Chapter III: Part 3

I commend that answer to Hon. Mackenzie King. If the Liberal leader is now as anxious to serve the nation of his birth as he was when he twice refused large salaries and comparative ease for the sake of continuing to do Canada's work, would it be high treason either to himself or to his party to call a Liberal convention out of which he would father a resolution of federation of historic parties based upon such a compromise as Macdonald created in the federation of provinces?

The answer is obvious: "Fantastic! Absurd! Impossible!"

Mackenzie King will put up a smoke screen to hide the defection of the West from historic Liberalism. He will insist that the Liberals want only a reasonable tariff for revenue while the Government want protection--when Heaven knows each of them wants substantially the same thing in opposition to the farmer who wants everything. He will point with confident pride to the solid Liberal _bloc_ Quebec, when he knows Quebec is dominated by Lapointe who can demand from him just what he wants as the price of Quebec's solidarity; and he knows equally well that Quebec is as much opposed to continentalism as the Liberal-Conservative Government can ever be. The man who wears the mantle of Laurier without his Orphean magic cannot lead Quebec.

However, Mackenzie King was put where he is to lead, and he intends to keep on doing it. If he can regulate a few of his enthusiasms and so adjust his personality as to make Liberalism as led by him powerful enough to be the dog that wags the Agrarian tail, he should be set down as one of the most remarkable men in the history of Canadian politics. He legitimately chuckles over Quebec. One can fancy him matching that race-group against the Agrarian _bloc_ and the Government industrial centres group, and saying to himself:

"Labour may lop a few from the Government; Michael Clark a few from the farmers--enough to make my friend Mr. Crerar a most excellent colleague in my Coalition. Excellent fellow, Crerar!"

A low-tariff group, of whom 75 per cent. are Quebeckers, amalgamated with a no-tariff group who are near-Continentalists, is at least entitled to serious regard as a fantastic experiment in administration. But we may trust Hon. Mackenzie King to simulate a vast moving-picture smile of high benevolence and great sagacity as he contemplates such a fantasia--with himself as the chief tight-rope performer and Niagara roaring below.

NUMBER ONE HARD

HON. T. A. CRERAR

Some Frank Norris such as wrote "The Pit" and "The Octopus" should arise in Canada and write a Wheat-Politics novel about T. A. Crerar. This man's photograph was once published squatting Big-Chief-wise in the front row of 300 farmers on a raid to Ottawa--I think early in the war about prices. It was a second to the last delegation which the farmers intend to send to Ottawa. The next one was in 1918, when the farmers went to protest against conscription. If you ask T. A. Crerar to-day, he will predict that in days not far to come manufacturers will petition a farmer government in Ottawa. Because the farmers in the West regard Crerar as almost a geological process, which sometimes results in a volcano.

Crerar was projected into public affairs by 50-cent wheat, monopolistic elevator companies, discriminating railways and protected manufacturers; all of which, while he was still a young man who should have been going to dances and arguing about the genesis of sin, he concluded were into a dark conspiracy to make a downtrodden helot of the prairie farmer. To-day Crerar is at the apex of a movement. He embodies the politically and commercially organized campaign of the biggest interest in Canada against all other merely "big" interests. He is willing to let himself be talked about as the next Premier of industrial and agricultural Canada on behalf of all the farmers whom he can persuade to elect him a majority minority in the next Parliament. And the prospect does not even dazzle him, or awe his colleagues of the coonskin coats and the truculent whiskers.

Crerar began responsible life as a farm boy in Manitoba, taught school, and managed a small elevator company; he became President of the United Grain Growers and of the Canadian Council of Agriculture--and the next obvious thing to say is that he entered politics as Minister of Agriculture in the Union Government. But T. A. Crerar had been in politics a long while before that, though he had never even run for Parliament or legislature. Unusual, unprofessional politics. Hear what the present Secretary of the Canadian Council of Agriculture has to say about the parliaments of the Grain-Growers in 1916:

"Their annual conventions are parliaments of the Middle Western Provinces. Resolutions and recommendations of all sorts and description are debated and decided upon. Questions of far-reaching influence, socially and morally, have their beginning, so far as Western Canada is concerned, in the Grain Growers' Conventions. Records of these Associations show that besides recommending the establishment of co-operative elevators, co-operative banks, co-operative dairies, free trade, single tax and a dozen other economics reform, the Grain Growers in convention fathered Prohibition long before it was adopted, advised and urged woman suffrage many years before that measure was generally favoured, and were the first sponsors of the idea of direct legislation. The Grain Growers' Association and their annual conventions are the source and inspiration of all the commercial activities, and social and political reforms with which one finds the name of Grain Grower connected so often in Western Canada!"

This is the reforming political school that has trained the man now openly discussed as the next Premier of Canada. And for the benefit of any Canadian Norris who dreams of writing a problem novel about Crerar, it may be said that he is the most drab and unpicturesque personality that ever stood in line for any such office in this country. In the triangle of leaders at Ottawa he is the angle of lowest personal, though by no means lowest human, interest. Meighen is impressive; King brilliant. Crerar--is business. He would be a hard nut for a novelist to crack. A man like Smillie impresses the imagination. Crerar, who is to the Canadian farmer what Smillie was to the British miner, invites only judgment.

The first time I met Crerar--at lunch in a small eastern club--he impressed me as a man enormously capable in business, tersely direct in his judgments, somewhat satirical and inordinately sensitive. He seemed wary, almost cryptic in his remarks. Recently sworn in as Unionist Minister of Agriculture, he had turned his back on Winnipeg, where he was a sort of agrarian king, and taken his first dip into the cynical waters of Ottawa, where he was but one of a Ministerial group some of whom were abler and more interesting than himself. He had not yet appeared in Parliament. He dreaded the ordeal. He had no knowledge of just to what programme he would be expected to adhere, except the general one of winning the war. He had little enthusiasm for the Premier, probably less for most of his colleagues. So far as he had been able to survey Ottawa, he considered it an administrative mess. His direct ways of doing business were menaced by a sense of muddle and officialdom. He missed the breezy, open ways of "the Peg" and the sensation of being general manager of the biggest commercial concern west of the lakes, the Grain Growers' Grain Co. Crerar could not business-manage Ottawa. When he opened his Agriculture door he saw no box cars trailing in from the elevator pyramids on the skyline; he smelled no wheat; he saw no "horny-handed" farmers writing checks to cover their speculative investments in grain which they had not yet sown. No wheat-mining comrade motoring in from the plains came to thrust his boots up on the general manager's desk and say, "Believe me, Tom, I paid thirteen-ninety for those protected articles. What a shame!"

Crerar complained of indigestion. I think his nerves were on edge. I asked him if he expected to co-relate Agriculture with Food Control and Trade and Commerce. "Oh, I suppose so," he said wearily. "Nobody in Union Government knows what he will do yet. I don't like Ottawa. Its whole atmosphere is foreign to me."

He seemed almost contemptuous. He had made the patriotic plunge in order to put his particular brand of radical Liberalism at the service of a Tory-Unionist Government. He did not like it. Of all the Liberals who entered the Union Cabinet he was the sworn Radical. Both Calder and Sifton were machine men from governments that still had Liberal labels on their luggage. Crerar represented the great inter-prairie group of no compromise and of economic enmity to the Tories. He was rather looking for trouble; thinking rather hard of how he could get through with such an uncomfortable job, do it well and get back uncontaminated to his own dear land of the wheat and his fine office in the most handsome suite of offices in the Grain Exchange at Winnipeg. The Ottawa that he hated was the Capital that old line politicians had created. He was looking forward to some Ottawa of the future which like Canberra, the new dream Capital of Australia, might be vacuum-cleaned and disinfected of all the old partisan microbes.

Crerar made his success in a country where the visible signs of getting on in the world are a bigger factor than anywhere else in Canada. The prairies are mysterious and sublime. The West is plain big business. Crerar represents the West rather than the prairies. He is temperamentally a man of Ontario, where he was born; solidly businesslike and persistent. He glorifies hard work. And he went West at a time when the law of hard work was just coming to replace the old-timer's creed of hanging on and waiting for something--usually a railway--to turn up. He came up with the farmer of 60-cent wheat in a part of the country where everything that the farmer had to buy in order to produce that kind of wheat was high in cost. Cheap wheat and dear wherewithals have been to T. A. Crerar and his kind Number One Hard experience. His axioms began with the plough made under a high tariff. His code of ethics was evolved from the self-binder, railroaded the long haul by systems that thrive on the tariff. His community religion--not his personal, which one believes has been pretty devoutly established--is embodied in the emotions of the skyline elevator following the trail of the steel and the twist of the box car.

One cannot mention these rudimentary western things without a species of enthusiasm for the Westerner, and a consequent precarious sympathy with the views of Mr. Crerar. Transplant yourself even for a year, as the writer did twenty years ago, to the far northwest, and you begin in spite of all your previously inrooted sentiments, to share the beliefs and talk the language that lie at the basis of even so arrogant an organization as the Grain Growers' Association and so inordinate an oligarchy as the Canadian Council of Agriculture. A man cannot fight the paralyzing combination of drouth, wet, early frost, rust, weevil, grasshoppers, eastern manufacturers, high tariffs, centralized banks and bankrupt octopean railways in the production of under-dollar wheat, without losing much of his faith in the smug laws of economy laid down by men who buy and sell close to the centres of production.

Now begins the work of the novelist, making _precis_ notes for his Crerar masterpiece; investigating the prairie farm of 1900, anywhere between the main line and the skyline. For the sake of space we copy his notes, hastily sketched:

Low hill--General aspect, poplar bluffs, billowy landscape--Log and mudchink shack; pole and sod roof--stable and shed ditto--Three or four cattle and lashions of grass--Broncho team and new high-painted wagon--No family--Dash churn--Lucky to have a wife--Some hens--Sod-breaking plough, long snout, breaks odd fields twixt bluffs--Coal-black loam, strong--Wheat and oats, wonderful early growth--Drouth first year--Second year, pole fences, more fields, and wet season--More crops but half spoiled by wet--Sacks on trail to cars, toiling across prairie to elevator--Smudge of train, bit of a town and a tank--No cars to load grain--Must sell to elevator--Monopoly--Low price--Grading wheat to No. 2 Northern--55 cents, used to be 40--Lien note to pay on wagon and binder--Goes to indignation meeting--Lots of that--Farmer revolutionaries--Want Gov't. to pass acts compelling Rys. to supply farmers cars to break low-price monopoly of elevators--Act passed, but roads in league with elevators--Same old trouble--Rise of radical leaders--Organization of farmers into group to fight interests--Helots on prairies--Helpless unless organized--Only partial relief from Gov't.--Two new provinces in 1905--Grits make great splash, promising Utopia along with newer trunk lines and big towns, etc.--Farmer grins, goes on organizing, in each province association of grain growers (G.G.)--Every few towns some fiery evangel--Great on conventions, regular convenanters, old style--Schools of debate and Utopian legislation--Gov'ts. wear goggles and organize elections--Farmer organizes group ideas, to oppose old line politics--Say Eastern old parties effete in West--Townsmen league with farmers, common interest; low price wheat means lean purchases and laggard towns--By this time young man Crerar in Wpg., taken from managing small elevator company to be general manager G.G. Grain Co.--Co-op. movement develops in all associations, for buying and selling--G.G.G. Co. give farmer equal rights with city man in speculation on what farmer grows--Horn into Grain Exchange, little office--Under Crerar Co. grows to much the biggest corporation in Exchange; whole ground floor offices of G.G.G. Co. which as commercial organization focuses the buying and selling end of whole agrarian movement--Head of this, naturally chief of movement--All remedial and legislative programmes merged in economics of G.G.G. Co.--Crerar wiry, quiet executive, now fuse plug to a real agrarian party with a programme which through Canadian Council of Agriculture, members from all over Canada, constitutes itself a parliament of farmers telling old parties to go to the devil--Liberal gov'ts in prairie province mere annexes of new radical group which is now bigger nationalist force than Quebec ever was, ready to march upon Ottawa----

On this basis the novelist builds his political fabric of Crerar, who began life as a Laurier Liberal, became a Free Trader of the Michael Clark school, and ten years ago gave symptoms of pushing the economic side of the agrarian movement to a point where it aimed to become the new Liberalism of the prairies. He was the business head of a revolutionary movement of which other men became the ardent, flaming crusaders, both in and out of Ottawa. Crerar calmly evolved his practical evangelism out of the ledger of exports and imports. Nothing excited him so deeply as comparative statistics. He never trusted to the moral or emotional side of the case. His crusade was in the national ledger. His church was the elevator; his economic Bible the Grain Growers' Guide.

Since 1914 or thereabouts this man has kept his balance at the head of a movement that split again and again into local factions only to come together again in the head offices of the Grain Growers' Grain Co. and the Canadian Council of Agriculture. He represented multi-millions of investment in land, agriculture, co-operative commercial enterprises and speculation. On the ground floor of the Grain Exchange he was at the head of the greatest organization in the world speculating in visible supply wheat. The grain that Crerar's cohorts bought and sold was either just sown, or heading out, or being threshed, or it was crawling to Winnipeg in miles of box cars on its way to Fort William. In wheat he put his trust; in railways and steamships never; in centralized banks and eastern manufacturers not at all; in old parties at Ottawa still less--if possible.

Crerarism was becoming power to act. Behind Crerar was a sullen but optimistic reformation of such varied emotional character that none but a quiet, steady man could have controlled it in Winnipeg. The novelist's prairie farm was now a power in the land. It was Agrarianism; that had bolted like an ostrich both old parties in the West, and now offered a new one supposed to contain as a new National Policy a general and itemized contradiction of the old N.P. of 1878--The National Progressive Party.

No economic crusade had ever been so rapid, gigantic and revolutionary. Trades unionism had taken decades to make head where the Agrarian movement took years. The One Big Union of the Reds, anarching against all Government as it is, merely applied the principle of direct action which the farmers had taught them by suggestion in the unofficial parliaments of the prairie. The Agrarian is himself a One-Big-Unionist. His concern is not with wages and hours, but with exports, imports and elections. The Agrarian will not strike. Crerar knows that. He must not tie up communities and stop trade. He must work through Parliament. His aim is to establish farmerism as the basis of the nation. His creed is, that no matter what use we make of raw material, cheap power, manufacturing experience and capital, Canada's greatest revenue and export production must be in the farm; and that therefore national legislation must gravitate about the farmer's garage.

This thing came to a head in a part of the country which contains less than one-sixth of Canada's total population, and more than half of them Canadians only by immigration. The one biggest man in the whole movement, besides Mr. Crerar, the man who practically elected the new farmer Premier of Alberta by appointment, is an American born. H. W. Wood, the Czar of Alberta, came as a farmer in search of cheaper land from the Western States. He is a good citizen, and as much entitled to play strong-arm in our politics as any native Canadian is to enter the Cabinet of the United States. But as a rule a free people resent men from other countries agitating for revolution on behalf of an original small minority in a part of the country where industrialism can never become more than a sideshow in the business of production. A people of national consciousness do not relish the idea of a minority group organized to the last man and the last acre, trying to organize a nation-wide group in provinces where the factory and the mine and the fishery are at least as important as the farm.

The whole plan smacks too much of engineering. It is a case of complete, almost Teutonic, organization masquerading as a sort of democracy, but in reality a controlled tyranny whose aim so far as at present defined, is to establish group government under a camouflage of the National Progressive Party, and by means of the power so obtained or by alliances with some other group, to upset the whole economic structure which it has taken fifty years to build up. No true citizen will object to farmers in Parliament and many of them. None but a slave will consent to a Parliament dominated by any group, whether farmers, manufacturers, lawyers or labourites. Democracy means free government on behalf of the people; not on behalf of a great group which arrogates by organized majorities the right to represent the people. Agrarianism is not a nation-wide interest. Quebec has more to hope from the Government now in power than from the farmers. Ontario cannot elect a clear working majority of farmers. It is the West and the West only, which has become Agrarianism rampant. And according to the new officialdom of the West the farmer must save us all. Elect him to Administration and he will open the golden gates of real prosperity by establishing a maximum of free trade, on the assumption that our present protective investment in great railways (two of them bankrupt), in banks, industries and speculative land is all wrong.

The prospect glitters. Mr. Crerar is not dazzled. He sees with a calm and collective gaze into the future. He contemplates with profound elation the scrapping of our present system built by experience, and the setting up of another which makes theories a substitute. Nothing is difficult to a revolutionist. Crerar's success in building Agrarian grand opera is a mere augury in his mind to still greater success in rebuilding a nation, which he thinks is the same thing because the farmer is the nation; and a nation is the easiest thing in the world to revolutionize so long as you do not obliterate its institutions. We are not expected to abolish Commons, or Cabinets, or even the poor old Senate--until further notice. Mr. Crerar may need them all in his business. "For this relief much thanks!" Mr. Crerar is not to be nicknamed Cromwell.

The repeal of the Underwood Tariff and the Agrarian majority in Medicine Hat gave him great joy. The prospect for a farmer victory in the general election is to him almost certain by some form of coalition--perhaps with the Liberals; possibly with Labourites. In 1920 a man very close to Crerar estimated a return of 75 National Progressives in a total of 235 had the election been held at that time. Since then farmer prospects have bulled on the market. Alberta has gone Agrarian, following Medicine Hat. Organization has been extended. The old Liberalism on the prairies has been absorbed. Dafoe, of the _Free Press_, has swung into line with Crerar. There is prospect of the Government winning some seats in the West, as there is of the Liberals fielding candidates who will not be elected. Ontario is already a loose-jointed but effective part of the movement. Business is not good. A time of trade depression has always been a good time for a change of government, even along orthodox lines. The present economic aftermath of destructive war and a large element of I-Won't-Work labour along with high wages no matter what else falls, must look to Crerar like a good time to make us all believe that we shall all get through to Canaan if we follow his Ark of the Covenant. He is able to assure us of cheap clothes and furniture and machinery, because the farmer needs these things in the production of food, which must not become too cheap or the advantage will be lost. What is to become of our industries is not clearly stated; but if living is to be so cheap we shall probably not need employment except on the farms; though under free trade we are told that industry, free to flow, is sure to locate itself at the point of advantage in material, power, transportation, and getting to market. In fact some free traders blithely tell us that once you get rid of tariffs, living becomes so cheap that people naturally flock to the free trade country, and industry is bound to follow the people; therefore free trade will give us factories as we need them.

There is no end of the mirage for your head and morass for your feet once you begin to consider the possibilities of a revolution. We had somewhat the same experience forty odd years ago in the forests of smokestacks supposed to spring up in the wake of the National Policy. It took a long while and much hard patient work to get those smokestacks. Now we have got them as part of our national equipment, along with great water powers and long-haul railways and centralized banks and a number of trusts and an undeniable number of dear manufactures under a tariff--and Mr. Crerar purposes to abolish the whole thing, to begin all over again as it was in the beginning, except that even then if the farmer had lost his market town on Saturday he would have been in a very bad way for his Sunday clothes.

In short, Crerar proposes one more revolution, whether by one fell swoop or by a slow process of getting us used to here a little and there a little more--we do not know yet. What we do know is that he proposes to govern this country by a huge economic group that used to go to Ottawa as delegations; that in his opinion the real Capital of Canada is not economically Ottawa, but the ground floor of the Grain Exchange Building in Winnipeg.

We may not all have been reared on the farm, but be it known to all of us, our natural gravitation is back to the land.

Not many years ago also it was said that one large nation would Boss the world; later that Soviets would do it. Both the Boss nation and the Soviets seem to be reconsidering the contract. The world is a perversely complicated technicality.

Meanwhile Crerar smiles when the Premier (by appointment) calls the Agrarians "a dilapidated annex" to the Liberals. He thinks he knows better. He smiles even more sarcastically when he sees Mackenzie King chortle over that amusing fiction. He may have some use for King. If the Liberal leader will be reasonable he may permit him to merge his party with the Agrarians. If not he may threaten to rob him of Mr. Lapointe and Quebec, and let him see how he will like that.

Last winter I met Crerar in a Toronto hotel. He had just been down east proclaiming for United Farmers in the Maritimes. An ardent Crerarite who spends his life watching Ottawa closely said as the leader came up:

"Tom, your one best bet is to make an alliance with Lapointe. That combination could upset any other confederacy in Parliament."

Crerar smiled--warmly. He said nothing. At lunch no doubt he discussed this with his supporter. The old ace of Quebec! When will that home of race Nationalism ever get into the hand of cards held by Crerar who would inundate Quebec with reciprocity? Perhaps one E. C. Drury can tell. He is talked about as the man whom Crerar may call to the Premiership in a Cabinet of fourteen Ministers of Agriculture and one Minister of Justice.

THE PREMIER WHO MOWED FENCE-CORNERS

HON. E. C. DRURY

MOWING FENCE-CORNERS.

A zig-zag old rack with its ivies and moss,
Just fifty-odd panels or so;
A wheat-field, a scythe and a boy his own boss;
He had the fence-corners to mow.

He slivered the whetstone clear out to the tip
Of his snake-handled, snubnosed old blade;
And he swung his straw hat with a sweep and a rip
With the sun ninety-four in the shade.

He thought of the water-jug cool as a stone
Right under a burdock's green palm,
By the leg of a fence-corner hickory half-grown,
Where the breeze always blew in a calm.

But the boss saw him loafing clear over the corn,
The next the boy heard was a shout;
And he wished for a moment he never was born
To mow all those fence-corners out.

Past the elder-bush blow it's five corners to mow,
To get to that burdock's green lug--
So he put on a spurt till the sweat blacked his shirt,
And he mowed his way in to the jug.

What cared the boy then for the boss in the corn
With a beaded brown jug at his feet,
While he pulled out the corn-cob as glad he was born
As the bobolink there in the wheat?

He unbuttoned his shirt and got on the top rail,
He hung his straw hat on the stake,
And he smiled to the hickory leaves' rustling tale,
As he gazed at that berry-bush brake.

Till chuck! went the scythe on a piece of old rail
That lifted clear out of its bunk;
And he said what he never had read in a tale,
To that innocent, rotten old chunk.

And then he heard something that never was sung,
That no bobolink could have said,
That never was rendered by pen or by tongue;
But it made his heart thump in his head,

As he let the scythe drop and he picked up the chunk,
And sneaked up as soft as a breeze,
And poked at the noise in that rotten rail's bunk
Till out came a bumble of bees.

Oh! the jug it was cool and the berries were red,
And sweet was the bobolink's strain;
But bumble-bee cups in a rotten rail's bed
Make a jug and a bobolink vain.

By noon at the nest there was only one bee,
And only one berry to pick,
And only one drink in the jug at the tree:
But that boy was as full as a tick.

They have torn the old zig-zag clear out of its snake,
And the bushes have gone up in fire;
The hickory stands but it's only a stake
To hold up a fiddle of wire.

The wires are strung tight for the fiddle is new,
And straight as a beam of the sun:
The plough slides along it, the wind whistles through,
And the fence-corner blue-grass is done.

The old mossy rails and green ivies are gone
With fifty grass crooks in a row--
But the bobolink sits on the wire and sings on--
The music he sang long ago.

And now 'mid the jostle and rush of the street,
That boy has his dreams in the day,
When he sits on the rail 'twixt the clover and wheat,
And mows out the fence-corner hay.

Whenever E. C. Drury whetted a scythe mowing fence corners he was, so far as can be reasonably surmised, thinking about the tariff and the waters of the Red Sea that swallowed up Pharaoh. It may be a coincidence, but it seems like fate, that he was born in the same year as the National Policy; the indignity of which was so great that he vowed to spend his life living it down. He went to sleep with blue books and the Bible under his pillow. He gave way to both. He has never gone back on either. The iniquity of a tariff to him was part of the moral law. The more he exhorted at revival meetings and local-preached and led class-meetings, the more deeply he was convinced that tariff-Tories are in constant need of economic salvation. At threshing bees I can fancy this broad-faced, dreamy-eyed, large-mouthed young "Reformer" who never was born to take life mentally easy, saying to himself as he shoved the stack straw past his boots, that the old boys talking so hard about elections knew nothing about economics; and he wished to heaven that barn was all threshed out, so that he could get back home to read some more tariff statistics.

The Drury farm, hewn from the bush by his grandfather, cost the young man nothing but taxes and upkeep. It gave him leisure in which to study the ills of farming. What a blessing all farmers have not leisure! Travelling up and down that peninsula between Huron and Erie, constantly at some sort of "Meeting," Drury could see "Hard Times" on almost every telegraph pole. The average farmer had a small lot, a heavy mortgage and a large family; scrub cattle, thin horses and poor hogs. No doubt Drury read, when it came out, that amazing pamphlet of Goldwin Smith--Canada and the Canadian Question, in which the writer alleged that the Canadian farmer sold the best he produced and ate the culls. Well, with hogs at $3 per cwt., oats 20 cents a bushel, hay $7 a ton, and wheat under a dollar, from stumpy little fields--the farmer in Drury's youth did well to escape cannibalism.

To know Drury, one must understand the oddly interesting epoch and region in which he came up. The men with whose sons he went to the village school were manufacturers first, farmers second. Their raw material was the hardwood bush; their factory the saw mill; their common carrier the Yankee schooner. In my own bush days a few counties further down in that same peninsula, I recall heaps of white oak slabs in the forest which I was told were the remains of the timber-men who had gone through buying and cutting out the oaks for square timber that floated away in rafts, probably to build tramp steamers in England. The bush farmer hired to wield the broad-axe on that oak was as much an industrialist as any moulder in a foundry. He would have fought with his naked fists any agitator who proposed to interfere with that wages revenue.

After the oak was gone came the elm buyers, shrewd Americans who paid as much for a thousand feet of prime swamp elm as the pork buyer twenty miles away paid for a cwt. of dead hog. Mr. Drury must have known something about those friendly but niggardly Yankee dollars that saved many a bush farmer from being sold for taxes. He may have seen bolt mills go up and young men betwixt haying and harvest swagger down to the docks to get 25 cents an hour loading elm bolts into the three-mast schooners. He probably saw stave mills arise in which hundreds of youths got employment while their fathers at home fought stumps, wire worms, drought and the devil to get puny crops at small prices. He saw the wagon-works and the fanning mill factory and the reaper industry come up out of these timber products. While he was a youth the farmers were the first promoters of bigger towns, because the big town meant more jobs for the young men whose father's acres were too few for the families, and bigger markets close at hand for perishable products. The farmers of that day would have tarred and feathered any revolutionist who came preaching that a good market town was a wicked conspiracy of _bourgeoisie_ and should become a deserted village.

Yankee money and Canadian industries were the economics of Drury's boyhood. If he was as good a Canadian then as he is now he must have had more faith in the Canadian factory than he had in the American paymaster, or sometimes even in the Ontario farm. There never was a bush farmer who would not have voted for a tariff that increased the price of timber for the saw-mill.

By the time Drury was old enough to consider being a candidate for Parliament, heaps of sawdust marked the grave of many a vanished saw mill. Young men who could not get work in the near-by town drifted to High School, to college, to law and medicine and the pulpit; they went to the big cities across the border and got high wages; to the Canadian West and got cheap land. The counties of Western Ontario began to decrease in man wealth as they increased in the wealth of agricultural industry. The schools that used to have boys sitting on the woodpile by the box stove shrank to about four scholars in a class. Congregations dwindled. Little towns lost their mills and began to feel like Goldsmith's Deserted Village. Then came the age of farm machinery, when the big towns had more overalls than the farms, and every good farm began to be a sort of factory.

All this was meat and drink to E. C. Drury, who came to voting age with the solemn conviction that though the fathers had worked hard, the sons were not prosperous. They paid too much for what they had to buy and got too little for what they had to sell; a fate which seems to overtake most of us in varying degree. With stagnant local towns the markets for perishable products declined. In the open markets of the world, reached by long railway and steamship hauls, the Canadian farmer's staple products were in competition with nations of cheap labour. Across the lake a nation of twelve times our population was retaliating against our protective tariffs by duties on Canadian grain, cattle and hogs. The Tory party and the Canadian Pacific and the Bank of Montreal and the Canadian Manufacturers' Association were becoming British at the expense of the Canadian farmer. At the back of all the gods of things as they are and ought not to be, stood the damnable, desolating tariff that fattened the town and starved the farmer in order to bloat the banks and the manufacturer and the railways--under the cloak of patriotism! Heaven deliver us! Was it not a Tory manufacturer of stoves who said in Toronto that he would build a tariff "as high as Hainan's gallows?" Was it not a Tory President of the C.P.R. who said he would have a tariff as high as a Chinese wall to keep out the Yankees? Was it not the President of a great Canadian bank who deserted the Liberal party when it sought to enact a measure of reciprocity?

On all hands Mr. Drury could see the evidence of a master conspiracy against the farmer, who was to become the helot of civilization. He could see it in his own barn as he reckoned the cost of his machinery, and over against that the price of what he had in the bins of his granary and on the hoof outside. That thousands of farmers voted and talked Conservative proved the astonishing power of heredity. That all farmers did not become Liberals and make the Liberal party a solid rural party proved that even a man's depleted pocket cannot compete with the traditions of his family. Drury looked to Laurier to emancipate the farmer. In vain. Laurier created more farmers, thousands of them in the West; but he only enslaved them with the voters' lists; the very party over which Drury had almost wept with joy when at the age of eighteen he had felt them like the armies of Israel sweeping out the scoundrels of the National Policy.

Thus his hope was no longer in Laurier, who knew nothing about the farmer, nor dreamed that in the very West which he had put on the political map with his prosperity of imported people and borrowed money, there was arising a race that would repudiate him and his. Drury had a weather eye on the West. There were farms in Simcoe county now worked by old men whose sons had gone to that Promised Land. In the constant drift of the hired man and the farmer's son to the town and the city for shorter hours, higher wages and more amusement, he saw the fluidity of labour, the first evidence that there was some common ground between the farmer and the labour class. Working in his own fields, driving his own teams, operating his own machinery, this capitalistic labour-unionist of the soil said to himself that the farmers of Canada were entitled not merely to representation in Parliament, but to the organization of a class interest that should take hold of the country's economic horns and turn it on to the right road.

In the lonely furrow of the farm a man often thinks out conclusions that are gloriously right in themselves, but in the chequered and cynical experiences of men in office tragically impossible. Mr. Drury was no stranger to Ottawa. He had been there on deputations; and on tariff commissions; and each time he came back he had a stronger determination to go there some day as the voice of the more or less united farmer against the tariff that had sterilized the Liberals.

Drury was a rural Liberal. He saw in the reciprocity campaign of 1911 some glimmer of hope that Liberalism might succeed without a revolution. The election settled that. From then on to the war the philosopher of Crown Hill bent himself to the deeper study of the one force that now seemed to him to be left capable of breaking the nation's bondage. He no longer had the fervent desire to see a new town grow among the farms that he had when he was a youth. Every bigger town, unless it had industries that could widen the farmer's low-cost market, was a mitigated menace. Every foundry and implement works and furniture factory and boot industry making goods more or less from imported material, considerably with imported labour, and selling to the consumer at a normal price plus the duty, roused in Mr. Drury as much hostility as a natively kind and Christian character would permit.

And at last he saw the predicted slump begin to come in the year 1913, when the boomster dodged the boomerang of inflated and speculative values; when east and west the farmers, crimped by high railway rates and cost of materials, machinery and labour, ceased to be the backbone of Canadian buying.

And then the War.

Whatever may be traced to the normal development of this Ontario Cincinnatus, it was the War which made Drury. But for the war he would have bided his time to be elected to Ottawa on a straight tariff issue. The war, backed by the man's religion and his tariff theology, drove him to the Premiership of Ontario.

There were times during the war when, if Mr. Drury was as honest with himself as he is about government, he must have reflected that the Canadian farmer was getting pretty well paid back in part of one generation for the wrongs and adversities suffered by generations ago. Pork at $20 per cwt., oats at $1.50 a bushel, wheat fixed by the Government at $2.40 to keep it from bulling to more than $3--none of these could have been economically justified by Mr. Drury except as an act of compensating Providence. The farmer of all people as a class benefited most, when he was driven to the worst labour hardship he ever had by the terrific prices paid for war work, which robbed him of hired help almost at any price. The higher the price and the scarcer the help, the more the Government clamoured for production. The Ontario farmer responded to the call. He was no more a patriot to do it than a man was to buy Victory Bonds. He was simply a profitee (we leave off the r).

And this was the first call of the war to which the farmers as a class made a hearty response. No doubt most farmers were better servants of the nation in the furrow than in the trench. But the time came when they had to leave the furrows. On top of the Government's most frantic call for more production by the farmer came the Military Service Act, which refused to exempt him. The call to the plough-handle came before the election of 1917. The call to the bayonet came afterwards in a crisis unforeseen at the time of the election. Drury himself had been defeated as a conscriptionist Liberal candidate in 1917. No farmer could be in khaki and overalls at the same time. There was no reason given for the drastic change of face except the message from the front that more men were urgently needed or the West front was doomed. It was not even reckoned that a farmer conscripted after seed-time in 1918 could not possibly be of use in the trenches till long after the time when the fate of the West front would have been settled anyway.

Hence the ire of the agriculturist, driven now to become an agrarian. The Ontario farmer made no distinction between the Unionist Government that had conscripted the farmer, and the Ontario Conservative Government which supported Ottawa. The farmer made up his mind wherever possible to defeat both the old line candidates.

Premier Drury was the chief result. He never would have been offered the post but for the cleavage caused by the war. The U.F.O. were not unanimous, and Drury was not anxious. He had his eye on Ottawa. But there was nobody else who could unite the group with labour. Drury had himself been the first president of the U.F.O. and secretary of the Canadian Council of Agriculture; he was a thinker, something of a scholar, a futurist, and a good deal of a radical; and he could speak well.

He picked a Cabinet mainly of farmers. He occupied more time drafting his Cabinet than most farmers take to harvest a crop. He was in a hurry, but he wanted nobody to suspect it. He said little; wisely. There was no occasion. He had no mandate from the people. He wanted sure-enough colleagues. The men he chose were all novices. The old line critics watched him with affected contempt. They said Agriculture and Labour never could mix. Drury went along. No Cabinet had ever been so prayerfully hand-picked. Labour must not get the idea that it was merely being sopped for the support of twelve men in a House majority of one. There must be concession; common aims understood, even ahead of experience, when there was as yet no common policy.

Mr. Drury had been only a few hours sworn Premier of Ontario when he was summarily turned out--not, however, from Office. In company with a farmer author friend who had been given the freedom of a certain small but desirable Club and who wanted to show Mr. Drury one place where he could have a quiet time of an evening, he went to have dinner. As neither of the gentlemen was known to the housekeeping department a member of the Club--a well-known newspaperman--was asked to inquire their identity. The result was that the Premier of Ontario and his friend left the Club, without dinner.

The next day the newspaperman looked over the shoulder of his editor-chief in office and said,

"Who is the important-looking man in the photograph?"

The answer came, "Hon. E. C. Drury, Premier of Ontario."

"Great Scott!" he said huskily, "that's the man I turned out of the Club last night."

Drury had the sense of humour to regard the matter as a joke on both the newspaperman and himself.

The opening of the new Legislature was a spectacle. Dignitaries and judges, professors and generals stood about the farmers--led by the farmer-in-chief, morning-coated, carefully groomed, plainly nervous but sustained by the dignity of it all. His voice was firm; his manner that of a very circumspect bridegroom. The old smug strut and case-hardened pomp of legislature inaugurals was lacking. An undercurrent of deep sincerity stayed many a tremorous hand. Drury was the least nervous of all. I imagine that in the morning he had sung to himself some good old fortifying hymn, like "Rock of Ages."

Since that day the Premier has learned that practical politics is a game that taxes all a man's technique in Christianity. Autocratic Hydro and Mackenzie the loosening octopus; New Ontario preaching up the old plaint of secession; better roads and prodigal Mr. Biggs; what to do with Education that Cody had not started to do; how to stave off commissions on reform of the school system; the constant queues of moral reformers; the new menace of the movies and the censorship farce; the timber stealers; disconcerting Dewart and redundant Ferguson; returned soldiers and khaki members; the Reds and the plain clothes men; blustering Morrison, and the tyrannical U.F.O.----

Until the Premier, plain, homespun gentleman that he is, longed for Friday evening and the Crown Hill farm and the quiet little church in the village, because one week at his desk took more out of him than a month in overalls. And then to relieve his surcharged soul he made that speech at Milverton in which he boldly proclaimed that he was going to head, not a mere group called the U.F.O., but a People's Party. For this "broadening out" speech he got clods thrown at him by Morrison, and Burnaby put rails on the road to upset the Premier's buggy, and the _Farmers' Sun_ tried to change the wheels on his rig so that he would not be able to get home. Worse than any the _Onlooker_, that virile organ of no advertising and of the Meighen Government, said:

"The U.F.O. chose this man and dragged him out of his rural obscurity. In common gratitude he should have stuck to their colours. He should have given fair warning of a change of heart, and indeed we think he ought to have resigned. When a man joins a political party he agrees to subordinate his ambitions and activities to the common good of that party, and failing to do so honour demands that he should leave it."

In spite of the fact that the Premier of Ontario twice made an appointment by request from the writer of this for the purpose of getting a statement for the press as to what he meant to do about this whole business of "broadening out," twice failed to keep the appointment and later came out with the Milverton pronunciamento, we have no hesitation in pointing out that:

Mr. Drury was not in rural obscurity. The U.F.O. had no colours which Mr. Drury had not helped to paint, for he was the first President the U.F.O. ever had. He had no change of heart, because when he made an unstable coalition of the U.F.O. and the Labour party he entered into a pact and covenant which the U.F.O. had never considered; he had already "broadened out" to drive Labour and Agriculture as a team and had pretty well succeeded in doing it. Mr. Drury did not join a political party. The U.F.O. was not a real party because it went into the election of 1919 without a leader, and in order to get its platform translated into party it had to have Mr. Drury or somebody like him. And if Mr. Drury should resign from the head of the two groups which he alone has made into the semblance of a party, he would be recommended by Mr. Crerar to let his guardian take him to a lunatic asylum.

Drury has done much better than his critics expected he would do. He has been bold enough to keep Adam Beck from being the unelected Premier of Ontario, which is more than Sir William Hearst ever could do. He has made Government cost more than it ever did, though it is only reasonable bookkeeping to believe that part of the cost was incurred by a Government over which he had no control. He has begun to build public highways which being originally a farmer's job should have been done well, but up to the present has been on a smaller scale as bad a case of wasting the public money as the railways of Canada ever perpetrated. The cost of administration being a matter of either experience or graft, it is probable that the Coalition will cut down the cost when they get more experience. The Chippewa Canal is one glaring instance of high labour cost which a Farmer Premier with Labour colleagues did not presume to regulate. If anybody knows what a day's work is it should be the farmer; but the farmer in this case was not absolutely free to express his opinions, because he depends upon Labour for his voting majority in the House.

In the matter of referendum Mr. Drury has been an advocate instead of a judge. He and his--notably the church-ridden Mr. Raney, who does not even smoke--are a dry lot. They wanted Ontario to be bone dry and therefore preferred to have the people vote either foolishly for the iniquitous O.T.A. or fanatically for absolute prohibition. Mr. Drury should have taken the spark plug out of his Methodist car long enough to reflect that what keeps a man contented is going to keep him from stirring up trouble. If the Government of enlightened and moral Ontario had brought in a measure to create a referendum on the alternative of prohibition _vs._ effective government control of reasonable liquors, it might have less cause to be panicky over Bolshevism.

The legislation to exempt from taxation houses costing less than a certain amount looks like a pretty straight play for the Labour vote, and the propagation of a semi-Bolshevistic principle that unless checked somewhere will exempt the many at the expense of the few.

But before Mr. Drury has the chance to be truly elected by the people of Ontario to carry on his People's Party, he hopes perhaps that he may have a chance to be called to Ottawa. It is freely rumoured that Mr. Crerar has no intention of taking the Premiership which the liberated people of Canada are going to bestow upon him by virtue of one more group-coalition. In which case he may invite Mr. Drury, who has given a sparring exhibition of being a Premier, to succeed him. Then we shall have the undemocratic farce of an appointive Premier all over again--for the third time in three years. And then--well, we shudder to think what is going to become of Mr. Drury's hitherto unimpeachable Christianity and of the economic welfare of a country which has as much right to modern factories as the bush farmer ever had to saw-mills.

EZEKIEL AT A LEDGER

RT. HON. SIR GEORGE FOSTER

Sir George Foster is a genius. The world forgives much to geniuses, because it lives by them. Canada has tolerated a great deal in Foster for the very good reason that no man except Laurier has for so long a period without interruption seemed so picturesquely necessary to our public affairs.

In his own temperamental way Sir George somewhat compensates Canada for never having produced a Milton or a Bach. One of his best speeches might be made into blank verse or set to a fugue. He illuminates life. Decade by decade he comes prancing down the vistas of our politics with a vitality that is perfectly amazing. And when some obituarist writes his epitaph, "Foster Mortuus Est," he promptly rubs it out and writes, "Resurgam!"