked Horace Williams.
“Common interest, yes,” said his father; “common taxation, no, for defence or any other purpose. The colonies will never send money to be squandered by the London War Office. We’ll defend ourselves, as soon as we can manage it, and buy our own guns and our own cruisers. We’re better business people than they are, and we know it.”
“I guess that’s right, Mr Murchison,” said Horace Williams. “Our own army and navy—in the sweet bye-and-bye. And let ‘em understand they’ll be welcome to the use of it, but quite in a family way—no sort of compulsion.”
“Well,” said Lorne, “that’s compatible enough.”
“And your domestic affairs must include the tariff,” Mr Murchison went on. “There’s no such possibility as a tariff that will go round. And tariffs are kittle cattle to shoo behind.”
“Has anybody got a Scotch dictionary?” inquired Stella. “This conversation is making me tired.”
“Suppose you run away and play with your hoop,” suggested her brother. “I can’t see that as an insuperable difficulty, Father. Tariffs could be made adaptable, relative to the common interest as well as to the individual one. We could do it if we liked.”
“Your adaptability might easily lead to other things. What’s to prevent retaliation among ourselves? There’s a slump in textiles, and the home Government is forced to let in foreign wool cheaper. Up goes the Australian tax on the output of every mill in Lancashire. The last state of the Empire might be worse than the first.”
“It wouldn’t be serious. If I pinched Stella’s leg as I’m going to in a minute, she will no doubt kick me; and her instincts are such that she will probably kick me with the leg I pinched, but that won’t prevent our going to the football match together tomorrow and presenting a united front to the world.”
They all laughed, and Stella pulled down her lengthening petticoats with an air of great offence, but John Murchison shook his head.
“If they manage it, they will be clever,” he said.
“Talking of Lancashire,” said Williams, “there are some funny fellows over there writing in the Press against a tax on foreign cotton because it’s going to ruin Lancashire. And at this very minute thousands of looms are shut down in Lancashire because of the high price of cotton produced by an American combine—and worse coming, sevenpence a pound I hear they’re going to have it, against the fourpence ha’penny they’ve got it up to already. That’s the sort of thing they’re afraid to discourage by a duty.”
“Would a duty discourage it?” asked John Murchison.
“Why not—if they let British-grown cotton in free? They won’t discourage the combine much—that form of enterprise has got to be tackled where it grows; but the Yankee isn’t the only person in the world that can get to understand it. What’s to prevent preferential conditions creating British combines, to compete with the American article, and what’s to prevent Lancashire getting cheaper cotton in consequence? Two combines are better than one monopoly any day.”
“May be so. It would want looking into. We won’t see a duty on cotton though, or wool either for that matter. The manufacturers would be pleased enough to get it on the stuff they make, but there would be a fine outcry against taxing the stuff they use.”
“Did you see much of the aristocracy, Mr Murchison?” asked Mrs Williams.
“No,” replied Lorne, “but I saw Wallingham.”
“You saw the whole House of Lords,” interposed Stella, “and you were introduced to three.”
“Well, yes, that’s so. Fine-looking set of old chaps they are, too. We’re a little too funny over here about the Lords—we haven’t had to make any.”
“What were they doing the day you were there, Lorne?” asked Williams.
“Motorcar legislation,” replied Lorne. “Considerably excited about it, too. One of them had had three dogs killed on his estate. I saw his letter about it in the Times.”
“I don’t see anything to laugh at in that,” declared Stella. “Dogs are dogs.”
“They are, sister, especially in England.”
“Laundresses aren’t washerwomen there,” observed Mrs Murchison. “I’d like you to see the colour of the things he’s brought home with him, Mrs Williams. Clean or dirty, to the laundry they go—weeks it will take to get them right again—ingrained London smut and nothing else.”
“In this preference business they’ve got to lead the way,” Williams reverted. “We’re not so grown up but what grandma’s got to march in front. Now, from your exhaustive observation of Great Britain, extending over a period of six weeks, is she going to?”
“My exhaustive observation,” said Lorne, smiling, “enables me to tell you one thing with absolute accuracy; and that is that nobody knows. They adore Wallingham over there—he’s pretty nearly a god—and they’d like to do as he tells them, and they’re dead sick of theoretic politics; but they’re afraid—oh, they’re afraid!”
“They’ll do well to ca’ canny,” said John Murchison.
“There’s two things in the way, at a glance,” Lorne went on. “The conservatism of the people—it isn’t a name, it’s a fact—the hostility and suspicion; natural enough: they know they’re stupid, and they half suspect they’re fair game. I suppose the Americans have taught them that. Slow—oh, slow! More interested in the back-garden fence than anything else. Pick up a paper, at the moment when things are being done, mind, all over the world, done against them—when their shipping is being captured, and their industries destroyed, and their goods undersold beneath their very noses—and the thing they want to know is—Why Are the Swallows Late? I read it myself, in a ha’penny morning paper, too—that they think rather dangerously go-ahead—a whole column, headed, to inquire what’s the matter with the swallows. The Times the same week had a useful leader on Alterations in the Church Service, and a special contribution on Prayers for the Dead. Lord, they need ‘em! Those are the things they THINK about! The session’s nearly over, and there’s two Church Discipline Bills, and five Church Bills—bishoprics and benefices, and Lord knows what—still to get through. Lot of anxiety about ‘em, apparently! As to a business view of politics, I expect the climate’s against it. They’ll see over a thing—they’re fond of doing that—or under it, or round one side of it, but they don’t seem to have any way of seeing THROUGH it. What they just love is a good round catchword; they’ve only got to hear themselves say it often enough, and they’ll take it for gospel. They’re convinced out of their own mouths. There was the driver of a bus I used to ride on pretty often, and if he felt like talking, he’d always begin, ‘As I was a-saying of yesterday—’ Well, that’s the general idea—to repeat what they were a-sayin’ of yesterday; and it doesn’t matter two cents that the rest of the world has changed the subject. They’ve been a-sayin’ a long time that they object to import duties of any sort or kind, and you won’t get them to SEE the business in changing. If they do this it won’t be because they want to, it will be because Wallingham wants them to.”
“I guess that’s so,” said Williams. “And if Wallingham gets them to he ought to have a statue in every capital in the Empire. He will, too. Good cigar this, Lorne! Where’d you get it?”
“They are Indian cheroots—‘Planters,’ they call ‘em—made in Madras. I got some through a man named Hesketh, who has friends out there, at a price you wouldn’t believe for as decent a smoke. You can’t buy ‘em in London; but you will all right, and here, too, as soon as we’ve got the sense to favour British-grown tobacco.”
“Lorne appreciates his family better than he did before,” remarked his youngest sister, “because we’re British grown.”
“You were saying you noticed two things specially in the way?” said his father.
“Oh, the other’s of course the awful poverty—the twelve millions that haven’t got enough to do with. I expect it’s an outside figure and it covers all sorts of qualifying circumstances; but it’s the one the Free Fooders quote, and it’s the one Wallingham will have to handle. They’ve muddled along until they’ve GOT twelve million people in that condition, and now they have to carry on with the handicap. We ask them to put a tax on foreign food to develop our wheat areas and cattle ranges. We say, ‘Give us a chance and we’ll feed you and take your surplus population.’ What is to be done with the twelve million while we are growing the wheat? The colonies offer to create prosperity for everybody concerned at a certain outlay—we’ve got the raw materials—and they can’t afford the investment because of the twelve millions, and what may happen meanwhile. They can’t face the meanwhile—that’s what it comes to.”
“Fine old crop of catchwords in that situation,” Mr Williams remarked; and his eye had the spark of the practical politician. “Can’t you hear ‘em at it, eh?”
“It scares them out of everything but hand-to-mouth politics. Any other remedy is too heroic. They go on pointing out and contemplating and grieving, with their percentages of misery and degeneration; and they go on poulticing the cancer with benevolence—there are people over there who want the State to feed the schoolchildren! Oh, they’re kind, good, big-hearted people; and they’ve got the idea that if they can only give enough away everything will come right. I was talking with a man one day, and I asked him whether the existence of any class justified governing a great country on the principle of an almshouse. He asked me who the almsgivers ought to be, in any country. Of course it was tampering with my figure—in an almshouse there aren’t any; but that’s the way it presents itself to the best of them. Another fellow was frantic at the idea of a tax on foreign food—he nearly cried—but would be very glad to see the Government do more to assist emigration to the colonies. I tried to show him it would be better to make it profitable to emigrate first, but I couldn’t make him see it.
“Oh, and there’s the old thing against them, of course—the handling of imperial and local affairs by one body. Anybody’s good enough to attend to the Baghdad Railway, and nobody’s too good to attend to the town pump. Is it any wonder the Germans beat them in their own shops and Russia walks into Thibet? The eternal marvel is that they stand where they do.”
“At the top,” said Mr Williams.
“Oh—at the top! Think of what you mean when you say ‘England.’”
“I see that the demand for a tariff on manufactured goods is growing,” Williams remarked, “even the anti-food-tax organs are beginning to shout for that.”
“If they had put it on twenty years ago,” said Lorne, “there would be no twelve million people making a problem for want of work, and it would be a good deal easier to do imperial business today.”
“You’ll find,” said John Murchison, removing his pipe, “that protection’ll have to come first over there. They’ll put up a fence and save their trade—in their own good time, not next week or next year—and when they’ve done that they’ll talk to us about our big ideas—not before. And if Wallingham hadn’t frightened them with the imperial job, he never would have got them to take up the other. It’s just his way of getting both done.”
“I hope you’re right, Father,” said Lorne, with a covert glance at his watch. “Horace—Mrs Williams—I’ll have to get you to excuse me. I have an engagement at eight.”
He left them with a happy spring in his step, left them looking after him, talking of him, with pride and congratulation. Only Stella, with a severe lip and a disapproving eye, noted the direction he took as he left the house.