Hence the ire of the agriculturist, driven now to become an agrarian. The Ontario farmer made no distinction between the Unionist Government that had conscripted the farmer, and the Ontario Conservative Government which supported Ottawa. The farmer made up his mind wherever possible to defeat both the old line candidates.
Premier Drury was the chief result. He never would have been offered the post but for the cleavage caused by the war. The U.F.O. were not unanimous, and Drury was not anxious. He had his eye on Ottawa. But there was nobody else who could unite the group with labour. Drury had himself been the first president of the U.F.O. and secretary of the Canadian Council of Agriculture; he was a thinker, something of a scholar, a futurist, and a good deal of a radical; and he could speak well.
He picked a Cabinet mainly of farmers. He occupied more time drafting his Cabinet than most farmers take to harvest a crop. He was in a hurry, but he wanted nobody to suspect it. He said little; wisely. There was no occasion. He had no mandate from the people. He wanted sure-enough colleagues. The men he chose were all novices. The old line critics watched him with affected contempt. They said Agriculture and Labour never could mix. Drury went along. No Cabinet had ever been so prayerfully hand-picked. Labour must not get the idea that it was merely being sopped for the support of twelve men in a House majority of one. There must be concession; common aims understood, even ahead of experience, when there was as yet no common policy.
Mr. Drury had been only a few hours sworn Premier of Ontario when he was summarily turned out—not, however, from Office. In company with a farmer author friend who had been given the freedom of a certain small but desirable Club and who wanted to show Mr. Drury one place where he could have a quiet time of an evening, he went to have dinner. As neither of the gentlemen was known to the housekeeping department a member of the Club—a well-known newspaperman—was asked to inquire their identity. The result was that the Premier of Ontario and his friend left the Club, without dinner.
The next day the newspaperman looked over the shoulder of his editor-chief in office and said,
"Who is the important-looking man in the photograph?"
The answer came, "Hon. E. C. Drury, Premier of Ontario."
"Great Scott!" he said huskily, "that's the man I turned out of theClub last night."
Drury had the sense of humour to regard the matter as a joke on both the newspaperman and himself.
The opening of the new Legislature was a spectacle. Dignitaries and judges, professors and generals stood about the farmers—led by the farmer-in-chief, morning-coated, carefully groomed, plainly nervous but sustained by the dignity of it all. His voice was firm; his manner that of a very circumspect bridegroom. The old smug strut and case-hardened pomp of legislature inaugurals was lacking. An undercurrent of deep sincerity stayed many a tremorous hand. Drury was the least nervous of all. I imagine that in the morning he had sung to himself some good old fortifying hymn, like "Rock of Ages."
Since that day the Premier has learned that practical politics is a game that taxes all a man's technique in Christianity. Autocratic Hydro and Mackenzie the loosening octopus; New Ontario preaching up the old plaint of secession; better roads and prodigal Mr. Biggs; what to do with Education that Cody had not started to do; how to stave off commissions on reform of the school system; the constant queues of moral reformers; the new menace of the movies and the censorship farce; the timber stealers; disconcerting Dewart and redundant Ferguson; returned soldiers and khaki members; the Reds and the plain clothes men; blustering Morrison, and the tyrannical U.F.O.——
Until the Premier, plain, homespun gentleman that he is, longed for Friday evening and the Crown Hill farm and the quiet little church in the village, because one week at his desk took more out of him than a month in overalls. And then to relieve his surcharged soul he made that speech at Milverton in which he boldly proclaimed that he was going to head, not a mere group called the U.F.O., but a People's Party. For this "broadening out" speech he got clods thrown at him by Morrison, and Burnaby put rails on the road to upset the Premier's buggy, and theFarmers' Suntried to change the wheels on his rig so that he would not be able to get home. Worse than any theOnlooker, that virile organ of no advertising and of the Meighen Government, said:
"The U.F.O. chose this man and dragged him out of his rural obscurity. In common gratitude he should have stuck to their colours. He should have given fair warning of a change of heart, and indeed we think he ought to have resigned. When a man joins a political party he agrees to subordinate his ambitions and activities to the common good of that party, and failing to do so honour demands that he should leave it."
In spite of the fact that the Premier of Ontario twice made an appointment by request from the writer of this for the purpose of getting a statement for the press as to what he meant to do about this whole business of "broadening out," twice failed to keep the appointment and later came out with the Milverton pronunciamento, we have no hesitation in pointing out that:
Mr. Drury was not in rural obscurity. The U.F.O. had no colours which Mr. Drury had not helped to paint, for he was the first President the U.F.O. ever had. He had no change of heart, because when he made an unstable coalition of the U.F.O. and the Labour party he entered into a pact and covenant which the U.F.O. had never considered; he had already "broadened out" to drive Labour and Agriculture as a team and had pretty well succeeded in doing it. Mr. Drury did not join a political party. The U.F.O. was not a real party because it went into the election of 1919 without a leader, and in order to get its platform translated into party it had to have Mr. Drury or somebody like him. And if Mr. Drury should resign from the head of the two groups which he alone has made into the semblance of a party, he would be recommended by Mr. Crerar to let his guardian take him to a lunatic asylum.
Drury has done much better than his critics expected he would do. He has been bold enough to keep Adam Beck from being the unelected Premier of Ontario, which is more than Sir William Hearst ever could do. He has made Government cost more than it ever did, though it is only reasonable bookkeeping to believe that part of the cost was incurred by a Government over which he had no control. He has begun to build public highways which being originally a farmer's job should have been done well, but up to the present has been on a smaller scale as bad a case of wasting the public money as the railways of Canada ever perpetrated. The cost of administration being a matter of either experience or graft, it is probable that the Coalition will cut down the cost when they get more experience. The Chippewa Canal is one glaring instance of high labour cost which a Farmer Premier with Labour colleagues did not presume to regulate. If anybody knows what a day's work is it should be the farmer; but the farmer in this case was not absolutely free to express his opinions, because he depends upon Labour for his voting majority in the House.
In the matter of referendum Mr. Drury has been an advocate instead of a judge. He and his—notably the church-ridden Mr. Raney, who does not even smoke—are a dry lot. They wanted Ontario to be bone dry and therefore preferred to have the people vote either foolishly for the iniquitous O.T.A. or fanatically for absolute prohibition. Mr. Drury should have taken the spark plug out of his Methodist car long enough to reflect that what keeps a man contented is going to keep him from stirring up trouble. If the Government of enlightened and moral Ontario had brought in a measure to create a referendum on the alternative of prohibitionvs.effective government control of reasonable liquors, it might have less cause to be panicky over Bolshevism.
The legislation to exempt from taxation houses costing less than a certain amount looks like a pretty straight play for the Labour vote, and the propagation of a semi-Bolshevistic principle that unless checked somewhere will exempt the many at the expense of the few.
But before Mr. Drury has the chance to be truly elected by the people of Ontario to carry on his People's Party, he hopes perhaps that he may have a chance to be called to Ottawa. It is freely rumoured that Mr. Crerar has no intention of taking the Premiership which the liberated people of Canada are going to bestow upon him by virtue of one more group-coalition. In which case he may invite Mr. Drury, who has given a sparring exhibition of being a Premier, to succeed him. Then we shall have the undemocratic farce of an appointive Premier all over again—for the third time in three years. And then—well, we shudder to think what is going to become of Mr. Drury's hitherto unimpeachable Christianity and of the economic welfare of a country which has as much right to modern factories as the bush farmer ever had to saw-mills.
Sir George Foster is a genius. The world forgives much to geniuses, because it lives by them. Canada has tolerated a great deal in Foster for the very good reason that no man except Laurier has for so long a period without interruption seemed so picturesquely necessary to our public affairs.
In his own temperamental way Sir George somewhat compensates Canada for never having produced a Milton or a Bach. One of his best speeches might be made into blank verse or set to a fugue. He illuminates life. Decade by decade he comes prancing down the vistas of our politics with a vitality that is perfectly amazing. And when some obituarist writes his epitaph, "Foster Mortuus Est," he promptly rubs it out and writes, "Resurgam!"
The first allusion I ever heard made to Sir George Foster was in 1889, on a Sunday School excursion when a Grit lawyer superintendent spoke with admiring deprecation of the then famous divorce case; adding, as might be expected of a righteous Grit, that it was a pity so eminent an advocate of prohibition should have so compromised, perhaps ruined, his political career.
Well, the compromise has lasted a long time and the ruin seems to be long overdue. Public sentiment over both temperance and divorce has somewhat shifted. In 1889, when virtue shuddered over marrying divorced women, drunkards were being made by hundreds in any town under the very nose of the church. In 1921 when Parliament moves to popularize divorce, public sentiment not only abolishes the bar, but votes bone dry on the eve of an artificial millennium.
A man who for some years has wanted the Ministry of Trade made the remark in a magazine article that if he had Sir George Foster in his employ as a salesman he would have him discharged for incompetence. That man forgets that a genius is not born to sell goods. There were times in the war when less genius and more business in Trade and Commerce would have been better for Canada. Foster was almost seventy when the war began; a pretty old man to act as the chief business manager for a nation at war. His department was the economic backbone of the Administration. The nearer Canada got to total conscription of resources, the more Foster's work should have towered into the blue. Trade and troops were the life of the nation. Hughes, White, Borden, Rowell, Meighen, were all shoved into greater eminence by the work they did in the war; Foster was no bigger or more potent a figure in war work or any other kind of work when peace was signed than he was in 1914.
He never was a great executive even at his portfolio under Macdonald in the early '80's. He has always been a prophet. Public speech is his besetting passion. He could rise anywhere and translate logic and economics into ethical emotion. No man in Canada felt the war more intensely. But Trade was not a matter of emotion; or of oratorical periods; or the right hand descending upon the left. It was a matter of urgent and colossal business.
In 1916, talking to the war budget, he declaimed against patronage. He had done the same thing in 1910 just as ably when he was the pot calling the kettle black.
"I hope," he said, "that in the white light of the present struggle the two parties will agree to do away with the evil."
But the "white light" was more intent on doing away with the parties themselves.
In the same speech:
"When the trenches call for munitions and supplies, when the blood of the country is oozing from its veins in the struggle to preserve its ideals and its liberties, when those who are at home are contributing with generous self-sacrifice and without murmur or repining, I say that to me as a member of the Government, to you as supporters of the Government, and to you, gentlemen opposite, as a part of the great body which represents the people of this Dominion, the call comes to cut off every unnecessary expenditure, to refuse every improper demand. It is our business to administer the funds of the people with perfect economy, and to devote ourselves to the one sole purpose of prosecuting this war to a successful and final conclusion."
Again, he spoke like a prophet when he riddled the blind optimism of the prosperity pack. At that time Canada had a favouring balance of $200,000,000 just two years after a heavy ledger against us.
"The Optimist speaks of the unexampled prosperity that is to follow the war. I would like to think so, but I can't. The prediction of a Montreal newspaper that Canada will have from twelve to fifteen million inhabitants within three years after the war is a mischievous exaggeration. The first trying period of readjustment will come immediately after the actual fighting ceases and an armistice is declared."
Ezekiel was profoundly right up till the last prophecy. The Minister of Trade, with all his great ability to analyze trade, had not mastered economics. Neither had the President of a great Canadian bank when he said before the armistice, that merchants with empty shelves and able to buy cheap goods would be in luck. It was a bad time for prophets.
However, for a man who aimed at so many nails, Sir George had a good average of hitting. But while he was talking so much, and in Europe so long, the biggest-business administration of which he was the chief went along on its own more or less mechanical momentum. By 1917 Canada had a total export trade of more than half a billion; with a possible yearly munition order of 500 millions—no thanks to the Minister of Trade. No nation in the world exported so much from so few people. No Ministry of Trade had such a record. Sir George knew exactly what it all meant. He was used to analytical surveys. But one fails to remember that at any period he issued from his office, the trade centre of the Dominion, any statements that shewed him to be more than a puzzled commentator on the riddle of trade, usually between speeches and journeys. Sir George never did have executive patience for the mastery of detail. In this case he did not even convince the people that he had sized up the great general outlines, so fascinating because so profoundly unusual.
In June, 1916, Sir George issued in his weekly Trade Bulletin a resounding Call To Action for a business conference at Ottawa of all parties interested for the purpose of pulling the country's industries and organizations into one bigensemblefor getting back to peace. That "Call" was published in one paper illustrated by a picture of Sir George—in the climax of a speech. A few months later a political writer was in Ottawa, and when he came back he wrote an article about the Foster Conference. The following extract shows what he thought of it:
In Ottawa, last week, I met a big bear of a Canadian westerner. He had just arrived from Toronto. He was all smiles, all energy and enthusiasm, and he was looking for the Minister of Trade and Commerce, Sir George E. Foster.
"Tell you what I want him for," he said. "I want to go up and shake hands with a real live man. That's what I want. I read his message 'bout getting together, and it sure set me thinking. I'm strong for this Conference scheme. I'm going to back it for all I'm worth and do my darndest to help a real, live statesman to pull off a big deal. Damn if I care whether he is a Tory. My middle name is—Boost! I want to help."
We walked up to the Department of Trade and Commerce together.
"Just what line of industry are you interested in?" I asked.
"Boilers—steam boilers. Vancouver. Little Van-cou-ver. That's my town."
"And if I may ask, what is your idea about this Business Man'sConference? What do you think ought to be done?"
"Eh? Why, I don't know yet. That's what I'm coming to see Foster about."
An hour later I met the boiler-maker coming away from the Department ofTrade and Commerce.
"Well," I said, "everything clear?"
"Clear?" he roared. "Clear? Why, man alive! that fellow Foster's away in the West with some Dominion Royal Commission, making speeches or something, and back there"—nodding toward the Department of Trade and Commerce—"nobody home!"
"Couldn't they explain it?"
"Sure. They explain that Sir George is away and nothing definite can be done. I asked 'em when the conference would be called and they said that was indefinite. Then I said where? And they thought somewhere in Ottawa. Why, all that fellow Foster made was a speech. That's all. A speech! Now what the h—— good will a speech do to help me and help the rest of us manufacturers to keep from getting swamped after this war?"
Trade in Canada during the war was of vastly more practical significance than the old fiscal idea of Empire of which Sir George had been such a protagonist when he stumped England for Chamberlain in 1903. But he never seemed able to grasp it as clearly even in a speech. I don't know which seems to me now the greater speech; that on the Chamberlain mirage to the Toronto Empire Club when he elevated fiscal statistics into a pageant of economic emotion; or his speech on the war, I think in 1916, when he lifted his thin spectral figure into a sublime paroxysm of ethical appeal, corralled all opposing arguments into a corner and flogged the life out of them in a great message to awakened humanity. The comparison scarcely matters except to show that in fifteen years of great Foster speeches alas for the prophets!—it was not the fiscal Empire of Chamberlain that had leaped to the war.
Still more startling to Sir George, the economics of war riddled to bits the old economics of Empire. In 1917 he was compelled to forget that a tariff was implied in the Ten Commandments and to consent for all necessary purposes to remove trade restrictions across the border. That was after the United States had declared war. The high priest of protection himself invented a phrase "economic unit" to express North America. He wanted markets to find their own levels by their own routes. He no longer had any fear of Canada being Americanized. Canada's nationhood was already defined in the trenches more than ever it had been in tariffs. In Sir George's phrase the food producers of North America were to become one vast international group. When Foster was "Yea" to Macdonald in 1887 and 1891, before he became "Amen" to Chamberlain in 1903, this economic unity was called continentalism, which to Foster was the mother of annexation, and Free Trade Liberals were traitors to the Empire.
Economic unity, however, meant far more than Sir George intended it to mean. He admitted the principle of free-trade only in production. In spite of tariffs North America became, not only a vast group of producers, but a huge family of consumers. Every Victory Loan raised money that was spent in once more paying wages and buying materials for war production in Canada. Every time that money went round the circle, prices for many of the staple commodities went higher. The Department of Trade registered a tremendous increase in the cash value of exports even when the bulk value changed very little. The more loans "put over the top," the more money there seemed to be. The more hazardous shipping became through submarines, the greater the scarcity, and the demand—and the price paid. Sir George witnessed this phenomenon: the fewer producers left by conscription on the land, in the mines, in the factories, the more Canada was able to export—in cash values.
This must have given a good Tory economist loss of sleep. No man could have analyzed the paradox more ably than Sir George. But so far as we can recollect, he published no illuminating bulletins from his Department to tell us about it. How we should have enjoyed his master mind elucidating the phenomenon of a continent being gradually denuded of goods and flushed with money; of prices inexorably mounting; of money hungering for goods; of fabulous wages for munition-making and anything else that could be scaled up to meet the competition unloading themselves into Victory Bonds at a sure profit, and the surplus into commodities most of which were not made in Canada and must therefore come from the United States. What a prophetic commentary it would have made on the "buyers' market" which followed the armistice. What wonderful reading it would have made if Sir George had issued replies to those commercial newspaper editors over the border who rushed jubilating into print to say with fabulous statistics that Canada was now the heaviest customer that nation had. How we should have liked to hear officially from the Minister of Trade how Broadway was infecting the country, luxuries reeling in argosies over the dry land to Canada, and Canada buying herself bankrupt on the exchanges; and that though there were powerful economic reasons for it all, we had better enlist in an army of economy instead of being conscripted later by the super-tariff on luxuries and the luxury tax.
But the Minister of Trade confined himself to growling that we should all wear patches and old clothes. Which was one good reason why many people did not. It was easy for Sir George to wear patched trousers if he felt like so doing. He would have been merely picturesque, like those ragged prophets of old. Most of us still had to invest in some sort of decoration. Anyhow a large number of people had the money to spend; and the more they spent the more they approved of self-denial in other people.
This problem of American penetration is big enough at any time here. The Department of Trade is the place where it is most clearly understood. We are constantly warned about the danger, not only to our Canadian dollar, but to our national independence if we persist in importing motor cars, fashionable footwear, party gowns and lingerie and hats, art furniture, home decorations, phonographs, moving pictures, and magazines. But we go on doing it; because Canada, whether in war or peace, fails to produce a great many things that people like to have and to wear and to go about in; and for those that she does we are charged the foreign price plus the duty and more; so that in many and many a case it has been found more economical to buy the article from catalogue, paying the duty and the express charges.
Has Sir George ever enlightened us about this? Has he ever tried to inform the Canadian manufacturer that if he expects to hold our allegiance even under a more or less protective tariff, he must refrain from charging the consumer all the traffic and more than the consumer will stand? We fail to remember; even when we recollect that on thus and such an occasion somewhere in the Empire he made some glorious patriotic speech. On a subject which causes many Canadians to explode, often with ill-considered accusation of "the Yankees," our greatest maker of pure and applied speeches seldom has a word to say. But he knows. Sir George Foster knows our economic subjugation by the 12 to 1 method, even under a tariff. Alas! he hails from the Maritimes, a land of great people, of constructive Canadians who have too often been in absolute economic need of more of that sort of subjugation.
Then there was the never-dead dragon of high prices for everything, which our St. George made no real attempt to spear. That is a long story. It was his department which furnished the Food Controller, the duties which the Trade Department could not discharge. Well remembered are the evangelical injunctions of the Controller to consume perishable and export other products; to live on garden truck grown in back yards and corner lots so that grain and butter and bacon and eggs and oatmeal might run the submarine blockade on the high seas. There was no fault to find with this, so long as it was economy. But heaven knew what armies of housewives, already desperate from lack of help, were dragooned into making their kitchens amateur canning factories where they wasted good fruit along with tragically expensive sugar in jars that approximated the cost of cut glass. And after all the slavery and the self denial, butter and eggs that were not shipped abroad because there was no room in munition ships to carry them, vanished mysteriously in the lower price season into some limbo known as cold-storage, only to emerge when it suited the storage barons at prices as high as were paid in Europe. No doubt there is an economic philosophy in cold-storage just as there is in hydro-power. But we have always supposed its virtue was in taking care of a perishable surplus, so that when there is a scarcity the surplus can be released at a reasonable profit.
Did the able Minister of Trade ever stoop to enlighten us with the economics of this? If so, the recollection has faded.
There is at any time, whether in peace or war, a great function for the Department of Trade to perform in the matter of what is the reasonable cost of any commodity in general demand. But no Trade Department in this country has ever done it. There is always plenty of time for the consideration of new markets, the plotting of new trade routes and the planning of mercantile marine for export; all very well, and if we are to pay our bills by exports, very necessary. But the common consumer has many a time, long before the war and often since, found himself in the jaws of a nutcracker in the shape of some combine or trust or confederacy of middlemen; and if there was any sphere of government to deal with these things it was the great Department of Trade.
This has nothing to do with party politics. Any party up to date has been capable of neglecting the people in these matters. But it is quite as important as the abolition of patronage.
We have ceased to expect any such function from a Minister so old, so eloquent, so Imperially-inspired as Sir George Foster. There is always something else to do. The party must be led in the House. Sir George was the House leader. Magnificent! No man ever rose at a desk in Parliament who could more superbly play upon the bigotries and the high patriotic emotions of even a remnant party. The man is a genius. There must be the valley of dry bones for Ezekiel. And the bones must come together and walk. Sir Robert Borden on such occasions was a mere interested gargoyle. Patriotism demanded that the party's desks be thumped. Sir George saw that they were thumped without stint.
Twice during the Opposition period Sir George was dead and buried by the Grits; once over the Union Trust land investigation; again in a libel suit which he lost to theGlobewhen Rowell was against him. None of these things defeated the able author of Resurgam! who was made Minister of Trade, went for a six-months' journey in the Orient trying to convert the yellow races from rice to Canadian flour, and afterwards got his title. So when the people, in 1917, asked Ezekiel for a prophecy, the Minister of Trade stoically advised them to eat less, save more, waste nothing, wear what their grandmothers wore if possible, and hope for the best. In the matter of fixing prices Sir George had as much wisdom as most, though he made a very awkward attempt to adjust the price of wheat and only then at the instigation of the British Government.
The world by this time was full of upsetting anomalies to Sir George. Even government was perverted. He had no desire for Unionism; to sit at Council with even win-the-war Liberals—once plain Grits. It needed political philosophy to make colleagues of such men as Calder, the Grit enemy of Toryism in the West, Crerar, the avowed apostle of free-trade, Sifton, the Alberta mystery man, and Rowell, who had won the libel suit against him for the Globe. It was not to be expected that so complete and historic a Tory as Sir George could at first easily regard such men as anything but interlopers, even though he admitted their strength in the Coalition. One can imagine Meighen making up to his old trade enemy Carvell, but not Foster making overtures to Rowell.
But the vital element was gone out of the Administration, and Sir George had to admit it. Cold and repellent as he has always seemed in politics, without a crony or even a man who cared to make him a confederate, he has never been a man of implacable resentment. He was yet to regard Rowell as a real man, worthy his confidence.
A newspaperman sent to Osgoode Hall to report the Globe libel suit for an Ottawa Liberal paper relates how the night of the conclusion of the trial he met Mr. Foster at the Toronto Station. The reporter had already wired the decision of the Court adverse to Mr. Foster, who had not even taken the trouble to inquire what it was. The two chatted amiably on the train and met the next morning in Ottawa. On his way home Mr. Foster saw the Liberal bulletin at the newspaper office. A few days later he met the scribe.
"Tom," he said, genially, shaking hands, "why didn't you tell me about that decision?"
"Well, sir, I really thought you knew, and I didn't care to hurt your feelings."
The member for North York laughed.
"Feelings!" he repeated. "You are the first Grit that ever said I had any."
A prominent Liberal described to the writer the exit of Mr. Foster from the House after the Royal Commission investigation into the Union Trust.
"Mr. and Mrs. Foster," he said eloquently, "went together down the terrace in a fog of rain, into the shadow of the night, under one umbrella. And I said to myself as they went, dejected and pitiful, 'Well, that's the final exit of Foster from political life.'"
The author of Resurgam knew better. He could always somehow come back on the stepping stones of a dead self. Something made him feel that without him the Conservative party would have been like the Liberals without Laurier, or in an earlier day his own party minus the old chief Macdonald. He was almost right.
One other episode illustrates how spontaneously the emotional aspect of things sometimes sways this cold politician who never could lead a party. When the Premier by request called a caucus of his Union supporters for the purpose of discovering what could be done with the Coalition to make it a party, it was not the Premier who held the floor, but Sir George, who made a long passionate speech upon the vicissitudes of men who—like the Premier and himself—had carried the burden and the heat of the political day. When Foster had finished, there were tears on case-hardened faces and the caucus adjourned. Asked later for a copy of his great speech, Sir George said he had not even prepared any notes; when he went to the caucus he had not intended making any such speech; he did not now remember what he had said.
Can we call such a man anything but a genius? As Minister of Trade he may be a poor salesman. He is not less a poor salesman of his party, his country, or his big original belief in the Empire, whatever form of government it might become, or of his birthright to spend his tremendous talent in public service rather than in private gain. And he has been for almost a generation the most interesting personality in the ranks of the Conservative party.
There is but one other politician in America with the political vitality of Sir George Foster. "Uncle Joe" Cannon is the man. In Washington Cannon is regarded as a miracle because he was once the autocrat of Congress and is still a member of the House and a very old man. Sir George Foster is almost as old a man and has been in public service much longer. He has held portfolios under all the Conservative Premiers that Canada ever had—Macdonald, Thompson, Abbott, Bowell, Borden, Meighen. There have been times in the shuffles of these men when for ability he, rather than Abbott or Bowell or Borden, should have been Premier. But there was always a fatal obstacle in the personality of the man whose leadership always depended upon making a great speech. When he was first Minister under Macdonald, a lad named Arthur Meighen was getting ready to attend a High School. Could that Minister and that lad have been introduced, would Ezekiel have prophesied that in 1920 he would be holding office under the lad, Premier of Canada?
Anomalies like these are the rule in a life of a man so unusual as Sir George, who is now a Senator. Even in the Senate he is not dead; for in Ezekiel, 37th chapter, it is written, "Son of man, can these bones live? And I answered, O Lord God, thou knowest."
Sir Thomas White was the world's only continuous Finance Minister for the whole period of the war—and after; when nobody else cared to have his job, and Sir Thomas did. He seduced billions of patriotic dollars out of the pockets of this country and smiled as he did it. No man in Canada was so exquisitely fitted to the task of making an average dollar burn a hole in a man's pocket in order to do its bit. It gave him "the pleasure that's almost pain" to feel that no man except Henri Bourassa or an Eskimo could escape the snare of a Victory Loan advertisement prepared by Sir Thomas and his committees of ad-men and brokers. Never before on this continent had a nation been so advertised into patriotism. In England some expert had done it for Kitchener's Army. But it was easier to recruit England, with 30 millions of people within the area of our maritime provinces, than to mobilize billions from a vast emptiness like Canada.
It must be admitted that the divinity which keeps governments from wrecking nations had somehow picked the right man for this stupendous task. Sir Thomas had a quality of mind and a political experience which made it possible for him to pull the last dollar for victory. In the war annals of Canada he will have a halo of billions, while Sam Hughes has one of bayonets. He mobilized our financial resources by a system that stopped only short of conscription.
I seldom see Sir Thomas standing at a street corner when I do not feel like urging him to run along and attend to his office and not to be losing time. He seems to belong to that cold group of men whose time is naturally money.
In 1912 I asked Mr. White in Ottawa for an interview. He appointed an hour when I might see him. As soon as I entered the office he began to talk. The ease and fluency of his conversation amazed me. No other Minister of that Cabinet could have been so suave and entertaining.
"Er—with regard to the question of railway fin——?"
He saw the question coming in a sort of parabolic curve and he dodged it. By a neat evasion he got the topic switched to sociology, from that to philosophy, to heredity, literature, journalism, art, and finally prenatalism. Every effort I made to probe him on public finance was met by some calm and smiling barrage of eclectic interest. For an hour we played conversational pingpong in the most amiable style. And when Mr. White urbanely confessed that he liked everybody in the House of Commons, even "Bob" Rogers and Dr. Pugsley, it was time for the interviewer to go, before so charmed a Utopia should vanish like a film on a screen, and to conclude that the Finance Minister of Canada was no novice in a certain species of diplomacy.
Time made some heavy changes in him. A press gallery observer, asked by a certain Canadian periodical to name a possible successor to Sir Robert Borden four years before the Premier's resignation, picked Sir Thomas whom he said he had watched turn grey and careworn in office, sedulous at his desk, always busy, never at ease. Yet in 1912 he could lecture hon. gentlemen opposite seasoned in political intrigues as though he, himself, had discovered some new coefficient in politics.
Sir Thomas White has always been a political emergency, a sort of administrative occasion. For real politics he was never meant. For government by business he had great aptitude. To him government is big business, and the human side of democracy a sealed book. He has an almost exquisite sense of prerogative. His equilibrium is adjusted to the niceties of a seismographic instrument. Yet he has never held himself aloof, and is not commonly proud.
There is an idle story that near the end of his term in office he went to a bank teller's wicket—being in urgent temporary need of a little common money—and presented a cheque. On being courteously reminded by the teller that he had not brought the customary identification, he blandly announced, "I am the Finance Minister of Canada." The manner in which the Minister spoke is said to have left no doubt in the teller's mind that he was indeed the very man whose photograph had appeared in the newspapers.
There is also a little story that during one of the Victory Loan conferences in Ottawa, one of his older associates in newspaper work politely called him Sir Thomas, and that the Minister replied, "Oh, forget it! Call me Tom."
The first may be fiction. The second is a fact. But the number of men who without invitation would call him Tom, is not very extensive.
From his youth up Tom White had a powerful capacity for ordered work. There was "a time to work and a time to play, a time to laugh and a time to weep." Nor did he acquire this from Sir Joseph Flavelle, with whom he was so long and intimately associated. He had it from the cradle, which he must have left at the appointed time with some impatience at too much rocking. As a student at the University, as a law student at Osgoode, as a barrister, as reporter on theTelegram, as an employee in the Toronto Assessment Department, he had always a sort of mathematical regard for the diligence that makes a man fit to stand before kings, and the sensation of a superbly pigeon-holed mind.
By heredity Sir Thomas was labelled a Liberal, and at the time of the Taft-Fielding reciprocity junta he sat on the edge of his political bed pulling the court-plaster off. Next morning, without a single new grey hair in his head, he found himself a Conservative. The Liberal regime of shipping in people and booming up speculative towns on the prairies was a good thing for any Trust. But when the Government began to barter its preserve for another lease of life, Mr. White decided that it was time for a change. When he quit the National Trust to take on a trust for a nation he was a new-born Conservative, and in the eyes of the new Premier a lovely child. And as Finance Minister in a Tory Government he became the real author of Coalition.
Mr. White took into the Finance Department the atmosphere and the technique of the fiduciary corporation. Hence he was never able to read himself into the life of the country, never became more than a superficial master of its political forces, never rallied men about him in a great effort to save anything but a financial situation, and never lost a superb sense of himself. The fact that without ever having been elected to Parliament or Legislature, or even a County Council, he could walk into what is usually regarded as the most important department of administration in any country, is a proof that government as big business was more important to him than politics as experience.
The average portfolio is handed to a politician, not because he knows anything about the matter in hand, but because he is a good politician, a big enough man to represent some electoral area, and may be left to learn his public job after he gets it. Such is democracy. White was a tyro in politics and public administration. But he did know finance. When Laurier picked editor Fielding from Nova Scotia to look after the Budget he chose a good deal of a genius. Mr. Fielding was a master of tariffs and of inspiring fiscal speeches outside the House. He had almost a Gladstonian faculty for making statistics scintillate with human interest. He had made a survey of the country on tariff for revenue; and he usually had a bookkeeping surplus at a time when he practically boasted on the platform of what it cost to run the country. Much thanks to him the Liberals had given Free Trade a profoundly respectable burial, with Michael Clark, headmaster of the Manchester School in Canada, as chief mourner.
But the ledgers of Canada looked to be in a bad way to Mr. White. "The cost of high living" had been demonstrated by the Liberal Government some time before James J. Hill coined the phrase. Laurier monuments to high living were dotted all over the country in the shape of armouries, post offices, customs houses, docks, courthouses, the Quebec Bridge, and vast systems of unpopulated railways.
When Mr. White's sensitive finger came to that prodigal item in the public ledger he had almost excuse, in spite of his pre-knowledge of the business, for curling up like a cutworm. His knowledge of banks and their customers was very extensive. He had dealt with those banks. The ex-manager of the National Trust had long known that Canada was overbuilt with railways and going-to-be-bankrupt towns. The orgy of expansion whose familiar figure was the prodigal with the scoop shovel in the gold bin by the open window with a huge hole in the ground beneath, was just about at the crest of its master carousal [Transcriber's note: carousel?]; and the transcontinental railways with their entails of cash and land grants and guaranteed bonds was the thing that gave the new Minister the greatest concern of the lot, though he never said so. An ex-Cabinetarian who used to agree with Sir Thomas in politics still stoutly alleges that the 1911 "bolt" of the famous 18 Liberals, of whom Sir Thomas was one of the leaders, was a tactical manoeuvre to save the Canadian Northern from bankruptcy by reciprocity.
Sir Thomas should have made the railways his first drastic item of reorganization. Here was a Verdun for the Finance Minister to take. But for two years while the railway cataclysm was coming he went along with business as usual. It would have been less of a burden to unload that railway bankruptcy in 1913 than it was during the stress of after the war.
But of course the Finance Minister was only the chief subordinate in the Administration. Time would force the railways to terms. The war and war business came faster than the time. Sir Thomas probably dreaded the public ownership in which he has never profoundly believed. In conversation with the President of the Canadian Pacific he practically admitted that a Government cannot compete with a great corporation in operating a railway. But in 1912, on the principle that an egg hatches into a chicken, he must have foreseen that national ownership of half Canada's railways would be thrust upon him.
It is not explicitly known what are Sir Thomas White's opinions about the Government ownership of railways; but one can easily imagine what he would have said prior to 1911 to any proposal of any Government to begin owning and operating banks and trust companies. And as Government is the owner of the Royal Mint in Canada and does its own coining of the metals used in our currency, it would seem to be vastly easier for a Government to own banks and loan companies than to own and operate transportation systems. Sir Thomas would scarcely deny that. He is too shrewd in experience. It is one thing for a municipality to own street railways, because all the streets are automatically part of a city's property. It is quite another matter for Government to own and operate railways, because the routes of these highways and the machinery necessary to conduct traffic are not naturally the property of a Government, which exercises its power chiefly through the regulation of rates and the functions of the Railway Commission.
One imagines that Sir Thomas sincerely hoped that the railways built from cash borrowed on Government guaranteed bonds, and by direct loans from the national exchequer would some time develop business enough to pay their own way. But it is not remembered that he held any conferences with the Minister of Railways to prepare a public statement on this question. Both these Ministers had troubles enough without creating more. The country was on the crest of a wave whose trough was not far ahead.
Sir Thomas had made but one really constructive budget speech when the inevitable slump began to come. But as yet he seemed to be rather charmed with the novelties of Parliament and the ironies of preparing to win elections. The war plunged him into a system that cared no more for his budget than a cyclone for a baby carriage. Tariffs, bankrupt railways, the banking system, exchanges, and the common cost of living were all but obliterated in the campaign of war loans, not the least marvellous feature of which was that selling Victory Bonds almost made the Finance Minister a friend of the common people. The "vicious circle" of higher wages and higher cost of living was offset by Sir Thomas White's virtuous circle of money raised in Canada, spent in Canada, for goods needed by Canada and the Allies at the front. The formula was 5 1/2 per cent with no taxes, and the best security in the world—if the war was won, which of course it would be if people bought Victory Bonds.
In this era of the patriotism of the pocket, common reason almost tottered from her throne. Ordinary financial logic was forgotten. Economic delirium took hold of the nation. A broker in those days could talk in language more mysterious than the polite attentions of a juggler who pulls an egg from your pocket. Newspapers were full of jargon that sometimes seemed more fantastic than the theories of the Holy Rollers. The citizen who could not cash a Victory Bond to pay a debt was considered behind the times, and the banker who told you that it was better to sell bonds than to borrow on them at the bank was regarded as an oracle, even though you could not begin to comprehend his logic.
But the Finance Minister was as calm as Gibraltar. He was the man behind the curtain and the show. He was seldom absent from the Orders-in-Council convention, commonly known as Parliament. He was again and again acting Premier. He cared little for Imperial Conferences. His war was at home. His firing line was all over Canada. He was the most stay-at-home and sedulous of our ministers. He worked while others slept or sailed the seas. No Victory Loan advertisement proof escaped the eagle eye of this ex-newspaperman before it went to press. He scanned and corrected every syllable. Every advertisement was a sermonette from the Finance Minister.
An independent writer visiting Ottawa in the fall of 1916, wrote concerning the Finance Minister:
"One of the best evidences of Ottawa's frame of mind is the way it talks about Sir Thomas White—and the way Sir Thomas talks about himself. Sir Thomas White has probably rendered more real brain service to this country in his few years of office than any one man who has held office as a Minister—I am not now speaking of Prime Ministers, whose functions are particular and peculiar—since Confederation. To Ottawa, Sir Thomas is little short of a miracle. The frame of mind on both sides of politics regarding Sir Thomas is not unlike that of the farmer who saw a two-humped camel for the first time. "Hell," said Ottawa, "they ain't no such animal!" Now it calls Sir Thomas White 'great'—and even Sir Thomas admits it!"
Vol. I., No. 1 of The Onlooker, had this to say on the other side of the ledger:
"One would gather from the way some of his admirers talk that he, and he alone, was responsible for the success of the various loans issued during the war. He had it easy. The country was literally bursting with money seeking investment. One could almost have raised it with his eyes shut. The whole community was humming with activity like a top asleep; and still the orders from abroad came pouring in. Every fresh loan stimulated activity anew. All that was required was to issue the prospectus, pass the solicitation of funds to interested canvassers, newspapers, publications, loan companies, banks, brokers, and hurrah at the end."
Some things do look easy to the man who is not doing them. Common sense admits that the man who patriotically juggled the billions from pocket to exchequer and back to pocket again would have had a much harder task to undertake what somebody called "the Gethsemane" of paying the nation's bills when the "hurrah" was over. The method of financing Canada in the war may be vastly different from the method necessary in peace. But when money must be had quickly in vast quantities there is no time to debate on just how you are going to get it. Sir Thomas White's raid upon the pockets of Canada was a financial spectacle not to be judged by standards of thrift, for the very good reason that the people were nauseated with thrift talk, were looking for something easy, and White had the instinct to know that the easier and the more spectacular he could make a Victory Loan the better for the war. He rowed with the current and knew he was doing it. In his own financial brain, which is not unthrifty, he knew that the "hurrah" was not healthy in the long run and that it could not last forever. But once it was started there was no other way but to keep it up.
Thanks to Sir Thomas, every citizen had an opportunity to get himself rubber-stamped on behalf of the nation; which on general principles was a good thing, because a large number of people at that time indulged the fiction that as the Government was paying its debts, a good way to do it would be to print more paper money. It was the Finance Minister's opportunity to instruct us, that the Government was not paying debts—but making it possible to pay wages. Unless the surplus of every man's earnings was invested in Victory Bonds there would shortly be no big industries left to pay the earnings at all, Canada would cease to export munitions—which might be the one thing to lose the war, in which case nothing would be left for any of us but to pay war indemnities to the enemy. Critics declared that non-taxable bonds were an iniquity in favour of the big investor who could heap up bonanza investments without taxes; another way of accusing the Finance Minister of being in league with the "big interests." But we must do Sir Thomas the credit of taking a sure way to encourage the small investor by refusing to tax his patriotism. A 100th per cent tax on some people's patriotism might have squelched it altogether. It would have been a public service if Sir Thomas White had plainly told the people, not less about why they should buy Victory Bonds during a period of inflation, but more about what would happen to them when deflation began to set in; when, ceasing to buy Victory Bonds at a low price, we should have to buy bread and butter and clothes at higher prices than ever at a time when money began to sneak away, we knew not whither.
Perhaps it was too much to expect one man to organize the "hurrah" and afterwards to conduct the "Gethsemane." At any rate, before we had an opportunity to test the real size of Sir Thomas as a public servant he resigned office.
Whether the Finance Minister at the climax of his bigopuswas shrewd enough to imagine that the kudos of the loans might get him the Premiership, we do not profess to know. He is not considered famous as a political strategist. He has far too much serenity.
In 1917 Sir Thomas was chairman of a monster meeting in Toronto when ten thousand people who tried to hear Theodore Roosevelt speak on behalf of that year's Victory Loan of Canada were turned away. For some hours he had been in company with a man whose mastery of the unusual was almost the equal of Mark Twain's. If ever he had a chance to be startled out of his headmaster poise, here it was. But he made a long, tedious preamble of a speech the only sentence of which that sticks in my memory is that sincerely girlish utterance of Portia to Antonio after the trial, "Sir, you are very welcome to our house." It was like pinning a pink bow knot on the head of a lion.
Sir Thomas showed strategic ability when he refused the Premiership.After declining the Premiership he was not likely to need a portfolio.
Public life is considerably like war. Every time you move there must be a motive.
A former political crony of Sir Thomas said to the writer that the excess profits tax imposed by the Minister was one of the cleverest political manoeuvres ever perpetrated in Ottawa, because it drove manufacturers and merchants to advertise in the newspapers in order to reduce their profits, thus paying part of the excess to the newspapers rather than to the Government; which was supposed to have made the Government popular with newspapers on both sides of the political fence. This is a genially cynical way of saying that every publisher has his price, and that the Finance Minister had made some startling progress in his mentality since the day when he was charmed with everybody in Parliament. But it is a Machiavellian touch quite uncharacteristic of a man whose friends had designated him for the Premiership.
The friends of Sir Thomas may have had good reason for considering him as the next Premier. On the evidence of the mere handling of executive big business demanding cool judgment, practical vision and powerful action he was the equal of any other candidate for the office. His defects were less obvious, but perhaps more vital in the case. Sir Thomas was not designed to lead, which in these days means to be constantly recreating a party, not to operate a well-built governmental machine. In his nine years of public life he did a big national work and justly earned all the real distinction he ever got. He did so much in a big, unusual way for the nation that his passing out becomes another example of how easy it is to cripple administration by sacrificing public service brains to private business.
N. W. Rowell has the bearing of a man who long ago felt that he was called to do something for a cause or a country and has never got over it. Meanwhile he has done much for both a cause and a country, and seems to have quit before the country had begun to enjoy more than the least agreeable elements in his character. To have suffered the insistent righteousness of Mr. Rowell so long, and at the close of the first period of his life when he seemed to be getting his own measure as a public man on a big stage, to see him withdraw like a chambered nautilus into his shell, not only from the Cabinet but from his seat in Durham, is a little hard on public patience. But of course the chambered nautilus may emerge again.
Years ago Mr. Rowell had moral energy enough to reconstruct a large part of the world in Liberalism and in the Methodist Church. Today he finds evangelic Liberalism rampant out on the skyline under such men as Crerar and Drury, and the church discussing social reformation in phraseology associated with dynamic ideas to which he never could be assimilated.
Mr. Rowell's career reminds us that there are four brands of Liberals in Canada: Evolutionary; Manchester School; Laurierite; Agrarian. Tories never evolve. There are only good Tories and bad ones.
He belongs to the first group, and there is nothing in his temperament to make him anything else. Free Trade never did convince him; he broke away from the enchanting tyranny of Laurier; and, though born on a farm, he never could revert to the plough-handles for a vision of the world.
Judging from some fairly recent preachments by able reverends such as Wm. Woodsworth and Salem Bland, there may be as many brands of Methodism. If so we unhesitatingly place Mr. Rowell in the evolutionary group. Therefore by personal development he is next thing to a Conservative; and the latest phase of his career proves that in working it out he has practised the fine old platitude of Polonius to Laertes:
"To thine own self be true,And it must follow, as the night the day,Thou canst not then be false to any man."
Mr. Rowell is one of our most encouraging types of what is called the self-made man. Any Oxford professor hearing him make a typically good speech in London on "The Commonwealth of Nations under the Union Jack," would infer that he had taken a post-graduate course in political history after graduating as a B.A. But Mr. Rowell never even attended a High School. He went from the farm as a lad to be a parcel boy in a London, Ont., dry-good store. The class-meeting and the sermon and the Mechanics' Institute gave him a taste for serious literature. He came up in the oratorical county that produced G. W. Ross and J. A. Macdonald. He must have regularly read Tannage's sermons. He was a youth when the Y.M.C.A. movement invaded Canada along with baseball. He made the choice. He passed into the Law School, somehow dodging all the good brethren who advised him to go into the ministry. And through the opportunity afforded him by the successful practice of law and Liberalism on a large scale he has been able to preach his sermons to much bigger audiences than he ever could have found in the Methodist Church.
If some of the advanced radicals of these days would con over the outlines of a career like this, they might get rid of some of their fantastic notions about State-devised equality and emancipation. Mr. Rowell instinctively reached out by industry and enthusiasm for the forces that would better his condition. In so doing he spent a large part of himself upon the betterment of society. The result is an intellectual, moral and financially successful character of which any community might be proud—so long as the community contained but one of the kind.
Rowellism is a good salt. It is not good porridge. The average unprofessional Christian man cannot live on the levels where Mr. Rowell breathes so easily.
Time and again have we heard the equivocal remark about this man; if such, and however so. Why not take the man as he is and make the best of him? Surely by now he has proved that he has a definite and uplifting leverage on public life. It is of no use to complain that he never was cut out to be a leader in anything but ethical ideas of statesmanship. It was political makeshiftery to make such a man the leader of Ontario Liberalism, which did not ask to be led but to be cajoled and tricked up for the carnival. It was fatuous to imagine that he could ever become a chief of the National Liberal and Conservative party to which he now inextricably belongs. If secret ambition ever spurred him to indulge that dream—which seems incredible—sober reflection at the looking glass should have corrected the strabismus. Mr. Rowell is not a leader of men, in action; never was and never could be—without some drastic transformation in his outward character such as he has never shown.
The last time I observed Mr. Rowell he was in the lounge of a club where he had just finished lunch. All about him were scores of men in groups, each group animatedly intent upon some topic from baseball to high finance. A few weeks earlier that same club had given a public dinner to Mr. Rowell and Sir George Foster, when each seemed to overdo the other in gripping those present by the presentation of a world theme backed by a striking personality. In the lounge Mr. Rowell, our best authority on the ethics of the Empire and the League of Nations, went about alone, unobtrusive, drab-coloured, almost insignificant. He spoke to nobody and few men as much as noticed him. He nodded gravely now and again, but never smiled. Both hands in his trouser pockets, he seemed to be gazing at some vagabond blind spot in the room. He almost seemed to be whistling to himself like a lad in a forest. Presently he wandered out.
By no exercise of imagination could one conceive such a man as a Canadian political leader. If there is anything in an aura he has it not. A halo would have suited him better.
Three elements conspire to make Rowell:
Conscience; oratory; opportunity.
Most men have trouble enough with any two of the three. Mr. Rowell continues to hold our respect in spite of the whole trinity. Too much conscience always on duty at a peak load is no way to attract a vast variety of people who relish a degree of sinfulness now and again. We do not repudiate the value of conscience in public affairs. The public man without it provides almost the only sane argument for the preservation of the gallows. But when one man carries so much of it, a number of others may be excused for carrying less. This is an age of specialties.
It is required of a truly efficient conscience, however, that it be instant in season and out of season, and that it do not wait upon opportunity. When the Ross Government was so old in sin that even the newGlobeeditor accused the ship of having barnacles, we fail to remember that Mr. Rowell lifted his voice against it. He was a candidate for the Commons five years before James Whitney began his regime of government by indignation; at a time when if Ontario went on a political spree Ottawa got a headache. Big-party government was pretty strong in those days to keep a man like Rowell from talking out in meeting. The value of a conscience to a community, whatever it may be to an individual or a party, is in giving it a chance to speak out when something is wrong with your own group, not when it is politically convenient to take off the muffler. Mr. Rowell's method of opening Durham as a safe seat for himself by making a Senator of the Conservative member for Durham, was one way of reforming the Civil Service, which was one of his Government hobbies. But in practical politics it is sometimes necessary to do evil that good may come. Mr. Rowell needed a safe seat—in order to do his work for the country. It seems a pity that a constituency so shrewdly obtained could not have been steadfastly held.
As an orator Mr. Rowell is remarkable in spite of two defects; no classical or humanities education except what he diligently dug out of books, and a very thin voice. Few public speakers of our time use such admirable diction, and it is a rare one who can make so lean a voice thrill so completely with passion in the presentation of powerfully synthetic ideas. This is a great gift; but like personal beauty it has its fatal fascination. Mr. Rowell has not ceased to suffer from a sort of bondage to his oratory as he has from the tyranny of his conscience. In conversation he seldom just talks. He seems to deliver dicta. He rarely glows with the fire of the moment; he seems to be preparing for the grand occasion. The stage must be set. When did he ever make a poor speech that he had time to prepare? Or a good one impromptu? One cannot soon forget his remarkable speech in the Toronto Arena at the citizens' reception to Premier Borden in 1915. Here this lifelong Liberal made what up to that moment was the greatest speech of his career; and he was speaking as a British citizen, not as a Canadian Liberal.
With equal power, to a small group, but with even more passion as a broad-minded Canadian, he spoke to the Bonne Entente in Toronto in 1917 on a subject which may have had something to do with his future as a Dominion instead of a Provincial statesman. In this connection I quote from a report of that meeting made by the writer:
"He took his preconsidered skeleton of argument with all its careful alignment of crescendos and climaxes and clothed it with the passion of a rousing, emotionalizing speech. The points somewhat roughly made by other men he remade by a new grouping of the ideas. With eminent juridical clarity he worked himself up the ropes of oratory, and when he got to the tiptop of the trapeze he flung out his big compliment to the French-Canadians now at the front. Of course he said other things. He made fine use of the historic as he always manages to do. But when he got away from that into the great little story of Courcellette and the gallant 22nd with its sole surviving eighty men and two officers besides the C.O. "fighting the Germans like devils," he had voltage enough for an audience of ten thousand."
It is doubtful if Canada ever had a public speaker who with so little personal makeup for the part could so wonderfully deliver himself in orational speeches on any topic of nations, commonwealths and empires. If Rowell were less of an orator he would be more of a power as a public man. Carrying around loaded blank pistols is not nearly so congenial to most men as a cigar in the left hand vest pocket. There is in most of us a strain of buncombe which we exhibit often when others are not looking. I think Rowell exhibits most of his in solemn form in public. If one has not what is calledsavoir fairehe must make his abstractions and silences confoundedly interesting. Rowell packs all his power into a speech. Therefore even his greatest speeches are sometimes to some people a bore.
I think he must have risen to about his height of unceremonious informality at a Peace dinner in London when he sat next to the plenipotentiary from Serbia, to whom he remarked:
"I should think so many dinners and public functions would be hard on your constitution."
"Yes," rejoined the Serbian with a gravely astute look at his companion; "but we have an upper and a lower chamber."
Rowell told this on himself. Even that he could not have done five years ago. Mingling with men more solemn than himself he observed the inconvenience of solemnity. He really wants to be a conductor of the little currents of energy that make men think and act in small groups. Some good parson years ago should have encouraged him to smoke between speeches.
Opportunity. This focuses the other two. Rowell has seldom neglected this mistress. It is comparatively easy for many men to make themselves at the Sign of the Dollar; as a rule more difficult at the Sign of Culture. Mr. Rowell is a man of fine intellectual attainments, which he has seldom failed to use in furthering his public success. Yet he was a good while becoming incorporated into the body politic of Liberalism. The world was his parish. Wesley was his idol; then Laurier. Between these two it is a marvel that even at the rather late age of forty-four he came to the leadership of Liberalism in Ontario. Here he became the prophet who would abolish the bar even before its time, not without provocation. There had been stories of wild drinking escapades among some of the Liberal leaders in Queen's Park. Mr. Rowell can therefore be amply forgiven for having been the instigator of that poster, "Is That You, Daddy?"
This can be remembered from his five years of misfit rule in Queen's Park when many of his good offices there are mainly forgotten. It was rather pitiful to observe how incapable Mr. Rowell was of giving vent to his great talents in that Legislature. He did not understand the lingo. Most of it was too piffling and small. He knew Ontario better from the angle of corporation law. He made a poor showing as leader, for there were no great issues in which he could lead; though he did initiate a great deal of useful welfare legislation. He made one heroic effort to understand New Ontario in the rough when he donned overalls and went down in some of the mines. But it was all too much in the rough. One imagines there must have been many a moment when he wished he had never taken that leadership with so precious little to lead, and yearned for some larger way. But it was a long, long trail. And Laurier was now a strange old man. Whichever way he looked he was in a blind alley.
The Coalition gave him a way out. The old chief's attitude towards the war made Laurier Liberalism still more unpalatable. Rowell was deeply stirred by the war. He could see in the upheaval of old and new world ideas the sort of grand realignment which he could understand; the assertion of true Liberalism in true democracy. Any average speech of his during the war demonstrates that he was among those few leaders of thought whom the struggle lifted into a larger conception of manhood in the State.
Again, honesty to himself suggests that Mr. Rowell did not suffer such pangs at his severance from Laurier as did men like Carvell, Guthrie and Clark, who had fought under the old man in Commons. At the Liberal Win-the-War meeting in 1917, he threw off all disguises and fervently proclaimed that he had chosen to take office under "the greatest Premier in the world." The statement smacked not so much of insincerity as of a sense of emancipation. Mr. Rowell was no longer labelled a Laurier Liberal. He was a free agent in a new great conflict of force. He was stirred as never he had been. Of all the Liberals who took oath under the new administration he was the strongest, and the most difficult to assign a competent task. He was made President of the Council and Minister of Information. The peculiar advantage of the latter was that as real information was the last thing that seemed to be wanted by anything resembling a Government, there was very little for Mr. Rowell to do at his desk and very much time for him to be absent where he felt much more at home, in Europe. As President of the Council he had great ability.
This one year of Ministry before the end of the war gave Mr. Rowell an opportunity to survey forces of whose operation he had no knowledge while he remained a mere Liberal. He became officially familiar to London and as the constant companion of the Premier came very near to the elbows of the great, when he did not suffer by comparison.
But it was the Peace Conference that gave him his real work. During the war any nation got the prestige that it could win, either by its own efforts or in league with others. All nations on each side were more or less animated by the one great purpose. Suddenly the golden grip of union was off. The second war began around the Peace table. In this new and more precarious conflict of pour-parlers and old secret diplomacies under the dangerous flare of the self-determination torch, national selfishness rushed to the front of the stage. Every pocket of people in Europe hemmed between a river, a mountain and a dialect claimed the rights of a nation, when more than half of them should have been conveniently merged into workable groups having some form of government with which nations of experience could deal.
In this clamour of thevoces populithe voice of Canada was not to be disregarded. We had reason that it should be heard. We were in sudden danger of being overshadowed at the Conference by the vast figure of the other half of North America. Mr. Rowell has never been an anti-Yankee. He has too much fine sense ever to pull feathers out of the eagle in retaliation for twisting the lion's tail. He knows as well as any man the strategic and moral necessity of Canada being the real House of Interpreter to the two leading Anglo-nations. He knew it at the Conference. But he knew also that in proportion to service and sacrifice in the war, Canada in the Council of Peace had a right to be heard and considered as the voice of a nation occupying the northern half of North America.
There was great sense in the estimate of a leading London correspondent that among the four most impressive and masterful personalities at the Geneva Assembly of the League, Rowell the Canadian was at least the fourth. This was not merely a personal or natural compliment. It was the sincere recognition of a fact.