Nothing is more certain than that four French-Canadian leaders, had they been given or had they asked for the opportunity and had acted together, could have put a different face on Quebec's relation to the war. Four men namable in that capacity are, Sir Lomer Gouin, Sir Wilfrid Laurier, Ernest Lapointe, and Cardinal Begin. Of these, Gouin was at that time the most able. For ten years he had been uninterruptedly Premier of Quebec with a moral guarantee that he could occupy the Premiership by an overwhelming majority until he should be gathered to his fathers.

Again and again rumour slated Sir Lomer for Ottawa. He wisely declined. He had a peasant's attachment to "le pays" and its white villages. In Quebec he was the Chief of Ministers, the little elected father of his country. In Ottawa he would have been perhaps a grand Minister of Public Works building docks in Halifax, customs houses in British Columbia, post-offices on the prairies, armouries in Ontario and court-houses in Quebec. Yes, there would be surely armouries in Ontario.

I met Sir Lomer but once, in his office in the Parliament Buildings. There was no particular reason for seeing him except the pleasure of encountering a descendant of the people who so gallantly fought under Montcalm so that posterity could enjoy a city in part exclusively English and for the most part idiomatically French. A few evenings previous I had talked on the Terrace to a glowing Nationalist, a young expert in cynical idealism, who spoke very curtly about the Premier. An ardent patriot, he talked freely and interestingly, as we gazed out at the blue-hazed domes of the noble hills that mark the valley of St. Lawrence. The roofs of Old Lower Town were sizzling in heat. Drowsy, lumber-laden bateaux and ocean-liners crept and smoked about the docks. Beyond the grey-scarped citadel the vesper bells of parish after parish clanged a divine discord into the calm of the great river.

"What do you think of Gouin?" I asked him.

A cynical smile flicked over the Nationalist's face. For a moment he did not answer.

"Pardonnez-moi," I mumbled. "I am Anglais."

"Oh!" he said, sharply, laughing. "Have you seen the Montcalm suite in the Chateau here? Do so. The C.P.R. discovered an old bed and some creaky chairs said to have been used by the great general. They placed them in a suite of rooms which they rent to curiosity-hunting Americans who sentimentalize over history at twenty-five dollars a day. Such is Quebec when she is commercialized into a highway for tourists."

"But what has that to do with Sir Lomer Gouin?"

"Directly—nothing. Sir Lomer is not even a director of the C.P.R., or of the Bank of Montreal, though one never knows what he may do with his money and his talents when he gets tired of manipulating elections."

"Oh, you mean that Gouin—does not reflect the idealism of Quebec; its love of the land that bore our fathers, its poetic isolation among the provinces——?"

He blew a shaft of cigarette smoke.

"Sir Lomer," he said, "is Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Province of Quebec. His chief duty is to go about inspecting and improving properties and to sit at directors' meetings declaring provincial dividends instead of deficits."

I remarked that since Quebec is so prosperous and so large and populous with so many cradles, the Premier need not perhaps vex himself deeply about ideals such as the French language in schools outside the province.

"What!" was the reply, as a glass banged upon the table. "Would you cage us in here like Indians on a reservation? Has the French-Canadian nation no rights outside Quebec?"

"What would you do?" I asked him. "What could you do?"

"Secede!" he exclaimed. "Become the Sinn Fein of Canada."

"What about the Pope of Rome?"

"Has as much to do with Quebec," he laughed icily, "as the President of France. If the Pope should issue instructions to the bishops of Quebec, asking the clergy to educate the people of Quebec on their duty to go to war or to vote for either of the old line parties, the people would openly disregard them. We would as much resent the interference of Rome in our affairs as the American colonies did the tyranny of George the Third."

Here was the superb inconsistency of the French mind wedded to a single magnificent idea. This Nationalist admitting the possibility of secession, made sure that it would not be to the United States which puts the French language on a par with Choctaw. When I suggested as a recipe for national unity that French and English be learned by both English and French all over Canada, he flouted the idea of French-Canadians learning more English than they needed in business, and of English-Canadians learning French at all. He fervently held to the Keltic notion of making a preserve of the French-Canadian race, language, literature and customs whatever may become of the religion; yet he objected to penning the race into a reservation like the Indians. He observed that in 1911 the Nationalists bucked reciprocity with the United States.

"I think we should become an independent republic," he said as he plopped a fresh cigarette. "We have the main part of the St. Lawrence. No, you will not find Gouin say so. Gouin is a Tory prefect. He plays politics, not nationalism."

I observed that the band was about to play.

"Ha!" he exclaimed, stretching his legs with a yawn. "And the concert will conclude with that amiable farce, 'O Canada,' followed by 'God Save the King.'"

This Nationalist interview is given at some length because it illustrates much of what Sir Lomer Gouin is not, and if he were would not openly say so, because he stands for a majority the watchword of which is "Stop, Look, Listen". I went at once to see the Premier. He was closeted with confiding—perhaps confederate—priests, and with simple habitant folk who stood, not in awe but in affection, of the Premier. He might have been himself a father confessor.

Talking to him I found Gouin peculiarly on his guard; broad-faced, heavy-jawed, slow of speech, almost devoid of gesticulation, he was as unamiably dispassionate as a bank manager. There was no militant passion of the minority in this man; no heroic tilting against windmills; no expression of ideals; no suggestion of a delightful outlaw. He was amazingly practical, with no inclination to discuss freely the native peculiarities of either race. He understood Ontario—as a politician only; England as a democracy and a form of government. He had no absorbing idiosyncracies and made no attempt to pose or even to be interesting. After the bounce of the young Nationalist he was as tame as a grandfather's clock.

I felt that Sir Lomer was asking himself—what did the stranger want? He would have been infinitely more at ease discussing with a bishop how to prevent a strike in a cotton mill; or with a political outposter what to do to keep some seat for the Administration. If I had made to him such a statement as once I had made with such volcanic results to Bourassa, that nine-tenths of the population in a village like Nicolet could speak no Anglais, he would have been eloquent. Had I observed that 70 per cent of the operatives in a great Quebec industry cannot read and write French, that Ontario has a policy of good roads comparable to that of Quebec, that Orangemen do not dominate Toronto, that the Ontario farmer is a better producer than the habitant, or that Protestant clerics do not interfere in politics, he would have bristled with information to set me profoundly right. But he created no atmosphere of free discussion with a stranger. He was coldly aloof, yet earnestly endeavouring to say something worth while.

What I really wanted to tell Gouin was that he was personally very much like the late great Tory, Sir James Whitney. But he did not warm up to personal comment. The bilingual question was too complicated. The atmosphere of the Bonne Entente was lacking. Gouin and myself were in different envelopes. He was the Premier.

From what is said of him I am sure most of the fault was my own. I did not understand him. He was too much the Premier; the master executive. The Nationalist was almost right; Gouin suggested the dividend and the census. He was the chief executive of a Province larger than almost any country in Europe but Russia, and with a population about half that of Roumania, of whom about one-sixth are the Anglo-Saxon minority. He seemed to know Quebec from Montreal to the edge of Labrador almost by telegraph poles. You recall that the French in Canada evolved the modern census with its intimate penetration into the affairs of the people, some time before the Germans did it. The Premier of Quebec was a handbook encyclopaedia of Quebec. He knew the precise location by the roads of almost any white village, pulp-mill, water-power, mine, timber limit; knew as much as a man can about the number of horses and cattle and cradles to a township; could talk with enthusiasm about the pioneer arts of the habitant—the rugs, the baskets, the furniture, the hand-made churns, the open-air bake-ovens. He could give the address and the full name of many and many a priest.

But beyond this there is a Quebec which Sir Lomer Gouin did not know, because he himself with his bourgeois excellences and his great good citizenship has not the Gallic sparkle in his mentality. He never deeply knew the soul of Quebec. He was too much concerned with its practical and useful politics to be conscious of its passions. From the shrug of his shoulder, and a certain twinkle in his eye when he mentioned diplomacy with clerics, one surmised that among the clergy he was the master among politicians who must walk warily. But he was too stout, too thrifty, too much of a high type of budgeteer to be spiritually informed of the crude but basically beautiful passions that undercurrent all peasant communities. There was no poetry in Gouin. No fire. Little imagination.

"Those Nationalists?" he repeated shrewdly, slowly. "Yes, I know their talk. Oh, they are not so dangerous, but a troublesome minority. I think—I know Quebec better than they do. You have, I daresay, Nationalists in Ontario?"

What he perhaps expected was some statement about Orangemen, who of course are nearly all Imperialists. Yet these very Orangemen represent an intense phase of Canadian life; the backwoods era, the simple industries, the old villages, the quaint settlements of the U.E. Loyalists as picturesque on the Upper, as the dormer-windowed villages of the French are on the Lower St. Lawrence. To these men the Empire is as visual, as to the intense Quebecker it is nebulous. And as the politician in Ontario has to regard carefully the Orange vote, so the Premier of Quebec had to be wary of the franchises of his emotional friends, the Nationalists. He was somewhat afraid of the minority as all masters of majorities are. Clearly—it was Gouin's main business to continue being elected. Had he gone out on behalf of enlistments, to educate his people, even to speak for France, he would have been in danger of converting Gouin Liberals into Nationalists.

Ontario cannot fail to make an asset of Gouin's anti-Nationalism. He was never for any of the violent doctrines propounded by my friend on the Terrace. He would not oppose Quebec going to war. I am sure he God-speeded the 22nd who died at Courcellette. He was the Premier of a free Province. Those men had freely gone. Others—the majority—had freely stayed. But an election was coming; where everybody would be free to vote.

Then there were the clergy; most of them friends of Gouin. The Cardinal at Quebec had been interviewed by Sir Sam Hughes on aid to enlistments. Gouin could have told Hughes that he would fail; that Begin, though not a Nationalist, was a reactionary. The bilingual controversy was still acute. Gouin could not have gone out or sent emissaries out, to reason with French-Canadians about marching with a Province which had denied the French language rights in contrast to the Government's own claim that it had given rights to the Anglo minority in Quebec.

Conscription was coming. It was a precarious time. The master of Quebec had to move cautiously. His loyalty to Britain was never questioned. His faith in a United Canada was never doubted. Had Quebec been all for Gouin instead of Gouin all for Quebec, the Premier's way would have been easier. Better let well enough alone; encourage those to enlist who really wanted to go—because Quebec was a free country.

Then there was the Laurier influence. Had the old man gone in with the Premier to help the Ottawa Government—

Impossible. Neither of them was asked before Coalition came on the heels of conscription. And when conscription came, the minority of Nationalists opposed to the war became the majority of Quebeckers who preferred not to comply with the law. From disregarding the law to rebellion, to Nationalism was not far. Gouin had the balance to hold.

The Cardinal's attitude on conscription made Gouin's position still more difficult. His letter to the press bluntly put the Roman Catholic Church above temporal law. One heard of no rebuke from the Premier of Quebec to the Cardinal. A Cardinal may be above politics.

Sir Lomer was playing the game of safety, when from his own temperament and position and unbacked by other leaders he could do little more. He stood for the law and did not hinder its operation. But if there was a chief executive in Canada who wished the war were righteously over, it was Sir Lomer Gouin. No Premier had such a predicament; so much at the end to lose; so much at first to have gained—if only he could have foreseen, as nobody did, that conscription was coming and that law would be more awkward than liberty.

The Premier of Quebec had experience in keeping his Government immune from agitators. It was not alone the Nationalists who had made him uneasy. On the other extreme there had been for some time one Godefroi Langlois, former editor of La Patrie, and later founder and editor of Le Pays, whose platform was compulsory State education away from control of the clergy and in defiance of the Archbishops. Gouin did not endorse Langlois. How could he? Le Pays, when it condemned clerical schools, attacked the Administration. Politically Gouin was right in opposing Langlois. Nationally he was playing provincial. Langlois had a mission, in line with a broader, nationalized Canada; the same mission which is now being reflected in the National Council of Education.

So, between the reactionism of Bourassa and the radicalism of Langlois, Gouin was the compromise; and Langlois was conveniently given an official post in Europe.

Gouin has compromised his whole political career. With the leverage of enormous success in elections and administration, he never had the vision to declare himself in favour of a bigger Quebec than could be got by extending its boundaries to Ungava.

He was too old to begin. Quebec to him was a vast prefecture to be administered; not a vision to be realized. Ontario—except politically—was almost as far away as British Columbia. He was seldom in Toronto. Montreal was as a rule the last west for this voyageur. He seldom or never went to the Maritimes. He knew the people down there regarded the bloc Quebec as a denationalizer. He had little or no desire to see the prairies. He wanted Quebec to prosper. He delighted to see pulp mills and cotton factories and power plants and railways and trolleys vibrating along the St. Lawrence. He loved to dream of the great unpeopled hinterland—all Quebec; of the other hinterland—all the rest of Canada; of the transcontinentals converging at Montreal; of the steamship lines terminating there; of a land where there are few empty cradles or idle factories or wasting farms.

All these things Gouin, growing stout and somewhat heavy of face, loved to behold; and out of that grew all the vision he seemed to have. In this enormous prefecture within the Empire he beheld a far more comfortable State than the Nationalist dream of a separative Quebec; glad when he could find time to motor grandly and amiably out among the villages and be greeted as le grand seigneur of politics, even when he lacked the grand manners of the eminent patrician.

At any conference of Premiers in Ottawa he held himself somewhat aloof, studying the lot, respecting them all, cordial with all, anxious to do all that constitutionally in him lay to further co-ordination. But Gouin always sagaciously knew that there was no Premier in the pack who already had so much, with so little to ask, from Federalism as he. His was the pivotal province of Confederation, the grand compromise of Old Macdonald with Cartier; the basic sixty-five members of Parliament, unchangeable except by ripping up the B.N.A. Act, an instrument of Empire. He could wink the other eye and reflect that from the political concessions of the Act in official bilingualism and a fixed representation, in the outlet of the St. Lawrence, in the possession of the historic city, in the control of ocean navigation, in a solid clergy, in fundamental virtues of thrift and an established peasantry—he and his had more than any of the others could ever ask.

"Ah!" he said eloquently, with a fine twinkle of his eyes to the interviewer at Quebec, "you have not seen our Province? Then you must come down again, when I am not busy, and let me take you to see—all we have down here!"



A POLITICAL MATTAWA OF THE WEST

JOHN WESLEY DAFOE

First impressions are always tyrants. The first time I heard John Wesley Dafoe talk he was in his large sanctum of the Manitoba Free Press, in the summer of 1916. He was without a collar, his shirt loose at the neck, and his hair like a windrow of hay. He reminded me of some superb blacksmith hammering out irons of thought, never done mending the political waggons of other people, and from his many talks to the waggoners knowing more about all the roads than any of them. The wheat on a thousand fields was baking that day, and the 'Peg was roasting alive. Since that I have always pictured Dafoe sweltering, terribly in earnest, whittling the legs of the Round Table and telling somebody how it is that west of the lakes neither of the old Ottawa parties has now any grip on the people.

Dafoe talked that way in 1916. He was beginning to lisp a little along that restless line of thought in 1910. And in 1940 he may be sitting in that same sanctum with walls of heavy books on two sides of him, telling somebody just how it came to be that an economic cyclone on the prairies once caught up all the Grits and Tories and nothing was ever heard or seen of them again.

When Kipling wrote, "Oh, east is east and west is west, and never the twain shall meet," he had never met Dafoe. Some directive angel planted him at Winnipeg shortly after Clifford Sifton crowded the gate there with people going in that they might choke it again with wheat coming out; and while people went in and wheat came out through this spout of the great prairie hopper, Dafoe dug himself a little ship canal which as it grew bigger sluiced the political rivers of the West into his sanctum before he lifted the lock and let them on down to the sea at Ottawa. The West as he saw it was a place of coming mighty changes. His own party was pushing the transformations. The prairies were due to become the mother of great forces. You could not be always herding people into a land like that from south, east and west and not come within an ace of fostering some revolution.

And of all cities west of the lakes, Winnipeg was the clearing-house, as much for policies and programmes as for wheat and money and people. No political cloud ever gathered on the prairies that did not get blown into Winnipeg before it burst. Dafoe stood ready for them all. He believed that no change had happened yet to the Liberal party comparable with the changes yet to come. He saw that party chaining itself to tariffs and big interests and he said:

"Believe me, that won't forever do. There's something just short of a revolution going to happen to this party before the West gets done with it; and if the party isn't ready for the West, so much the worse for the party."

Just to get ahead of mere chronology, the bane of many a good man's life. In 1919 the most complete imitation of a little Moscow ever seen on this continent was set up in Winnipeg. For many weeks it looked to some hopefuls as though the Wheat City would reconstruct the whole economic structure of the nation to suit the ideas of a violent minority. The main recorded issue was "collective bargaining". The real issue was direct action in the form of the sympathetic strike. By its expected control of urban centres the Soviet organization aimed to throttle big utilities, finance, shipping, railroads, telegraphs. The United Grain Growers were to be but a helpless giant in the hands of Jack Proletariat. Parliament was to be superseded by Direct Action. The A.F.L. was to become obsolete. Trades Unions were to be taken over and painted red. Citizens in starched collars were to become comrades in shirt sleeves, or enemies. Political parties would be reconstructed. The "workers" would own the country. The British Empire would be shaken into Soviets. The Army and the Navy would be internationalized. The real Capital of Canada outside of Winnipeg would be, not London, but Moscow. The International would supplant national anthems. Public opinion would be exterminated except as revised by the Red leaders on the Red River at its junction with the Assiniboine.

In the unfolding of this Great Adventure we pause here to observe that it was a newspaper which behind the Citizens' Committee administered a black eye to this attempt to make Winnipeg the Soviet headquarters of North America and 120 millions of people. The name of the paper was the Manitoba Free Press.

And the Free Press was seeing Red. What business had the Red Flag in a city like Winnipeg at all? If anywhere in Canada, why not in the industrial, big-interest East—in Montreal or Toronto?

"One revolution at a time, please," we almost hear the Free Press saying. "Now the war is done the West has to settle the fate of Government at Ottawa in its own way. And the way of the West is not with the Red Flag; not with Direct Action. This city is a headquarters of evolutionaries, not of outlaws. You people of the Strike Committee are trying to get the spot-light when you've no business anywhere except right at back stage."

A perfectly straight argument, though not couched in those words. Dafoe and his associates were profoundly busy with what to them was a ten times greater issue than any form of Soviet anywhere in Canada. As a matter of record the paper did admit that the metal workers had a right to strike for collective bargaining.

"But no other Union here or elsewhere," it thundered "has any right to a sympathetic strike to help the metal workers. This city is not going to be throttled by a thug minority, who want to exercise governing power as a revolutionary usurpation of authority."

A minority always leads. Majorities follow. The position of the Free Press was, that it is only a minority able to command a majority that should rule; and the Soviet was no such minority—while the Free Press was.

A clear grasp of this is necessary in the business of judging Mr. Dafoe and his coming influence upon Canadian affairs. What Dafoe enunciated about the strike will have a strong bearing in the case upon what he thinks about the Agrarians. The judge must get a fair judgment. But of this later.

Dafoe was, so far as we know, the first editor in Canada to advocate from the beginning of the war a Coalition Government. This was natural. The Free Press had no faith in the Borden administration of Bob Rogers, owner of the Winnipeg Telegram. By the summer of 1916 it was into a Coalition campaign. A year later when the Premier came back from England declaring for conscription and inviting Laurier to join in a Coalition, the Free Press supported him.

Why this anxiety? We must pull off a bit of the makeup to find out. The Free Press was a Liberal paper. It supported Laurier in the West. But the older it grew the more clearly Dafoe and his associates saw that the man who had created the two new Western Provinces could not hold them. Other gods were now arising. Their organ was the Grain Growers' Guide; their parliaments were in grain growers' conventions; their policy was radical Liberalism. The Liberal organ of a Wheat City could not consistently antagonize this radical movement. The farmers must be studied. So far as they could strengthen Liberalism by becoming a Radical wing, they must be encouraged. At the point where they developed an extreme left away from the party they must be checked. The Free Press which was yet to fight an economic revolution must not itself be revolutionary.

This leads up to policy in Empire. The paper had gone against Borden in 1911. It was against the taxation Navy of Borden even though it could see the danger of war ahead. It was opposed to the whole super-Tory idea of a centralized British commonwealth of nations. It "hung the hide" of Lionel Curtis and his Round Table propaganda clubs to the Canadian National fence. It argued for "a progressive development in Canadian self-government to the point of the attainment of sovereign power to be followed by an alliance with the other British nations", who it was assumed would do likewise. For years before the war the Free Press had talked of this evolutionary Empire, deeply regretting that Mr. Bourassa had coined the word "Nationalist" and made it obnoxious.

Winnipeg seldom does things one half at a time. In the summer of 1917 J. W. Dafoe was one of the most astounded men in Canada. The other one was Sir Wilfrid Laurier. That was the year of the famous Liberal Convention. Had such a Convention happened in Chicago with such a man as Roosevelt as the centre-piece, its doings would have been cabled the world over. In its small way the Winnipeg Convention was more sensational than the Big Strike two years later. Mr. Dafoe was in Ottawa that summer. He was needed there. The Premier had come back from England primed with a policy of conscription to be enforced by a possible Coalition Government, an offer of which was made to the Opposition leader. Since early in the war the Free Press had argued for coalition, but opposed conscription until after the United States entered the struggle because of the inevitable exodus of slackers across the border.

There was a strong conscriptionist group of Liberals in Ottawa. We must assume that Mr. Dafoe, though not a member of Parliament, was strongly behind them; his presence in Ottawa indicates that his counsels were needed in view of the attitude to be taken by Western Liberals. It was the conscriptionist group of Liberals in Ottawa that decided upon the Convention, whether on the advice of Mr. Dafoe is not generally known. The intention was to create a Western Liberal group free from Laurier control, prepared to consider coalition—involving conscription—on its merits. So far, the policy of the Convention was in line with the previous programme of Mr. Dafoe. But the Liberal machine in the West—which was not Mr. Dafoe's party at all, because for some time he had been working on the principle that both the old parties as such had lost their grip on the West—went out and captured the delegates. The Convention was suddenly stampeded for Laurier, a result which Mr. Dafoe never expected but against which he had strongly urged, the Liberal Unionist leaders. The Free Press thereafter thundered against the Convention as entirely misrepresenting Western Liberalism. The subsequent South Winnipeg convention shewed that the Free Press was right. Almost the entire strength of Western Liberalism swung into the Union movement and the Coalition, and the Free Press became a temporary, though independent, supporter of the Union Government for the purpose of winning the war.

Now for the larger front stage view; how does Mr. Dafoe's attitude in the defeat of the Winnipeg Soviet idea of government and his former campaign against Laurier Liberals match with his attitude towards the Farmer Movement as embodied by Mr. Crerar? The leader of the Agrarian movement is a friend of the Free Press for much the same reason that the strike leaders in 1919 were a foe to it. Crerarism in the West looks for the support of that paper in its drive upon Ottawa. From his experience outwardly to the public, and intimately behind the scenes, always concerned with building up a new Liberalism on the wreck of the old, Dafoe endorses Crerar and his movement. When Crerar went into the Government the Free Press favoured his going. Mr. Dafoe clearly states that, "if the Union movement could retain its Liberal elements and produce an economic and taxation policy acceptable to Western opinion, we could continue to support it." In contemplating such a miracle, did he expect that the ultra-Tories would lop away from the Union, making a "rump" party to match the Laurier Liberals, and leaving the Union Government free to make an alliance with the Farmer Group? This we do not profess to know. In a political age like this almost any sort of alliance may be made for the purpose of capturing Parliament. But a permanent alliance between Western Liberalism represented by Mr. Crerar and the Government by Coalition looks now as fantastic as a Coalition between Lloyd George and de Valera. Mr. Dafoe probably knew that the Government and Mr. Crerar would lock horns over the tariff—since any species of protection and free trade never could sleep together. When Mr. Crerar left the Government on the budget issue, the Free Press ceased its active support of the Government and moved its guns to a detached position. When Meighen became Premier and in his programme speech at Stirling outlined his policy, Dafoe definitely declared himself as no longer in support of the Union Government. As he could not support the Laurier Liberal party, which he had formerly opposed, the only thing left was to make an active and open alliance with Mr. Crerar.

Such a mobile course of action is incomprehensible unless we keep in mind the fact that Mr. Dafoe has long found it impossible to support either of the old parties. The Coalition was a new one which he consistently supported on its merits and up to a point. The point was reached. Unionism and Agrarianism were incompatible. Therefore Unionism was a Tory institution; and the only Liberal programme left for the Free Press was to form an alliance with Mr. Crerar and his great group of class-conscious Agrarians.

By this time, if he reads this, Mr. Dafoe will have observed that we are trying to corner him on the question:

If you were opposed to a Labor Soviet which aimed at making a little Moscow of Winnipeg, what are you going to do about a Farmer Soviet that aims to capture Ottawa?

Already he has begun to answer. He uses a label for the party led by Mr. Crerar and evolved with the aid of Mr. Dafoe:

The National Progressive Party.

A good name, even if not new. What is behind the label? That the party so named has now taken over all the Liberal economic traditions in the West and after the next general election will become the real Liberal Party of Canada. In the opinion of Dafoe, Mackenzie King should keep out of the West in the coming election in order to let Mr. Crerar romp home with three-fourths of the entire representation in Parliament. He alleges that Laurier destroyed the old Western Liberal party in 1917; that King has not revived it—though Mr. Fielding might have done so; that Western Liberals have become Progressive except in the cities, where some have become Unionists. In making this statement he probably reckoned on Michael Clark becoming a Progressive. But Michael Clark has turned out to be one species of even Free Trade Liberal which Crerarism cannot absorb.

Let us concede that here is one of the most absorbing problems in Canada. If Dafoe backs Crerar in the effort to get that preponderant majority away from Meighen and King, then he is afterwards committed to Crerarism. Dafoe cannot afford to take Crerar and abandon the traditions of the Free Press. If he is so keen about real "nationalism" in this country as to regret that Bourassa made the word obnoxious, he has surely decided that the policy of the N.P.P. must be to build up a true national life in Canada. And the man who was Canada's press representative at the Peace Conference, with such exceptional facilities for focussing Canadian national sentiment among other nations, will not dare to countenance in Mr. Crerar and his followers any policy that will open the gates for the United States to walk in and walk over this nation as twenty years ago his Free Press associate, Clifford Sifton, opened the doors to let Europe inundate us with a polyglot, un-national flood.

No Canadian journalist has shouldered so perilous a responsibility. Dafoe knows what a struggle it is to preserve national identity on a basis of one to twelve against us. Born in Ontario and experienced in the East as few editors have ever been, he surely knows the value of not surrendering our national birthright for a mess of free-trade pottage.

If he knows this as well as we think he should, will he uphold the Free Press as the constant critic of Mr. Crerar if he attempts to denationalize this country; or will he accept a portfolio of Minister of the Interior in the Cabinet dominated by Messrs. Crerar and Drury, and in his haste to establish the new Liberalism of the National Progressive Party help to strike out the meaning of the word "National" in the label?

Can a man who fought a Direct Action Strike because it aimed at revolution, consistently endorse, lock, stock and barrel, a movement which aims at a revolution by Indirect Action through Parliament?

Is government by a "National Progressive Party" Agrarian Group with a business-farmer Premier and a farmer-dominated Cabinet any less of a group government in principle than the One Big Union, even though it does not tie up the nerve centres of the country by a minority general strike, but merely throttles Parliament, which is supposed to be the national brain, by the use of the group minority in voting?

Mr. Dafoe has already begun to answer. Again we see him sweltering in his sanctum, his hair like a windrow of hay, as he dictates something like this to his stenographer:

"Your logic is good except that your major premiss is a case of being off to a bad start. The National Progressive Party is not a group; it is a business majority. It contains the people who produce the majority of the nation's wealth for consumption and export and therefore enable the nation to pay its bills. It is Liberal because it advocates free-trade and is opposed to big monopolies, and there is no other Liberalism in Canada left worthy the name. The N.P.P. is the new Liberalism, not for the West alone, but for the whole country. It depends upon the franchise of the people, not upon the strike action of revolutionary groups. Agriculture, not industry, is the basis of Canada's economics. Even labour as embodied in the Trade Unions does not aim at revolution: Only the Reds want that. And the Reds are a hopeless minority. The farmers are not as yet a popular, though they are an economic, majority; but the future of this nation depends upon a voting as well as a producing majority of farmers."

This may not be the exact way in which Mr. Dafoe would state the case, but it expresses the fact that sound economics are at the root of all ideas which have to do with fair government. And it suggests that J. W. Dafoe with his Free Press has more to do than the Grain Growers' Guide with what the people think about the N.P.P.

For this reason we hope that Mr. Dafoe, the judge and the advocate as well, will always stay "behind the scenes" to keep Mr. Crerar on the right track if ever he gets the right of way.



HEADMASTER OF THE MANCHESTER SCHOOL

MICHAEL CLARK, M.P.

The eminent headmaster of the Manchester School in Canada is one of the few M.P.'s who know how to build a wheat stack. He farms in the spot north of Calgary where the poplar bluffs begin to mark that you are in the black loam of wonderful crops at a maximum distance from Liverpool. It is an art to build a wheat stack. Michael Clark—so we believe—knows exactly how many tiers to lay before he begins the "belly"; how to fill up the middle so that the butts of the sheaves droop to run off the rain; and how high to go with the bulge before he begins to draw in with the roof. All day long as he worked on his knees, not in prayer, he had mental leisure to think about one vast, fructifying theme; which of course is Free-Trade as they had it in England; unrestricted trade according to the Manchester School. And when he got his stack done he could tell to a ten-dollar bill how much tariff the railways and steamships would levy on that stack by the time the wheat got to Liverpool.

During the War, Clark was a win-the-war Liberal. He broke away from Laurier on conscription, which he openly supported. In July this year he was scheduled in the press—another of those wish-father-to-the-thought news items—to join Messrs. Drury and Crerar in an anti-tariff tour of Ontario. He did not go. He probably never had the slightest intention of going. Michael Clark had other wheat to stack. An Alberta election was coming. It came. When it was all over Alberta was in the grip of the Agrarians. Liberalism by constituencies was swept out as clean as a barn floor at fanning-mill time. And Michael Clark sat down to think it over. He had half expected that tornado. But he refused to like it. The farmers had stolen his own programme of free trade and by means of it had stampeded his Province for the sake of using it as a spring-broad to make the grand jump into the Federal arena. The apostle of free trade, himself as good a farmer as any of them, was now regarded as a chip on the Agrarian stream at high tide.

Wherefore Michael Clark, after certain "conversations" with Mr. Crerar, wrote the letter which, if Mackenzie King is as wise as he is hopeful, will be used to flood the country. Hoardings and electric signs in the interests of true-Liberalism should blazon abroad such sentences as these:

"The House of Lords, the Family Compact, the Manufacturers' Association and the junkers and militarists of Germany are each and all examples of group government."

"Class consciousness is none the less class selfishness, and therefore doomed to die, because it suddenly appears in Farmer and Labour parties."

"The apostles of progress must unite upon common principles, sincerely held to resist reaction, which is ever present like a dead weight to drag down the aspirations of the race for freedom, justice and democracy."

"These were the things for which sixty thousand Canadians died in the recent war. . . . I have been fighting 'class' for forty years. It would be quite impossible for me to turn my back on my past and the right in this election."

Our political history contains no declaration of independence more significant, manly and sensational. Repudiation of the Free Trade, group-governed, National Progressives by Michael Clark, the farmer and the apostle of Canadian Free Trade, is the first truly emancipating note that has been struck in all this pre-election barrage of group against group. Michael Clark may be no bigger as a Canadian for such a stand, but he is true to his own form as one of the rarest and manliest Radicals that Canada ever had. And his declaration should be of immense value to the Government, which confesses that its real fear is, not of Liberals, but of Agrarians.

The headmaster of the Manchester School in Canada has had a multitude of pupils; none more brilliant than Mr. Crerar, who seems to have made Free Trade a species of bondage. In no other land could Michael Clark so well have demonstrated the virtues of Free-Trade. On those plains, buffaloes worth multi-millions of dollars in trade annually migrated across "Parallel 49" into Montana and back again into the Territories. The prairie schooner trekked northward over the border carrying migrants in search of homes when there was no government official to turn them back or to question the terminus of their travels. The freight wagons creaked up from the south into MacLeod and past it into the valley of Saskatchewan, carrying goods made and bought in the land of the Western Yankee long before the great antidote to Free Trade, the Transcontinental Railway, put those crooked trails out of business.

Clark was spouting free-trade on the prairies at a time when many men in the West scarcely knew that trade had any restrictions except in the matter of beverages. He was an apostle of Cobdenism almost before the Territories were baptized into party politics at all; when Regina was the home of a Territorial County Council that had neither Tories nor Grits. He was farming and prophesying commercial union before James J. Hill began to compete with the protective C.P.R. for trade north and south instead of the long-haul east and west. Before ever a real Agrarian began to head out on the plains he was contending like a tribune of the plebs, that unrestricted reciprocity between two halves of a great productive continent, of which one-half contains nine-tenths of the people, was not a prelude to annexation away from the grand old Empire. And when he got into Parliament the voice that had been so mighty in the trail-side school houses and the little town-halls became more potent than ever as "Red Michael" went full tilt in the House against the high protectionists.

High courage was here. Bucking bronchos from the West who had gone to Ottawa were duly corralled, haltered, hobbled, surcingled and thrown, finally harnessed and driven by either of the old parties. In breaking a political broncho the Liberal party was as good as the other. But the House is full of insurgents now, lining up into a tyrannized and tyrannous group organizing as a party. In Clark's inaugural days, and for years after, there was but one real solo voice calling like a trombone from a high tower for Free Trade as the Kingdom of God which, if they would first seek it, all other things would be added unto them.

French psychology traces certain forms of insanity to the fixed idea. There have been times when Parliament has regarded Michael Clark as a melancholy victim of this big idea that warped his whole political mentality. But it was a grand form of insanity. Nobody ever heard Clark in the House who did not realize that here was a fine British rebel whose brain should be a great hope to his party. The old chief knew that. He kept his ear towards Clark when he was sometimes deaf to his ministers.

Clark was the mountain peak which the party had left for its fleshly sojourn in Egypt. The Liberal party in Canada had once been a free trade party—somewhat before Clark's time. In free trade and the universal franchise had been its life. But Liberalism before 1896 was one thing; afterwards another. Laurier in practice knew that Clark was magnificently wrong; in theory superbly right. Therefore he indulged and admired him; sometimes playing with him, conscious that Liberalism was the only show in which Clark could be a national performer.

In truth Michael Clark was for long enough a man without a party. But from the benches of the Liberals he could stand and preach his Manchester doctrines to Hansard and the nation, even when the party yawned and held dangerously on to the tariff.

It was always a tonic to hear Clark in the House. Like Carlyle he breathed a certain inexorable vitality into public affairs. To meet Clark in the corridors was to get a breeze that swept like a chinook across the frozen waste of old-line politics. In the gloom of the lobby this apostle of red hair and rubicund visage was a beacon light. I have met him so, of a Saturday afternoon when the House was out of session, and when the member for Red Deer was ripe for a free talk to any stranger. A great friendliness possessed him always. He could laugh at the besetments of party and the tyranny that opportunism imposes on great minds. He himself was free. He wanted others to be free. He could stand for half an hour in one gloomy crypt of those corridors in the old Parliament and talk of the power of being that kind of Liberal.

It was the wheat that helped to keep Clark where he was on the outpost of Liberalism. When his old leader became enswathed with election bandages, Clark looked out upon the landscapes of the wheat, not so long ago the limitless pasture of the free-trade buffaloes, and felt again the vision of the life that is Liberal but is sometimes called another name.

Alberta was leaping to a great life. Almost in the middle of it north and south is the town of Red Deer. All about it were the settlements of "nationals" emancipated from bondage in Europe. What was the use, quoth Clark, of bringing such people to a country of free homestead land, of alleged free institutions and making them the slaves, first of political machines, second of protected interests in the East? If enslaved people were to become free in a new land why should the wheat and the oats and the cattle which they raised not be made free to move for a market as naturally as the wind blows across the borders?

This may not have been the precise order in which such ideas generated in the mind of Michael Clark; but it is the way those ideas confronting such a man strike a contemporary. I have lived in the land where Clark lives, though not at Red Deer, and remember well the burning desire of twenty years ago in that far northwest for economic emancipation. Then at any meeting, no matter what, any little dinner to a citizen no matter whom, men rose to talk about the need of conquering the isolation of the country. They remembered the tyranny of the old Trading Company into Hudson's Bay. They clamoured for more people, more farms, more towns, more railways, more life—from the East. And when it came they said the East was a tyrant, an economic monster to bleed them white. Clark, as one remembers him best, has not been so much a foe to the East as he has wanted to be a friend to the South.

But a new oligarchy was arising on the great prairies. As official liberalism got its grip on the three Provinces and became itself a tyrant, while unofficial Toryism in league with the big railways got a stranglehold on British Columbia, and when even "Honest" Frank Oliver ceased to be an independent Liberal and became a red-taped Minister of the Interior, Clark the Free Trader in Parliament found himself striking hands with a sect mainly of Liberal Radicals first called Grain Growers, next Agrarians, and by some the very devil. With official Liberalism as expressed by Scott, Sifton, Cross, Norris and Martin he had only superficial sympathy. These men were more or less on masquerade. The Agrarians were barefaced, one-faced Radicals who would open the borders, and abolish the customs houses, and set up a sort of Western political autonomy whose root idea was that trade should be as free as grasshoppers. These people were not raising Old Flag wheat.

How far Clark fell in line with all the doctrines of the United Grain Growers, I do not know. But one thing clear about this insurgent is that he has always stood four-square for the British connection—and for all that it means to Canada. Clark is a Britisher. He still has his English accent. You would spot him at once as a transplanted Englishman. He is prouder of being a Briton in Canada than he ever would have been in England. Clark never forgot—Manchester and Cobden. He stood among the wheat and saw the Empire.

When the War came and his adopted Province of Alberta for a long while held the lead in enlistments for war, no man was happier in the grim outlook than the member for Red Deer. The War to him was a great emergence of Liberalism the world over when Peace should bring Free Humanity, Free wheat, Free trade. Why not? His son went to the war—and he lost him. His speech on the Military Service Act was in many respects the best of all in that debate, not in rhetoric, but in logical virility. It was a howitzer broadside, slow, deliberate, but every shot a hit. His old leader had already declined a belated offer of Coalition and was now opposing conscription and arguing for amendment by Referendum. In all his life he never got from a political foe such a searchlight on his soul as his once devoted follower gave him in this speech.

Laurier had previously executed the Nationalist dodge of taking refuge behind the Militia Act, asserting that it was right to enforce that Act calling out the Militia for the defence of Canada; to which Clark replied:

"England is fighting this war wherever she sees the turban of a Turk or the helmet of a Teuton. She is fighting it in Egypt, Mesopotamia, in Macedonia, in Belgium—most of all in France. . . . America, whose independence had been fought in a struggle of blood for sound fiscal ideas was now immortalizing her reunion with Britain, her old enemy. . . . If organized labour was opposed to conscription, so much the worse for labour, whose own trades unions were a form of conscription; in England he had never named either lord or labour with a capital L. . . . Canada should be in the war to her last man and her last dollar. . . . As to the referendum amendment, it was fathered by the man who down to his attitude on this question had gone into history as the greatest of all Canadians, but who had applauded Pugsley when he argued against extending the life of this Parliament, and who in the matter of sending men to fight, in organizing the whole nation for war, in conserving national unity, and in making an election a smaller matter than the honour of a nation was opposed to the Government. If the amendment should carry, and the Referendum show a majority against the Government measure by omitting the soldier vote and piling up the vote from the Province which had given birth to the Referendum, then when the author of that measure should be returned to power on a no-conscription issue what chance was there for Canada to win her part of the war with the lion Laurier and the lamb Oliver lying down together—and a little child—Macdonald from Pictou—leading them?"

Not as a climax, but as a mere personal note midway in his speech, he had said:

"I have a little toddling grandson on my farm out West to-day whose father was killed with a gunshot wound in his neck two weeks ago. I say to you, sir, on my soul and conscience I support this Bill, because I believe it to be a part of the necessary machinery which can save that little fellow, born a Canadian, and thousands of others like him from ever going through what his father and his uncles have gone through."

Parliamentary debate has risen to much higher levels of oratory, but seldom to such a height of accusing vindication and personal affection for the accused from whom an insurgent is driven to sever his allegiance. Clark can always make some sort of big human speech with a natural knack of getting at the vitals of a subject in simple, dignified language and a searching logic—once you admit his major premiss. That one speech flung into bold relief, almost as the No Man's Land under a flare of a great barrage, the issues between men who for so many years had been political confederates.

A couple of years later I again met Clark when he was speaking guest at an Empire Club luncheon. His topic was—the Empire. His brand of political ideas was vastly different from those of the average man in his audience, and he knew it. The Club had invited him, because he was Michael Clark. He said not a word about trade. He uttered no propaganda. He talked simply and strongly about the race that had made the Empire which to him was a commonwealth of neither trade nor conquest but of liberating ideas.

I don't think that any of the Chamberlain-Foster school could have uttered quite so broad and noble a tribute to the inner vitality of the British League of Nations. And not even Mr. Rowell could have surpassed it for breadth of view on that subject, Clark looked at the Empire from within outwards. He saw in it the expression of a great race of people working the leaven upon other races; a mighty confederacy of free nations.

Red Michael has been a great informing Liberal, and a big illuminating Canadian. Whether grandly right or magnificently wrong, he is never uninteresting; a man who could come off a stack of wheat, wash himself up bare-armed, and in Sunday clothes but seldom well-dressed and never groomed, step on to a platform over in the schoolhouse or the town hall and make a great speech to men who believe in the simplicity of a big mind that thinks hard on the welfare of the majority. John Bright would have loved such a man. Even John Macdonald might have loved him. And the one regret among those who value the power of a big free nature in a nation is, that owing to some fatalistic streak in his genius, Michael Clark has not risen to the inspiring height from which the country might get the best that he has to give. Never cured of his insurgency in Parliament, he has become an uncompromising conformist to one big and bigoted idea that universal Free-Trade is the need of the world, and especially of Canada. He persists in the delusion that what has been good for Britain must be good for Canada; not only is Canada at war when Britain fights, but when Britain has no tariff Canada must have free trade.

All which is freely forgiven this stalwart on account of his challenge to the group who took his Free Trade luggage and attempted to label it National Progressive. The Free Trader who could watch that caravan of adventurers going down the trail and stoutly tell them all to keep on going to the devil, deserves well of his country. Michael Clark's advocacy of Progressivism might have got him the promise of a Cabinet position. His rejection of it is the proof that the free-man who believes in great parties can never be bound by a class-conscious group. "Better a dinner of herbs . . . ." Michael Clark, whether M.P. or not, is free to consider himself if need be a party of one man—without a platform, but not devoid of a cause.

Whatever Michael Clark knows about the benefits of Free Trade and its effect upon the exchanges, he knows peculiarly well the danger of unrestricted reciprocity in sentiment between Canada and the United States.



THE SPHINX FROM SASKATCHEWAN

HON. J. A. CALDER

The Hon. J. A. Calder has never seen the Sphinx. But he has a looking glass. He has never been in Egypt. But he has lived a long while in Saskatchewan. A man who can continue to know as much as he knows about the confessional side of government, and who can say so little, has some claim to be considered—Canada's political Sphinx.

Such a reputation is sometimes enviable. The average public man babbles. Often he talks to conceal thought or as a substitute for action. The mental energy needed to turn end for end what some of these garrulous people say, in order to decipher just what they mean, is usually more than the wisdom is worth. Calder spares us. He tells us nothing. His silence may be golden, or it may be just a habit; but from the known character of Calder it is never the omniscience of stupidity.

A Sphinx in action may sometimes give himself away. It is not usual for a Sphinx to do anything except to conceal the riddle. Calder has all his life been a busy man. He is still in middle age. All but fourteen years of his life up till 1917 he spent in the West, most of it in the part now known as Saskatchewan. Ten years ago he was furtively discussed as successor to Laurier. He is now a Unionist-Liberal. To give him work in the administration commensurate with his ability—or somewhere near it—a new department was created in Immigration. Now he is slated for the Senate!

Little was heard about Calder's department. He had a publicity bureau which did not spend vast amounts of money on diffusing information. The department is said to contain a moving picture section, some of whose films probably creep into Canadian movie houses. But nobody ever saw a picture of J. A. Calder on a screen. He had a Canadian novelist as chief of publicity. That novelist might have yearned for the chance to immortalize his chief in a story, but so long as he is in the pay of Mr. Calder's department he will continue to yearn. And not even he has been given to understand why when a reconstructed Liberal like Mr. Rowell left the Cabinet at the appointment of Premier Meighen, the Minister of Immigration stayed on. One might surmise that the man who, a decade ago, looked to some people like an Elisha to Laurier, would run again in Moosejaw as a National Liberal Conservative with the expectation of re-entering the Cabinet, probably as Minister of the Interior. But he was suddenly and humdrumly designated for the Senate.

Apparently the Sphinx is not a great deal concerned over the fact that his action in the case would throw some light on the sort of government we may expect, and the kind of man we are privileged to conjecture Mr. Calder to be. He seems to take very little interest in what any one thinks about him. He accompanied the Premier on his Western trip. Now and then he made a speech. He was heckled. He was in the land of his critics, where he was unofficially known as "Jim". What did he mean by staying in a Government which was supposed to have finished its work in 1919? Was he coming back as a Liberal? Had he no longer any fellow-feeling for the farmers among whom he had lived for so long? The Sphinx did not directly say. He was publicly and conventionally endorsing the Premier, who was well able to speak for himself on behalf of the administration.

Calder was headmaster of Moosejaw High School when he was twenty-three, in the year 1891. He must have learned reticence then. Up in Edmonton, a few years later one heard considerably of Goggin, the speechmaking educationist of the prairie; rarely or never of Calder, who about that time was Inspector of Schools for the Territories, not yet provinces. The silent young inspector must have looked like the reincarnation of Socrates as he drove—sometimes a four-horse team on a buckboard—through the sloughs of the Northwest. No prairie doctor with a radius of fifty miles, none but a pioneer missionary like McDougall or Robertson, ever had so glorious a chance to study what the life of a new country was going to be, as this inspector toiling hundreds of miles over a land, where, if he stopped at three school-houses a week, he was doing a good average in bad weather.

Regina had no party politics then. All it had was the mounted police and a leg-boot legislature. Every man was then a trailsman. In Calder's time as Inspector, there were only 400 miles of railway north of the C.P.R. main line—the two branches to Prince Albert and to Edmonton. It was only in the last year or two of this buckboard and broncho inspectorate that there were even any Doukhobors in that part of the world to bring back the days of Adam and Eve. He saw all the "nationals" beginning to arrive. He could put his finger on a gaunt anemic map of the Territories and point out just where there was beginning to be some nucleus of a foreign settlement. He could talk a little Cree and he learned the jargon of several countries in Europe. He saw the farmers arise, and railways begin, and little villages dot the skyline, and here and there an elevator, when a box car was looked at by a trailsman as a small boy gapes at a circus parade.

Calder lived in Regina when politics was born. He shares with Frank Oliver the memory of the day when Nicholas Flood Davin was the wonder orator of the West, and when freight-carters from Winnipeg to Edmonton via Saskatoon, which was then a temperance colony, carried demijohns of whisky on traders' permits to make everybody at home ingloriously drunk, including the mounted police. He recalls the day when the first lieutenant-governor was inaugurated in Regina and what Frank Oliver said about it. Four years he was Deputy Commissioner of Education for the Territories up till the inauguration of two new Provinces when, travelling on a thousand miles of new railway and over the old main line of the C.P.R., Laurier paid his first visit to the Great West and discovered as one of its greatest potentialities J. A. Calder, who under Premier Scott became Provincial Treasurer and Commissioner of Education.

To people outside Saskatchewan—even in Alberta, he was very little known—Calder has always been a somewhat nebulous figure; to some critics, a rather suspicious character; but always—clever. Being a Sphinx he never courted popularity and seldom got it. Scott was brilliant, popular and impulsive. His chief executive in Education, Railways and Telephones and Premier de facto during more than half of Scott's term, was cold and calculating. The West prefers warm-blooded politicians. Calder succeeded in spite of his manner, or his mask, or whatever it may have been; and he did it by a penetrating knowledge of the country, a superb capacity as administrator and a talent for keeping out of trouble. He was no man for prima donna scenes. Even the Education Department, a witch's cauldron of troubles over the Separate School question in the new provinces, never entangled him in theatricals. He was unpopular with the Opposition as soon as the new Government began, because he was regarded as a Civil Service interloper. What business had a school inspector in politics, and in a Cabinet?

Calder demonstrated that best when he handed over the educational cauldron to Scott and became Minister of Railways and Telephones. Here was a department of utility administration in which he shone. He had great political executive ability. When Scott was absent more than half his time through illness, Calder was Premier. There was no other man to choose. The liquor problem was more his to handle than the Premier's. Calder did not share the popular enthusiasm for Government-dispensed liquor. He knew the weaknesses of officials and the historic thirst of the prairie. The Opposition constantly accused him of being in league with the liquor men. Calder made no denial or affirmation. He was Mephisto enough to let people wonder whether he was one thing or the opposite.

A man who knew Calder twenty-two years ago gave, not long ago, some impressions of the Minister in connections with the liquor administration.

"About two weeks after Saskatchewan went dry," he said, "I was spending a night in one of the larger towns in the Province. Among the other guests at the hotel was a member of the Government. In the lobby an interesting argument waged throughout the evening, the Minister of course, defending the action of the Government in closing the bars. Among other things he told us about the relief work carried on by the Dominion and Provincial Governments in certain districts where there had been crop failures, in order that the destitute settlers might earn or borrow enough to keep themselves and their families through the winter. He emphasized one mistake the Government had made in not first closing every bar in the districts affected, because there were many instances where every dollar that had been earned or borrowed had been spent in the bars on the very day that it was received, by the men whose families it was intended to save from freezing and starvation.

"I was telling this afterwards to one of the leading social reformers of Saskatchewan, and a smile played over his face as I was speaking. When I had finished he said:

"'He didn't tell you the whole story. We recognized the necessity of closing those bars before that relief work was started, and urged it so strongly on the Government that they agreed to do it. The Orders-in-Council were drawn up and ready to be signed when Calder, who had been absent from the Province on business, returned and immediately it was all off.'"

Calder has a sister who is one of the leading social workers in Regina. She has a profound regard for her talented brother Jim.

The liquor did more than even Separate Schools to disrupt Government forces in Saskatchewan. Calder was no hypocrite to weep over the moral issues in prohibition. He was not a profound governmentarian or a champion of enforced morality. A Government might own and operate telephones, but not so well consciences. The liquor administration turned out to be a mess in Saskatchewan, largely because the administration did not unanimously believe in the thing that the majority seemed to want. Calder was no more to blame than anybody else, except that he was highest in the Government when the Premier was away.

The reformers said that Calder was pro-liquor in the administration. He seemed to have no opinions about that—at least for publication. Ideals often run away with communities. If he had only spouted a little now and then he would have given people a chance to bring something home to him, and himself a chance to get near the people. Two or three scandals came up in departments over which he had control. Commissions were appointed to investigate; they always exonerated Calder. Even in the search-light on liquor—as many as four, one after another—no technical blame attached to the silent Minister. Calder may have had a contempt for either commissions or public opinion. A Sphinx is as a rule not much of a burning avenger of wrongs to the community. Besides Scott was continually running into emotional trouble. The Premier de facto had the balance to keep. He must work while other people talked.

A German-born but thoroughly loyal detective engaged by the Borden Government to report upon seditious activities of the German element who were so badly disgruntled over the Wartime Elections Act, repeated to the writer more than once with great vehemence that Mr. Calder had a special interest in the Regina Leader, which was used to get votes for the Administration, particularly among the German element. Governments had been known to own newspapers before Calder ever began. The Leader was naturally a Government organ and may have needed pap. This is a form of patronage hard to uproot.

When Scott finally retired the chief administrator did not succeed him. Martin was picked, a safe, genial and popular man. The Sphinx, it is said, might have had the post; but he preferred to stay behind the scenes. Before that he had been much talked about as a possible successor to Laurier—but with not much hope of succeeding. There are probably a number of reasons why Mr. Calder did not take the Provincial Premiership. Dig them out of Calder if you may. He has never explained. He leaves it to his commentators.

We are privileged therefore to conjecture that:

Mr. Calder was pretty well sick of Saskatchewan politics and was looking hard in almost any direction for a good way out;

Mr. Calder could see far enough into the near future of prairie politics to know that Liberalism was becoming a label for something else; and he was not disposed to come out as an Agrarian Liberal;

Mr. Calder wanted a chance to begin politics all over again, because with all his practical success he felt that he had travelled some wrong trails.

Possibly all of these had something to do with the case. At the Winnipeg Liberal Convention in 1917 he was a coalition-conscription Liberal. He worked against the Liberal machine that captured the Convention by a fluke for Laurier. Before that he was known to believe in Union Government. It was only common sense to make him one of the Prairie triumvirate—Calder, Sifton, Crerar, who carried the West into the Union. Cloudy as his career has been, for no reason that anyone specially cared to name, he might in Ottawa be a big force for the Government. He was a behind-the-scenes actor. He knew something about the art of winning elections and converting immigrants into voters. He was practical. He would be needed in Ottawa—more than he could see any use for his talent in Saskatchewan with its farmer-dominated Cabinets.

Alberta has gone Agrarian. All Saskatchewan needs is a change of label. Some psychological morning Premier Martin will get up and rub out "Liberal" after his name, buy a big farm and set up as a National Progressive. Provincial Legislatures are things to be captured. The old parties shrewdly used them in the Ottawa game. The new ones are just as apt. Too long these Western elective bodies have been on the switch. It is time to shunt them, once more, on to the main line that leads to Ottawa—with a different company label on the cars.

By no exercise of the imagination can one behold Jim Calder becoming a Grain-Grower Progressive. The thing is anomalous.

On the other side of the Sphinx he is credited by those also who know him well in Regina with going to Ottawa purely as a patriotic duty. He wanted some work to do for the whole country bigger than any he had done in Regina. The authority formerly quoted in this article had this to say about Calder in 1917 when Calder took office in Ottawa:

"About the time of the Winnipeg Convention I was talking with the same man whom I have already quoted, and we were discussing the enigma which Calder's character and public record seemed to present. I knew that my friend was not especially a friend of Calder's, so his words seemed to carry greater weight.

"'There is no person in Canadian public life,' he said, 'who has been trying more conscientiously and consistently to be good than Calder. I will not say that his motive may be higher than that of political expediency; but he has been and is more scrupulously careful to do nothing that may reflect in any way upon his honour and integrity. I believe that he has set before him the highest possible ideal of public service and that he is doing everything he can to live up to it.'"

A prominent citizen of Regina who has seen a good deal of Calder, both in his home city and in Ottawa, has the same opinion; adding that Calder never bamboozles a deputation with suave words or false hopes; what the Cabinet thinks about any particular programme of a deputation he already knows and suggests that a typed memo, which he will present, will be as good as waiting days for a personal appeal. In 1919 he informed the writer that he proposed to enact much-needed reforms in immigrating Canada, especially as to the quality of new-comers.

Why has Mr. Calder never made a big study of this absorbing question? When the Premier went to the Imperial Conference, with his mind pretty well made up on the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, why had he not in his grip, to show the Conference, one common sense, powerful little book signed by Hon. J. A. Calder, Minister of Immigration, giving a complete exposition of Japanese life in Canada? When we are all talking about the good entente with the United States why can't we get from the Immigration Department in Ottawa a hand-book giving a complete picture of what Americans have done in the West?

However, the Sphinx may have the best of reasons for not doing these simple things. But there is scarcely a Department of administration that does not regard itself as a machine for winning elections as much as for serving the people who pay for it. Apart from all he has not told us, I have no doubt Mr. Calder is doing a big reforming work on immigration in Ottawa.

The Immigration Minister should be our leading sociologist. He should be able to diagnose communities. He might easily begin upon Ottawa. What a study a cross section of the Smart Set would be, especially upon the arrival of a new king at Rideau Hall! There's nothing in other democracies quite like that. Washington has a White House, but the inmate is merely an elected servant of the State. Rideau Hall is an endowment, a gift of the gods. The 30,000 people of greater and lesser degree in Ottawa who normally or abnormally live by the Civil Service are profoundly affected by the arrival, sojourn and departure of the Governor-General. They are vitally influenced and entertained by the Parliamentary restaurant, even without the bar. The social show provided by Ministers' and members' wives and their visiting friends is itself a subtle study in the art of getting on in the new world, which is at the root of all immigration. Bridge for money and dining out with your friend's wife are within the reach of any ambitious immigrant. The Smart Set in Ottawa is an exotic colony all by itself. Montreal and Toronto and Winnipeg can merely copy it. Some of the farmers have their eye on the Set; no, not to abolish it. Women must have their share in the Government. Petticoats and politics are affinities. Farmers are no more necessarily immune from what is said to have corrupted the Roman Empire than Tories or Grits. Farmers in fact, as Mr. Calder knows, are not the hope of the world; neither are lawyers nor manufacturers.

Suppose we ask the Sphinx about this. Listen in imagination to this once Liberal, as with an astounding burst of candour he says:

"My friend, your description of my make-up may be as right or as foolish as anybody feels disposed to think. None of it bothers me. What does bother me is the law of compensation. Agree with me that the manufacturer had his drastic innings with Canadian governments; that tariffs and protected industries are the result; that lawyers—yes, I'm a lawyer—have had a big day in our affairs because they had the talent for schemes and speeches. Admit that and conclude—that the very human farmer thinks his turn is coming, and rather soon. But—somebody who was never educated as a Tory has got to help the National-Liberal-Conservative Government to get an even chance to administer this nation after the upheavals of war. Somebody who moves silently while others are talking their tongues loose may be needed to manipulate——"

Before the Sphinx could complete his statement of the case he was politely asked if he would care to inter his talents in the Canadian Senate, and he suavely answered that such a thing might be a good way to solve the conundrum, even though it would make a thoroughly stupid last act in the play.



A TRUE VOICE OF LABOUR

MR. TOM MOORE

Many years ago an Irish poet visiting Canada and voyaging down the Ottawa wrote a poem of which may people recall only the lines—

"Row, brothers, row, the stream runs fast, The rapids are near, the daylight's past."

The Tom Moore about whom this article is sketched is not a poet. He is, in fact, one of the prosiest public men in Canada. But we may leave it to any of those who have known him during the past three years when he has been President of the Trades and Labour Congress, if many and many a time he has not felt some such sentiment as—

"Row, brothers, row, the stream runs fast, The rapids are near, the daylight's past."

Since Mr. Charles Draper first became Secretary of that Congress he has never known a period when so much was expected of a President by way of limitless patience, statesmanship and self-control as has been shown by Tom Moore. The rapids were always close to this man, and there were rocks under the rapids. It took steady piloting by the captain to keep the crew of the labour ship from getting holes in her bottom and going down.

So far as one has been able to follow the career of Moore at the head of the Congress, and as reported in the public press, he stands now and always for adherence to the principle of Union in evolution. He believes in labour getting ahead; but not by the method of upturning everything that is established just to see what kinds of crawling things there may be underneath.

When we reflect that Canada is not primarily an industrial so much as an agricultural country, it is startling to remember that two years ago it was the home of the only organized attempt ever made in America on a scale of efficiency to establish something closely resembling a Soviet government. The big Winnipeg Strike was a lurid menace to the solidarity of labour in Canada. West of Winnipeg, once the Red River Soviet had been set up, there was a chain of inflammable centres to link up with the revolution. Calgary was the scene of one convention which had sent a cable of sympathy to Moscow. British Columbia was full of seething susceptible elements, regarded by some of the Reds across the border as the real centre rather than Winnipeg, of the One Big Union idea. The mines of Alberta were dominated by swaggering foreigners who owed no allegiance to the British or any other flag except the Red emblem. Long ago under the influence of the clergy and the Archbishop of Montreal, Quebec had created a Canadian Labour movement intended to cut Canadian labour away from the American Federation. This was a phase of the Nationalism that had its headquarters in Quebec, but had spread in various strange guises to other parts of the country, when none of the clergy or intellectuals behind the movement dreamed that the One Big Union insurgent against the A.F.L. would be the most theatrical result. Once get the O.B.U. idea rampant in Quebec with its scores of big industries and its thousands of poorly educated workers, and the Red movement was due to spread faster than the United Farmers' programme had ever done.

In the propagation of the Red programme Ontario, and especially industrial Toronto, was regarded as the buffer state. But if the Soviet had succeeded in Winnipeg and further West, then the whole weight of that success marching upon Ontario, with Quebec bringing up the eastern end, would form a sort of nutcracker device from which Ontario would have had a hard time to escape.

This was the dazzling formula propounded at a time when every nation in the world was in a state of ferment, and when the vast loose-jointed nation known as Canada was in a condition of instability unknown since it became a Confederation. The apostles of the Red programme had all the advantages of being able to sling the paint on to the canvas of the future without caring overmuch about the drawing. Men in large numbers everywhere seemed ready to grasp at and embrace the unusual. People who for years had been ground down by high prices for the commonest necessities, considered seriously the question of the "salariat" joining forces with organizing labour under a banner that might be red. Civilization, physically shattered by the war and hysterically stampeded by the doctrine of self-determination of peoples—a high form of Bolshevism—stood ready to inquire whether the theories being tried in Russia were not, after all, right, no matter what butchery might be perpetrated in working them out.

Revolutionary ideas were everywhere.

Everything prepared the public mind.

A barrage of propaganda had been set up—and kept up.

Legitimate Trades Unionism itself in Britain had subscribed to The Aims of Labour put forth by Arthur Henderson, who foreshadowed barricades and bayonets in London streets if the proletariat did not get their "rights".

Canada did not surely escape. We had the Winnipeg flare-up, which was watched by legitimate labour across the border. The A.F.L. was challenged for authority in this country. It came to the peculiar pass, that in order to maintain the solidarity of Canada as constituted by Government under the Old Flag, the legitimate leaders of labour had to fall back upon the one continental organization which makes brotherhoods, not across the seas, nor so much across Canada, but across the border.

It was Ontario's opportunity; the steady old Province of some bigotry, great industry, many labour unions, and more or less fixed ideas regarding the function of Government. The office of Tom Moore is in Ottawa. There the President of the Trades and Labour Congress is in close touch with the Labour Department, with the Labour Gazette, with the Government in Council. We shall never know just how much of the steady conservatism of Moore at the first Congress following the Winnipeg strike, as well as at other Congresses later, was developed and held steady by association with Government.

But whether or no, even though it was nothing but loyalty to the established brotherhoods of the A.F.L. or a deeper loyalty to his own ideas of the case, the rock-steady influence of Tom Moore at the conventions was the one biggest hope of the indirect action element winning out. He was not opposed to Socialism. He has to work with Socialists—of many sorts. The whole basic idea of the Federation of Labour is a degree of Socialism. But it was the Marxian brand of Socialism born in Germany and transplanted to Russia to which Moore was opposed. He saw no field for this in Canada. He believed that Canada had a right to freedom of action. At least if it came to a choice between authority from the Gompers organization in the United States, and the Lenine tyranny in Russia, the course was clear. Time and time again he was bombarded and machine-gunned by the Red elements in Congress and Convention. As often he solidly stood his ground, based upon the older idea of labour getting its rights through negotiation and later through the ballot.

"Row, brothers, row, the stream runs fast, The rapids are near——"

But the daylight was not yet past for this Tom Moore. He could see ahead.

"I have seen Moore," says a close observer of him for two years, "faced by labour opponents in a number of Western cities. In all the howling he has never lost his temper or his dignity."

It would have been so much easier for this man to lose his temper, except that he knew it would be harder at the end when he had to face his own steady rank and file accusing him of poor chieftainship. It would have been so much easier to compromise with the preachers of glittering formulae, except that in the settling up he would have to justify himself to those who suspected him of defection.

Moore stuck to the commonplace business of wages and hours and agreements. He had no head for the poetry of Utopias. He knew, as he knows, that wages are the chief item of cost in all commodities, and that no matter what form of capitalism you choose, whether embodied in a Soviet or in a close corporation of dividends, wages of labour must be paid. He knows that prices of living and of labour are almost convertible. Amid all the howling and paeaning for a better day, for the new life, for the heaven upon earth, for the glorification of the proletariat, he could stand hard and fast by the common necessity of sticking to an agreement and as fast as possible bettering conditions.