We have heard independent observers say that the Reds have always shown a grasp of the new life, while the Trades Union men were crawling along with the uninspired programme of wages and hours; that the Reds were the sacrificing idealists and the Unionists the selfish Tories who wanted nothing more than to slowly improve their condition. Well, the logic of events seems to show that in the long run the Moores have the gospel. One scarcely cares to think what might have happened in Canadian industry and common living had Tom Moore given way to the Reds who came at him from almost every quarter.

At the 1920 Congress Moore had the old-fashioned courage to ask the new Premier of Canada, Arthur Meighen, to address the delegates. Of all men, the man who prosecuted the leaders of the Winnipeg Strike was the last to say anything to organized labour about milleniums or about anything more Utopian than a common agreement between labour and capital for the good of all. Moore had no fear. He believed that he was right. Had he invited Mackenzie King he would have got a speech with more in it about the philosophy of Industry and Humanity, and perhaps more to the point in the practical study of the labour question. By inviting the Premier, Moore paid respect to government. Even Mr. Crerar might have made a more sympathetic speech. But in the Moore philosophy there is no radical connection between Crerar and Labour. In the organization of the Drury coalition between Labour and the Farm he can see one way of getting the rights of each incorporated into legislation.

But the Government is the final thing. Statesmanship is bigger than programmes painted on the clouds. There's a vast deal to be done yet in this country for the enfranchisement of labour in industry as it is franchised in government. There are pig-headed Tories of industry who will have to illustrate tombstones before some of the old spirit of repression of labour will die out in the nation. But the die-hards are fewer every year. Some wages had to come down to get everything else down. But we believe also, as Moore probably does, that wages which are the chief item of cost in all commodities ought to be as high as production will stand and pay reasonable profits on investment; that collective bargaining is sound as applied to individual industries, but a form of bigoted tyranny when extended to the whole group or to the sympathetic strike; and that the slogan, "Union is Strength", does not mean levelling efficiency to the lowest common denominator.

The day may come in the recorded minutes of Trades and Labour Congresses in Canada when a man of broader and more constructive vision may be needed to build the brotherhood out into labour statesmanship. But for the past few years, and for the few to come, Canadian labour and common weal may well arise to thank Tom Moore, who, when the rapids were near and the rocks were under the rapids, kept his craft rowing into safe water. Tom Moore of Ireland was a poet. Tom Moore of Canada is not. The play on the names is only an accident. The parallel holds. May we never again need such a man in this country to be sure that labour does not run us all on the rocks under the Red rapids.



A MAN WITHOUT A PUBLIC

SIR WILLIAM MACKENZIE

A few years ago, before Stefansson reported on the blond Eskimos, the first Eskimo movie ever taken was shown in Toronto to a small audience who waited an hour for the film, which did not begin until a thick, grizzly man with shrewish, penetrating eyes came in with his party.

"Sir William Mackenzie, late as usual," whispered one. "He never arrives on time at a public function, often sleeps at a play, and sometimes when his family invite musicians to his home he plays bridge in a distant room so as not to hear the music."

"Oh, yes," nudged the other; "but Sir William, you see, owns this film. It was taken by his own exploration party."

"Oh! Then the last scene will probably be Eskimos laying railway ties."

"Oh, no. Digging up mineral deposits. Iron—Sh!"

It was a wonderful film full of epical energy and primitive beauty; picturing one of the few kinds of people in Canada that Mackenzie had never been able to link up to civilization. The room was hung with costumes, curios and weapons of these folk, all of which were afterwards presented to the Royal Ontario Museum by Sir William, who was never enormously interested in ethnology. And that exploration of the far North was the last act in the complicated drama of William Mackenzie's great discoveries in Canada.

A study of Mackenzie is useful under the head:

WHAT DID YOU—NOT—DO TO WIN THE WAR?

He was appointed in 1915 on an "Economic Commission" which seems to have practised a rigid economy on what it did for the country, because it was never heard of again. However, it was No. 1A of the 46 war-time commissions, and because Mackenzie was a member it should have a memorial.

There is one man in Germany something like William Mackenzie, who makes money almost by magic out of utilities and buys up concerns in other countries with money which he made in his own. His name is Hugo Stinnes. Mackenzie is a bigger man and a higher type than Stinnes; but each man regards his country as a commercial asset to be developed; each is a wizard of a species of applied finance. For years Mackenzie was of speculative interest in Canada to people who had never even seen his photograph. He was the man who had a second headquarters in Ottawa and a branch office in every provincial legislature except Prince Edward Island. We almost had Provincial Premiers lullabying to their Cabinets:

"Hush ye, hush ye, do not fret ye, The Black Douglas shall not get ye."

Mackenzie seemed to arise about twenty-five years ago from some magic mountain and to stride down upon the plains with the momentum of a Goth army. He was a contractor who became for ten years a demigod. Sometimes before the war when people saw him on the street they paused to watch him walking as though a black bear had suddenly wandered down from Muskoka.

"By Jove! Mackenzie's back again."

"And is that William Mackenzie?"

"Did you never see him before?"

"No, sir, I never saw him before."

"Well, take a good look. He's just going to lunch. That man brought back sixty million dollars this time from Threadneedle Street. A gang of reporters met him at Montreal to get the good news—-more money for Canada. Great game! He got forty millions a year ago or so."

"Who's that benign man with him?"

"That's a Provincial Premier. His province wants more railways and the Government has to guarantee more bonds——"

"Oh, then he sells bonds with Provinces for security?"

"That's the big idea. Why, what's wrong with it?"

"Oh, I guess it's all right."

"Of course it is. Railways can't be built out of earnings of lines built last year. Traffic's too thin; has to be developed. Mackenzie's building lines for a real population Canada, my boy, is a terrific country to railroad. The C.P.R. got land and cash grants. Mackenzie takes Government-guaranteed bonds. The whole country is on the same road. We import people on to homestead land and we have to borrow money to set the people up so that they'll become real Canadians——"

"Yes, especially at election time. But tell me—who finally owns these railroads?"

"Well, you've got me. Nobody has figured that out yet. Everything is too new. All I know is that Governments are behind Mackenzie, and the people elect the Governments, and the people want the roads, and if they don't get 'em the Government probably goes out. Anyhow I take off my hat to Sir William Mackenzie as a great man."

Nine-tenths of Canada used to think that Mackenzie was a great man. The more he borrowed in England on Government-guaranteed bonds, and the more he invested in Mexico and South America, and the greater number of street railways, power plants, transmission lines, ore mountains, new towns, smelters, docks, ships, whale fisheries, coal mines and land companies that he and his able partner Mann were able to octopize, the greater the country thought both these men were—and especially Mackenzie.

Toronto Board of Trade once gave a dinner to these men to celebrate the fact that by the building of the new line to Sudbury at a cost of about fifteen millions, Toronto was at last actually located on a Mackenzie road and had a right to be made the headquarters of the system. A deer in some places could have jumped from that line to the new line of the C.P.R. built at the same time—and about the same cost. There was no farmer in Ottawa to prevent the C.P.R. from getting a charter to double-track this line. It was the same year that Mackenzie inaugurated the Canadian Northern line of steamships, the two Royals, and for lack of tidewater was compelled to dock them at Montreal under the shadow of the C.P.R., who of course did not join in the civic welcome. And in the same year people were talking—as they are now again—about Toronto and Port Arthur becoming ocean ports. The wonder was that Mackenzie did not see to it. But he was fairly busy, tying Halifax to Vancouver by the Yellowhead Pass, and giving Provincial Cabinets new ideas about government.

Without a doubt William Mackenzie had a mandate from this country to do a great work—and he overdid it. Bankers and other financiers agreed that he had found new ways of investing creative money. Scarcely a teacher of geography but admitted that Mackenzie was changing the map of this country so fast that a new one became necessary every three years. New towns sprang up at the rate of a mile a day of new railway built by Mackenzie. Every new town became a monument to this man's faith in the future of Canada. Even the old city of Montreal, preserve of the C.P.R., lent its mountain to Mackenzie for a tunnel and a "Model City" on the hinter side.

There was always money to be had. A map of Canada in Mackenzie's satchel when he went to England to see money lenders seemed under his talk as big as the whole British Empire. It was not common Empire patriotism to refuse either the money or the guarantees for the bonds. The whole of Canada backed Mackenzie's notes. It was he, not Sir Thomas White, who invented the principle of Victory Loans whereby the nation becomes your banker. Between building a new line and operating a line built last year, there was no system of accounting that could audit his books. The centipede became so vast and complex that no banker could begin to understand it. Mackenzie never made the effort. He was developing Canada.

The Saskatchewan valley was the one great trunk Eldorado, the greatest discovery of natural resources ever made in Canada. The settlers in that valley wanted more people, the people wanted the railways, the Government needed the voters, and Mackenzie wanted settlers, people, voters, Government and all. If a Government was obstreperous, Mackenzie might lend a heavy hand to help turn it out at the next election. It was not proper for a Government to obstruct him. He was the over-man.

In no other nation has there ever been a man who could play such a prodigious and prodigal game with the resources of the whole country. Mackenzie mobilized the nation before the war. Millions of people in Canada used to regard him as a sort of magnified Daniel Drew—the father of Wall Street and watered stock and corrupt-contract railways. But Mackenzie was a broader man than Drew, with a much higher sense of honour. Drew admitted that he was a wonderful Methodist, that he had been a profiteer of the Civil War, and that he had starved a railway of rails so that it killed a large number of people in an accident. Mackenzie was no Methodist; and he never was a profiteer from any emergency of the people. He wanted Canada to prosper. All his profits must come from greater wealth in Canada, which he did much to produce.

Mackenzie had more faith in Canada than most of the politicians had. He wanted a great Canada, chief Dominion in a great Empire, The best way to conserve a nation's wealth, he said once, is to develop its resources. We never had such a developer. He never was a born railwayman, any more than he was a pure financier. He was a colossal exploiter of national resources by means of borrowed money. In the era before Mackenzie we had Clergue at the Soo. Clergue was a pigmy forerunner of Mackenzie. What Clergue did in Algoma the other man aimed to do for the whole country, And he almost did it.

Asked once why he gave so much leeway to men like Mackenzie and Mann, Sir Wilfrid Laurier is reported to have said:

"Well, what other kind of men could you have to do such remarkable work?"

Beaverbrook said at a dinner in Canada not long ago:

"I never was a William Mackenzie. I created nothing as he did."

The debacle of Mackenzie railways was never contemplated by Mackenzie. He did not even imagine that it was possible—except that he was prophetically troubled by the ambition of Laurier to create a third transcontinental. He had the right of way in this. He and Mann had developed the Canadian Northern out of a little stub line in Dauphin, Manitoba. The thing grew because it served the people, and the people lived in a fertile country that needed a road to market. The whole basic idea of the Mackenzie roads was to give more and more people a road to market. The original idea of the Grand Trunk Pacific and the National Transcontinental was to rival the Canadian Pacific monument to John A. Macdonald by erecting a railway monument to Wilfrid Laurier.

The race of the railways just about broke the nation's neck. It was not all the fault of Mackenzie that the race ever began, or that it was carried on to insanity. He was a practical philosopher to perceive that a Government is an elective corporation capable of manipulation in the interest of an all-Canada enterprise needed and wanted by the people. He was a master cynic to surmise that when the future came to balance the accounts, Father Time would be a very bewildered assignee.

The war was very ill advised. Mackenzie had no use for war. He never could see in the predicament of a nation any chance to profit for himself. He wanted perpetual prosperity. It never occurred to him, perhaps, that some day critics would arise to say that the country called Canada had done more for William Mackenzie than he had ever done for the country; and that when the parent utility of the cycle which he had helped to create was declared bankrupt, he had no rights in the case whatever and never should have been paid a dollar of indemnity for the common stock.

But as the country had submitted to Mackenzie's system of building railways, so it was compelled to be content with the Royal Commission method of adjudicating what the builders should get out of the wreck.

Financiers and politicians and common citizens may wrangle till doomsday about the ethics of this debacle. They will never get anybody to understand it. The thing is an economic outlaw like its author. Mackenzie as a common storekeeper would have been sold for taxes. As a railway builder he staged the greatest pageant of industry ever known in Canada, and when the show went off the road because it was no longer able to pay its bills, took what he could salvage of the properties and left other men to wrestle with the reconstruction.

We shall never have another Mackenzie. Bigger men may arise. More unusual characters may stalk out of obscurity into places of eminence and power. But there never again can be an era like the Mackenzie epoch, because that kind of experience is suffered and enjoyed but once in a nation's lifetime. He still has big interests, some of them gradually being taken over by governments and municipal corporations. But he has shot his bolt, and it was a Jovian big one. No doubt he is enormously rich. That does not matter. Canada no longer cares whether he is rich or poor. Once a demigod in our national ledgers, he is now a grizzled relique of his former energy. He used to be a despot feared by those who had to work under him, admired for his superhuman audacity and power to get what he wanted just because he knew why and when he wanted it, and capable of inspiring an almost insane loyalty to a man-made system that never was anything at all but an economic mirage. He is now just William Mackenzie, more or less a citizen, now and then interviewed laconically by a reporter who never can extract anything but arid commonplaces from what he says to the public.

Because, to William Mackenzie there never was any real public. What he cared about was the prosperous nation upon which he could build and build without limit till he died. When the nation came to a crisis in the war he did nothing to help it, except to let the Railway War Board pool his lines for traffic and the Government commandeer his ships. The man who years before had been regarded as the greatest doer in Canada, when the country and all Mackenzie's works along with it came to the great test, never so much as lifted a personal finger to help in the work that had to be done. Mackenzie had done his work in prosperity. In the great predicament he had no function. The nation paid him his ducats and let him go.

This, if we are concerned about the man value of Canada, is a tragedy. For there was in William Mackenzie somehow, with all his ruthlessness and audacity and semi-piratical creed, the element of a kind of great man. There is in his uncommon face the look of a man who with less excess of one quality might have become a wonderful citizen. Nature made him vastly selfish on a scale big enough to devise a totally new scheme for over-capitalizing Canada. She denied him the commoner human qualities that make a man a constructive citizen whether his country is in weal or woe.

The epic which Mackenzie and his partner achieved in this country out-bid in dimensions, variety and the use of practical imagination, even the work of Rhodes in South Africa. It was a feat of economic and financial engineering which but for its peculiarly selfish energy and ruthless characteristics, might have become a monumental contribution to the human welfare of Canada. No man of common brain or conventional ethics could have been the dynamic head of such a work. For years, decades, this astounding adventurer exercised his precarious despotism over the country that he might make its prosperity a factor in his own success. In gambling with its securities he hoped to multiply its wealth without diminishing its happiness. The constructive imagination and tireless energy that he expended on his great cycle of utilities, had it been spent by a poet would have produced epics and dramas. But in all the things he did and the words he said, there is no record of any sentiment of sacrifice for the good of a nation.

William Mackenzie had his day, while Governments rose and fell. His day is done. The public which he dazzled and outwardly despised has no credulity left for any further hero-worship of such a man. "Well, what does Mr. Mackenzie want now?" was the oft-repeated query of the bewildered Laurier to Mackenzie agents in Ottawa. No Canadian Premier will ever ask such a question again. Ottawa has no further possibilities for William Mackenzie of any interest to the public. The kind of prosperity created by such men as he is played out in Canada forever.

The forecast than Mackenzie and Flavelle might form a new two-man junta to operate National railways was too absurd even to merit denial. Such a partnership would merely revive the old Schoolman debate of the Middle Ages—What happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object? The two mentalities are incompatible. For twenty years the chief common ground between them was the Canadian Bank of Commerce, of which Sir Joseph is a director, who long ago discovered that the total assets of the bank were but a turbine in the Niagara of Mackenzie finance.

And William Mackenzie who built the conspiracy of enormous interests with which his name is identified, was never meant to be a railway operator at all. One might as well expect Lloyd George to be a successful manager of Sunlight Soap and of Lord Leverhulme.



THE IMPERIAL BRAINSTORM

LORD BEAVERBROOK

Lord Beaverbrook could stroll into an Arab camp and in five minutes be psychologically persona grata as the man who could make something out of almost nothing. He could learn the Arab language, adopt their customs, interpret their ideas, transact their tribal business, and go away without an Arab to admit that the strange new chief—or whatever they might call him—would ever learn to be a true Arab.

This man without a congenial country has an unlimited talent for adapting himself to the necessities of time, place and opportunity. He has little or no power to assimilate himself to the real life of the people. He trailed like a comet through the land of his birth and left it in a mirage of finance before Canada had made him a citizen. He went to England where in a few months he had made himself intimate with public affairs; and in ten years, "with all his honours thick upon him," he has not yet become an Englishman.

Once only I met this extraordinary man, at close range, for a number of hours. He was a most absorbing study; and he knew it. There never was a moment when Beaverbrook could not consciously estimate the effect of his actions upon some other man, or group of men. As an actor he is not a mediocrity.

A personal friend vividly describes meeting him at a small semi-private dinner in a Canadian city. The ostensible occasion was a mere complimentary affair to his lordship. The psychological objective was—something else. There began the conjecture. What was it?

It must be inferred. There are some men who study the effect of themselves upon a group. The group method of psychology is essentially Beaverbrookian.

A number of speeches had been pre-arranged for this dinner on behalf of various interests. At the close of the talks Beaverbrook was asked to respond to a toast of his own health. He did so in a perfectly amazing confessional of a speech, saying things which he said he felt sure no journalist present would publish. He was asked questions. Each question meant one more speech. He made four in all, occupying much more than an hour of time in a most graphic and humanly interesting account of things that had happened behind the curtain in British politics, shrewd estimates of the signs of the times, forecasts of coming events and vivid delineations of great men whom he had intimately met in various parts of Europe.

In all this there was not a trace of embarrassment or of suspicion. The little dynamo with the prodigious head and the baby mouth and the intense, deepset, restless eyes stood by his chair, and with knuckles on the table much of the time, talked down into the flowers directly in front of him. He spoke sometimes in a husky, low voice, now and again in a smothered shriek, again in a tragic whisper. He was in a small gathering and he seemed to know that though the dingy, mysterious room was somewhat high, he had no need to lift his voice to the shrill impetuous discord that is said to characterize his speeches in Commons or Lords. He was carried away by some indefinable atmosphere. What it was he scarcely knew. After the dinner he shook hands with people, delivered himself of a number of snappy brusqueries, laughed a good bit and, almost the last to leave the charmed precinct where he had unbosomed himself among "congenial" souls, he wandered out.

Next day, lying poseurishly on a lounge in his room at the hotel, he said to a confidante who had been with him at the dinner:

"Bunting!" (that is not the true name) "Will you kindly repeat to me some of the things I seem to have said last evening. I know I talked an unconscionably great deal. What on earth did I say?"

As it had been a perfectly abstemious occasion, one imagines that Beaverbrook at the dinner was sincere, though playing the actor, and that in his room he was both theatrical and insincere.

This man has a confusing, but in his own mind seldom confused, orbit of his own. He was a conundrum in Canada. He is an enigma in England. That he still considers himself a Canadian, because he was born here, fortuned here and voluntarily exiled from here after he had completely mystified a large number of people as to his working psychology, is proved by the fact that he continues to come back here. He also professes to be manning the Daily Express with Canadians. He has been for ten years the intimate of Bonar Law, also a distinguished Canadian of sorts. And a few months ago there was a rumour, which no one remembers him to have refuted, that he was a likely candidate for the Governor-Generalship of Canada. Of course if ever Rideau Hall should take Beaverbrook for a tenant, it will be time to take refuge in a Canadian republic.

It is easy to think disagreeable things about Beaverbrook, because he is so enormously interesting, so pathologically unusual, and altogether so brilliant and resourceful a phenomenon. I have called him the Imperial brainstorm. A dozen other titles would fit him as well. There are times when one almost imagines himself mingling an element of real liking for the man with one's unfailing admiration of his remarkable ability. But always when you feel like that cordial handshake and talking to him with brusque familiarity, there is the intuitive feeling that one of the two, perhaps both, might live to regret it.

You cannot absorb the atmosphere of such a man. Whatever the sterling qualities of his character, the approximate miracles of his achievements, the warlike strategy of his career, you judge him at last by that indefinable but inexorable law of common congeniality. To live at close range with Beaverbrook, to become part of his daily scheme of vibrations, to work either with, or for, or even over him as a regular part of one's programme would be to a normal man a penalty almost amounting to a crime.

Though of course tastes differ, even in companions. There are people who rather like hobnobbing with Beaverbrook. Some are interested in his idiosyncrasies, as though he were a good subject for a novel. Some enjoy the sensation of playing moth to a social flame. Others—perhaps—have a deep respect for his money which, like Carnegie's, is supposed to be a perplexity to himself to know how to spend it that he may die poor.

Well, the noble lord has his idioms. Discussing the details of the little dinner already referred to a flippant but devoted critic said:

"I think he would enjoy speaking right in front of that huge fireplace. He would consider it Napoleonic."

As to the social orbit of Beaverbrook, one may suspect that it is a rather exotic atmosphere in which the sense of true human equation is lost in a jumble. A man who can entertain almost simultaneously, at his country home, financiers, politicians, authors, and actresses from his own theatre at Hammersmith, may be regarded as a shrewd social mergerist but scarcely as a subtle entertainer of congenial souls. As for the discomfort of knowing what to do with his money, Beaverbrook has never complained; during his latest visit to Canada he was offered and he refused the purchase of two bankrupt newspapers each of which thought that the acquisition of such a side line to the Daily Express might enable him to do some of the good in this country which he failed to achieve while he lived here.

Estimating this man by the superficial but rather subtle qualities by which he has achieved success, it seems a sort of irony to think what he might have done and did not do for the country of his birth. What did he ever do for Canada? Before the war—nothing. He made huge fortunes here. He created mergers here. He started consolidated companies here that in time fought their way into the appreciated valuations of the stock market. He became Canada's greatest adventurer in creating a sort of "wealth" from the merging of small, sometimes decrepit, concerns under a new name and new issues of stock; just as Mackenzie was our greatest adventurer in creating wealth from borrowed money. Beaverbrook worked mainly with small groups to whom he left the task of raising most of the capital. Thus his personal gains came neither from the immediately increased earnings of companies which he amalgamated, nor directly from the pockets of the shareholders. Beaverbrook never made a dollar by defrauding a director or luring unsuspicious dollars out of the pockets of common people. That species of tactics so often practised by men who are near criminals was quite beneath him. The laboratory where he got his results was the stock market, which of course has its own codes of ethics and plays its own remorseless game of making or breaking men.

His career here had most of the elements of romance. Son of a poor parson born in a cross-roads Ontario hamlet, brilliant but erratic student at Dalhousie University, down-at-the-heels insurance agent in Halifax, youthful merger of two small banks at a time when he was unable to pay for his own clothes—we have here symptoms of a career which might have turned into a character of high value in Canadian politics, public service or social reform.

But Nature thrives on migrations. Even a man sometimes takes better root when he is transplanted. The Beaverbrook that England has is a more unusual character than the Max Aitken that Canada lost. Canada to be sure had lost enough brilliant men to other nations and imported enough able men from abroad. It was time to produce and to keep our own. There was national work for them all to do. Aitken came up in the boom time of Canada. He fitted the time. A nation's financial adversity was no occasion for him. He followed the wake and profited by the experiences of builders of railways, industries, banks and provinces. Every move forward of the country in commercial expansion was a nudge ahead for his chariot of fortune. He was the most successful "bull" factor Canada ever had. But in all probability, were he to be flung into one of the demoralized nations of democratized Europe he could make money even in disaster.

Before he was thirty-five Max Aitken had become a multi-millionaire. He worked much as clever but humbler men have invented formulae to beat bookmakers at the races. Having done all this, at so early an age, what was left? Superficially we should have said—public life. He had the money, the talent, the leisure. Canada had the need.

But Max Aitken never so much as became a pound-keeper in Canada, not because he had not the opportunity, but because he had the shrewd sense to feel that the land where he had made "his pile" was not the land in which to serve his country. To serve a nation means as a rule to deal directly with the public. Max Aitken had never dealt with the public. Neither does he yet—except indirectly through a big daily newspaper of phenomenal circulation. On his last visit to Canada he was invited to public functions. He consistently declined; not because he shunned popularity or hated the limelight, but because he would not have felt comfortable. In one of his speeches he pointed out that the securities which he put on the market years ago were all now listed as paying ventures. It was more comfortable to make that remark as a returned celebrity than to have made it as a citizen.

His own story of why he went to England, and stayed there, is ingenuous. He said that he went in order to do business; that he tried to talk business; that the public men with whom he had conference insisted on talking politics; that he succumbed and stayed, winning a seat in the Commons, and almost before an ordinary man could have said "Jack Robinson", he was hobnobbing with men the calibre of Bonar Law, Lloyd George, Northcliffe.

Only fragmentary accounts of Beaverbrook's political history in England have as a rule drifted over here. To show what an amazing story it is, nothing can be better than to quote a curiously apt summary written for two Canadian periodicals by Arthur Baxter, who for some years now has been a sort of Boswell to Beaverbrook.

* * * * * *

In 1910 captured the seat for Ashton-under-Lyne.

In 1912 a vigorous and successful attack on Lloyd George concerning finance matters in the House.

From 1911 to 1914 he entered parliamentary intrigue and gradually his home at Leatherhead became a Mecca for puzzled politicians.

During this time somebody made him a Knight.

The Irish situation was more than threatening; the tariff issue was causing bitterness; Austen Chamberlain with a minority following was fighting Walter Long to lead the Tories and on this troublesome sea Sir Max Aitken's barque bobbed up and down with the skipper's eyes keenly alert. He saw the possibilities in Bonar Law. When Chamberlain and Long created a deadlock, Beaverbrook advocated Bonar Law as leader of the Tory Party. To make his voice heard more distinctly he purchased the Daily Express and backed his candidate with a powerful but (then) not very profitable newspaper. Law has the reputation for modesty, but his fellow-Canadian led him to the barrier, started him off and when he stopped running he found himself leader.

For some time it had seemed as if Asquith's Coalition Government would survive the war, but late in 1917 it was obvious that the old ship was leaking badly. Carson was the first to propose scuttling the frigate. The others argued that even a sinking ship was better than no ship at all, so the Irishman went overboard and sailed away on his own raft. Bonar Law representing the good old Tory element kept on working the pumps; Mr. Asquith kept on assuring the crew that all they needed was to "wait and see"; and Lloyd George was wondering whether he had better take a hand at the pumps as well or throw both Asquith and Bonar Law into the sea.

At this juncture a sail was sighted. It was Max Aitken's barque that "hopped aboard" and took in the spectacle of his old Maritimian sweating at the pumps; and noticed with a critical eye the extremely able appearance of that able-bodied politician, Lloyd George.

Beaverbrook thought the situation over—swiftly. He saw that the genial Micawber on the Bridge could not be routed as long as Bonar Law and Lloyd George stuck to him. But even if they could be persuaded to heave the skipper overboard, could they sail the ship and keep the crew loyal as well?

He decided that Carson had to be brought back to the fold, so jumping into his little craft he scoured the political sea and returned shortly with the uncrowned king of Ireland on board.

But Lloyd George, Bonar Law and Sir Edward Carson loved each other as much as three Prima Donnas. They all agreed that Asquith was sailing to disaster, but they weren't sure that they didn't prefer disaster under the Old Chief to prolonged life in each other's company.

Beaverbrook had seen a vision and he knew that Lloyd George was the only man in England capable of forming a ministry that would last six months. Day after day the Canadian stuck to his task and gradually the three men, all smarting from old political quarrels, agreed to send an ultimatum to the skipper that they demanded a sailing committee under the leadership of "Pincher" Lloyd George.

In other words they demanded a War Cabinet with the Welshman as Chairman.

Finally, in desperation, Lloyd George called for a mutiny. Bonar Law summoned all the Tory crew around him. They went to the bridge and told the Skipper that they were sorry to break the news to him, but it had been decided that, all things considered, he had better walk the plank.

Mr. Asquith was dismayed, blustered, then resigned—defying the mutineer Welshman to do any better. His Majesty called on Bonar Law to form a cabinet; the Canadian declined with thanks but mentioned the name of a certain Welshman as a likely candidate for the job. The Welshman was asked—and accepted. Two days later his Cabinet was formed. Carson took over the pumps; Bonar Law went up to the bridge and Lloyd George delegated to himself the rank of Commander and Pilot of Britain's ship of State.

And that is the story of Beaverbrook's tremendous contribution to winning the war. He secured most of the Labour Party, the Tories, and Carson for Lloyd George; without them the Prime Minister could never have formed a government.

Sir Max Aitken wanted more than a Peerage for his work; he had hoped for a position of tremendous power, but the Government made him a Lord and he went back to Canadian publicity.

* * * * * *

Imagination tries to conceive of any Englishman coming over here to merge Borden, Laurier and Crerar. Imagination fails. Not even Aitken could have done it. That he succeeded in England where he must have failed in Canada must have reasons.

1. Experience in mergers.

2. Prestige as a Canadian.

3. Advantage of being—Max Aitken.

The first we understand. The second involves the Empire. Aitken was—if anything that could be labelled—a Tory. He had no trouble becoming a Unionist. His success with Bonar Law made it possible in getting rid of Asquith. He could call Carson "Edward". He could think as fast as Lloyd George. It was a time for quick thinking—and action. He had opened all the heavy doors in Montreal—and closed them upon all but those he wanted inside. He tried the same thing in England. His audacity was inspired. Something had to be done. Somebody must be the middleman. Aitken had an uncanny faculty for sizing up situations; for manipulating men; for interpreting ambition—because no man in England had an ambition surpassing his own. He could play political chess and absorb superficial culture at the same time. Books, plays, authors, artists, manners, accent—all were grist to his mill. He was an astute actor. He could assume a virtue; simulate anxiety; hover about closed doors on tiptoe; speak in the awed whisper; in the event of a crisis peer tragically into men's faces.

England knew she had taken a queer character to bosom; a child who was growing up at Gargantuan speed, an enfant terrible of sudden and prodigious experience; a creature who could sit up o' nights and plot and organize and cabal and next morning rub out the wrinkles at tennis, amiable if he beat his opponent, growling and savage if beaten, ready for a campaign in the afternoon, a speech in the evening and a conference at midnight. Or he could plunge into polite arts, talk familiarly of literature with duchesses, undergo a surgical operation to-day and sit up for correspondence to-morrow. He has a brain whose recipe for complete rest is "change of work"! Barring Lloyd George and De Valera, he has perhaps the most unusual brain in Great Britain.

No Canadian, already a millionaire, had ever done these things. Not even Gilbert Parker had so amazingly cultivated the accent. Greenwood, diligent and talented, had been slow and determined. Aitken—opened the heavy doors. As in Canada, he was at last able to close out all but those who could play the game of the hour. This Canadian could not only talk, but act, Empire; not merely ape, but superficially assimilate, England; and he understood the United States—because he was temperamentally something of an American.

His success on the surface is incomprehensible. The one key to it is his persistent cultivation of Bonar Law, who in the Coalition was the great prop to the Premier. Beaverbrook hugely admires Lloyd George. He reverences Bonar Law. The Premier and himself had too many points, though not characteristics, in common to become running mates. Intimately congenial to the Unionist leader, Aitken was never allowed to become indispensable to the Premier. His brief term as member of the War Cabinet terminated almost suddenly. Was it voluntary? Or ambitious? What did this Warwick want as reward more than the peerage which may have been designed to chloroform an electric battery?

We are not told. Once during the second year of war he offered to raise and equip and command a battalion from New Brunswick. His offer was not accepted. He went to Sam Hughes. "Sam," he said, "I want a job in the Canadian Army!"

He got it. Aitken's work as Eye Witness to the Canadian troops and the publication of "Canada in Flanders" was the performance of a man who in the great crisis of war had found a sudden and sincere interest in his native land that he had never exhibited while he was a citizen of this country. He showed a grasp of the human as well as the technical side of war. A man who could so rediscover his own nation could surely do something new in helping to co-ordinate the Empire. He has an astonishing knowledge of great public men in all countries, a thorough commercial knowledge of Europe and Asia, and—may we say a genius for a sort of secret diplomacy? His war record demonstrates most of these qualities. His Canadian War Memorials are a proof that he understands how to make his own country useful to British artists.

What then did Beaverbrook expect as reward for his political services, beyond a peerage and the sublime sense of having "done his duty" where he saw it?

Governor-Generalship of Canada?

Ambassadorship to the United States?

Secretaryship of State for the "Colonies"?

Or the Chancellorship of the Exchequer?

There is really nothing else left for an ambition like this except the Premiership of Great Britain. Brilliant, plotting, crafty and phenomenal, this young man has still the spirit of the corsair. England has not absorbed him. But there is a general election pending over there. The Coalition is not on Gibraltar. Party cleavages are rife. Labour, Liberals, Socialists, Syndicalists, Bolshevists and old-line Unionists are all pitching camps about the Premier's Verdun. When the battle really begins will Gen. Beaverbrook be in the citadel, or working in a headquarters tent to merge any three of the common enemy into a force that will haul down the Coalition flag?

"Why do you think Lloyd George will come back as powerfully as ever?" he was asked here, after his admission that for the time being the Premier was in the doldrums of unpopularity.

"Because—he always does!" was his cautious reply; in which one almost detected the suspicion that he might not; and if so—what?

These are some of the unpredictables. Even the answer Beaverbrook himself might give to-day might be challenged by his action of to-morrow. But this man has always succeeded in finance when a country was prosperous, and in politics when the nation was confronted by emergency. He is still too ambitious to adjourn permanently to Leatherhead, Surrey; too young to write his memoirs. England is a new world. And it may be—unless he has already alienated his personality from his genius—that one of its picturesque discoverers will be Lord Beaverbrook.

Meanwhile he remarks that most of his friends are in Canada. One misses at least a fumbling guess, if in the days to come he will not value those friends, whoever they may be, more than he ever did when he was making millions here or merging politicians over there. Such a man seldom moves his forces just for parade. As Aitken used this country to get himself preferment in England on account of the Empire, so it may be suspected that he has used England—not impossibly—to reclaim in this country whatever credit he lost some time before he left it.

Meanwhile until the Government of Great Britain finds some better function for this phenomenon, we recommend that he be made the official economic investigator of the Empire. Up to the present this has been a pastime for leisured travellers like Lord Southesk, Sir Charles Dilke, and Rider Haggard. A man with Beaverbrook's ability to analyze economic conditions and gain the confidence of men in high positions could be of incalculable value in getting a thorough survey of the commercial and political resources of a commonwealth which as yet nobody seems to understand. After that the Government might well make him Viceroy of India, where he might apply his talent for group-coalition to the great problem of constitutional Home Rule.



CONCLUSION

A Canadian newspaperman once flippantly asked the late W. T. Stead:

"What do you think about continentalism in North America?"

The answer came just as flippantly:

"Every nation has a right to go to the devil in its own way. Canada should not be denied the privilege."

There was a blunt candour about the reply that even from an egotist like Stead meant infinitely more than the soothing-syrup idealism dispensed by some of the visiting prophets to this country. Stead did not mean that in establishing independence of the United States, Canada should cut the painter from the Great British Commonwealth. But he was a trifle cynical about the young nation, just as Disraeli was fifty years ago when he said that "these colonies would yet be a millstone about Britain's neck". Neither of them was more cynical about us than we usually are about ourselves, never in theory, but in practice.

Most of the men sketched in the foregoing pages, as well as hundreds of others in public life, realize that Parliament and Legislatures have a hard time to keep themselves from going to the devil, and that so far as they go along that road the nation travels with them. As an experiment in nationhood we have some peculiar and original weaknesses, as well as strengths. Belgium, for instance, could be tacked by Atlas overnight on to one of our northward coasts, or set down as an island in some of our northern waters, when only a geographer would notice the difference. Belgium has a king and two million more people than Canada. We have slightly more territory than the United States, when New York State alone has as many people as our whole country. We are as big as many Britains and we have enough railway mileage to make Britain a spider-web, when our population is about one-fifth of hers and our ultimate authority in democratic government comes from Downing Street. Yet there are prophets among us who predict that we shall yet be the pivot of the Empire.

Once you begin to speculate about the future of this country there is no end. And the past of the nation has rather little to do with estimating its future. We have been a wide-open immigration country. In twenty years we have transformed ourselves by a foreign policy with which Britain had nothing to do. Twenty years more and we could do it again with even more disastrous results. In 1867 the great compromise known as Confederation tied four and a half millions of people into a political unity. In half a century we doubled our population; built 30,000 miles of transcontinental and branch lines of railway; made ourselves a race congress imitation of the United States; enacted a National Policy of protective tariffs that failed to protect us from ourselves; created an Oriental problem on the Pacific, exaggerated a race problem on the Ottawa, and developed an American-penetration system clear across the country; sent a small army to help establish a similar government and dual problem to our own in South Africa and a huge army to Europe to help make the world safe for the kind of democracy of which we consider ourselves a fair sample; created a small army of millionaires and had bestowed upon us about an equal number of knighthoods as well as a number of peerages, and four years ago petitioned the King through Parliament to abolish the practice; gave a first mortgage on the country to one great transcontinental railway, and a second and a third to two more which we have since nationalized into government ownership because the roads were bankrupt for the present and built for the future, which is yet a long way off; developed a cycle of quite remarkable big industries and federalized banks which a large element of our heterogeneous democracy now consider a menace to the nation; and on the prairies which, shortly after Confederation, we bought for a few millions sterling from the Hudson's Bay Company, a Liberal Government, never contemplated by the Fathers of Confederation, carved out two new great Provinces which for ten years have tried to kill the Tory Party which gave the Northwest its birth, all Liberalism that does not go back to the furrow, and aims to abolish even the moderately successful economic system by which we have come to our present state of comparative prosperity.

If that is the kind of thing that Stead meant by "every nation going to the devil in its own way" it must be conceded that we have lost no time over the going. We are among the forward nations, even though we are less radical than Australia. No young nation ever accomplished visibly and materially so much in so brief a period. We had the enormous scientific resources of the 20th century to give us momentum. Perhaps we were a little too fast on the down grade. We still take some inspiration from looking at the map to reflect that no other part of the British Empire occupies so strategic a position as Canada. We note that Canada is not only the natural interpreter between Britain and the United States—which it took some of our far-seeing statesmen a long while to discover—but that we are also a transformer between the power-house at Downing Street and the one at Tokio; that we are fair on the highway of traffic and travel between London and Yokohama; that we have room within a reasonable time for as many people as are now living in Britain, and that if we are not too awfully anxious about going to the devil we can make that population one of the most potential in the world for its size, not only in producing things to eat and wear and export, but in helping to hold the British Commonwealth steady long enough to let the old thing work out its big share of the world's salvation.

Such is the outlook. Meanwhile we have our innate defects, the first of which arises from the vastness of geography and the littleness of politicians. Little politics in Canada are pocketed away in sections. Some of our native born are the most parochial. There are groups in Canada as un-national as Eskimos who in some respects are our best citizens because they owe nothing to, and expect nothing from, any Government.

People shout about assimilation, not knowing to what pattern, if any, foreign peoples should be assimilated. The missionary goes abroad and extracts from the heathen even the nobilities of his own faith and leaves him often the miserable animosities of a creed. Political and social missionaries in Canada make the same mistake about foreigners. It is a great thing to Canadianize a race. But we ought to begin by Canadianizing some of our native-born.

Even our public men believe in political servitude. A man goes to Ottawa burning with zeal to inaugurate political liberation. Six months or a year produces sleeping-sickness. He is given a hyperdemic [Transcriber's note: hypodermic?] of conformity. He gravitates into the formula of a group. His message is muzzled. If not, it too often breaks loose in a tirade on behalf of some section littler than even any of the groups in Ottawa.

Big men do not, as is often said, go into Parliament. There is a great reason. The wonder is that the few big men we elect stay there so long. Government is supposed to be business. But the business takes a long while to do—even badly. Ottawa is the place where the national field-glasses too often get turned wrong end about.

We are seldom honest about public men. A man's own party praises, the opposite party damns him. In an old nation this intellectual strabismus is pardonable. In a young nation it is a form of political suicide. We too often wait for a man to make a great speech before admitting independent of party, that he is anything great as a man.

Because Canada is so vast, political leaders find it necessary to enunciate one doctrine here, another one there. This is an old trick; playing the lights on stage when the spot-light is reserved for the big local issues. We are constantly besieged by "national policies". Many of them have very little to do with national citizenship. Most of them sketch out milleniums that are never realized. We are a people of extremisms. When national prosperity is the objective we tolerate, and even idolize, any man who is bold and big enough to capture the country with his special-interest programme. Then the delirium is over, heyday is done, and the nation wakes up to classify as public plunderers the very men whom it once regarded as the economic saviours of the country.

Our faculty of national criticism is not as yet strongly developed. Thank heaven, we are not cynical; but it is better to be a hopeful cynic than a disgruntled idealist. Men will arise with specious programmes by means of which they can hypnotize a group and aim at capturing the country. Progress carries on by means of such men and such groups. But the devil himself stands behind the stage bush to prod these zealots into the limelight and the next moment to lead the claque in the gallery. We are carried away by the act, afterwards find that we have been duped and hold indignation meetings after the show is safely ten miles down the line.

Like all other nations we have had our share of "the new time coming". During the war we had all the old parties dead and buried along with patronage and race cries and public graft. But while the preacher was busy over the funeral rites a number of chief mourners were somewhere "making hay". A nation's adversity is too often some man's opportunity. In moneymaking this is even worse than in politics. It is too easy to shout and to shed tears. We deplore the past, suspect the future and work hard to make ourselves solid for the present.

Many men in Canada do not regard public life as public service. There is little or no preparation for doing the nation's business. Men are log-rolled into Parliament and pitchforked into Cabinets. The work they are expected to do has little or no relation to the work for which nature and experience intended them. It is regarded a simpler matter to administer a great State department than to manage a big industry.

Ottawa is the natural objective of all those who "want" something. When interests camp on the trail of Governments and of Parliament, the interest of the nation is going to suffer—and it always has. We are paying in taxes now for the lobbying that went on ten years ago. No Government is ever considered so patriotic and humanly powerful that can resist the inroad of "big interests".

Bigger interests arise. In a storm of newly patented virtue they declaim against the "big" ones. They fail to admit that they merely want to usurp instead of to magnify Government. The political machine of the country is regarded as a part of the machine by which special interests prosper. In its efforts to repudiate such a connection Governments resort to the trick of clamouring on behalf of "the people".

Presently even the people lose faith in Government. They come to believe only in class-conscious groups. No nation can be big whose parties are small. No parties can be great whose platforms are for the good of a class or the veneration of what "my grandfather" used to think.

Elections are eternally war. A general election has for a sure sign the prediction on the part of the Opposition that the Government intend to "put one over" in order to grab another lease of power. Experience has taught us that the prediction is too often true. It does not teach us that it is time to abandon the expectation or the practice. Men who in party bondage have helped to win elections by redistribution after a census, and to award patronage to the victors, arise years later in Opposition to denounce such practices when carried on by the present Government. The pot usually succeeds in calling the kettle black. Hence a bad black eye to political sincerity.

The average parliamentarian knows very little about Canada; much about his own Province, or his own constituency, or his own group. Politicians do not even travel except on business. A country of vast and variegated human interest, of wonderful charm even for scenery, without considering people at all, is the home of a large number of people burning to do national work who know little or nothing about the life of the nation, historically or otherwise.

President Harding solemnly predicts that the United States will produce a race of supermen. He does not say how. He merely observes the need. He knows that his country has gone the pace that will take generations of coming back before any superman nation can begin to be. In Canada we have not gone so far that we cannot easily come back. But we have no vision of any future for this nation except a larger instalment of what we have been.

We talk about being a nation when we ignore the very disadvantages that militate against true nationalism. We bluster about national sentiment and spend our money on paying to have ourselves Americanized. When we are tired trying to explain that, we fall back into dithyrambics on the Old Flag and the great British Empire.

But if we are ever going to be anything but a national and polyglot sandwich between the United States and Great Britain, it is time we paid some respect to the innate democracy of the British idea by developing our own national identity. Our strategic position in the Empire will be worth no more to us than our great native resources, or our bilingual nationalism, or our pioneering history, or all combined, unless we elect to make the biggest and best we have dominate our national life. This is a big country that must become a great nation if those who aim to lead it will abstain from little ways. We need more poetry in our public affairs. More imagination in Parliament. More vision in the Administration. More faith in the country. Less sectionalizing propaganda everywhere. If we rise to the measure of opportunity, we may yet prove that when the Fathers of Confederation hung our national future on a great compromise and a transcontinental railway they were not talking in their sleep; and that when Empire statesmen look to our leaders for counsel we shall not send unto them any man who represents a class-conscious economic group instead of a nation.

It is true that Governments have always capitulated to groups. We have sacrificed a great deal for the sake of protection when that was merely a tariff to keep certain industries from obliteration. But a nation cannot be forever built upon smoke-stacks and blue-books. We can better afford to have continental free trade and spiritual freedom as a nation, than a high tariff and bondage to an industrial-financial-transportation group. But if we gobble the bait of free trade, and find ourselves on the hook of economic and national domination by the United States, our last state will surely be worse than our first.

THE END