Chapter VIII: Part 8

This was no time for any man to pray that he might be made chief executive of the greatest transportation system in the world; nor a time for Lord Shaughnessy to continue in that office. The work was now too heavy for the autocrat and for a man whose eyesight was bad. A successor had to be found. The directors did it almost automatically. There was but one man to consider; and he had no experience in any of the mechanical departments.

Beatty was the man. The old autocrat himself had said so; and he knew. Shaughnessy had taken the road from its wizard creator, and made it the size and efficiency that it was. There was almost apostolic succession. Stories that the Montreal directors favoured one man, the Toronto directors another, and that Shaughnessy gave the casting vote, were mere fabrications. Yet Beatty stated that never in his long years of experience with the system had he a clear ambition to climb up its ladder. He never wanted anything but a large day's work--and he got many. But, when he was made Vice-President, he must have known that he was the man. Vice-Presidents on the C.P.R. are not necessarily presidents to be. One of Beatty's friends travelling with him up from Three Rivers once bought him a picture postcard with the legend, "No mother ever picks her son to be a Vice-President." Beatty smiled it off. He probably knew. This was one of the rare bits of humour that illustrated the Shaughnessy regime. His lordship, fond enough of Irish jokes outside, was never humourous inside the system. All the humour in Canadian Pacific was supposed to have died when Van Horne left it.

But now and again a gleam of human insight came from the grim efficiency of the great system, and at least upon one occasion it flashed from the legal department. When the Railway Commission was almost a new thing under that remarkable square-deal chairman, Joseph Pitt Mabee, the town of Trois Rivieres, Que., had a suit, through its Board of Trade, against the C.P.R., involving discrimination in rates. The counsel for the plaintiff was a French-Canadian who could read, but not comfortably speak, English. The further he went the more bewildered the chairman became, until he ventured to interrupt:

"I have a suggestion to make to my hon. friend who is having difficulty in getting me to understand the case."

The suggestion was that the solicitor for the railway who had made a special study of the Board of Trade's argument for the sake of demolishing it, should himself present that side of the argument in the clear, concise English of which he is a master; that wherever necessary the French counsel should correct the statement; and that afterwards Mr. Beatty should proceed to demolish the argument which he himself had put up. The counsel was agreeable. Mr. Beatty rose to the occasion. His statement of the case was so satisfactory to the counsel for Trois Rivieres that he afterwards wondered how Beatty was ever able to demolish it and win the case.

Beatty has no hobbies. He cares for no art, collects no curios, has no great house, drives no big cars; cares not at all for society; thinks more of the Amateur Athletic Association and the Navy League and the boys of the Y.M.C.A., the athletic equipment of Queen's University and the success of Sir Arthur Currie as President of McGill. He never travels for pleasure. When he goes over the C.P.R., expect results. The average Montrealer does not even know where he lives. He is said to spend forty minutes a day, indoor weather, at basketball. In summer he camps. Snapshotted in a sweater he looks like a compromise between Babe Ruth batting a home run and Hofmann playing the piano.

When Beatty was first a young lawyer in Montreal he was so lonesome for the city he came from that he used to go down to the station to see the Toronto train pull in. He did not dream then that some day he would be the man that pulls all the trains in; that from his desk he should have a periscope on the world--every day--the greatest intelligence department in America. When he was a school lad in Thorold, afterwards at the Upper Canada "Prep." (where he got so bad a report that his father was advised to take him out of school), he had no idea that he would be Chancellor of Queen's University.

The system and the man. Determining which most affects the other is like the old problem of the hen and the egg. But here, anyhow, is a great system. No man venerates it more than Beatty. He does not even consent to call it a corporation; prefers to think of it as an association, imbued with enthusiasm and loyalty. Now and then he publicly discusses national ownership; none can do it better. He did it at Thorold soon after he was appointed. He argued it in Ottawa with Cabinet Ministers. He did it in Winnipeg. One suspects that Beatty's ability to do this was one of his qualifications for the presidency.

A year before Beatty became president a man high up in the system predicted that the C.P.R. would spend a million dollars to campaign against Bolshevism. He failed to foresee that the stolid old bulwark of things as they are would never need to do any such thing. All it needed to spend was Beatty who, within six months of the time he changed the sign on his door, had convinced the system that a sort of new optimistic vitality had got hold of it. There was once a cynical proverb around those offices: "It's cheaper to buy editors than newspapers." One hears very little of it now. The annual meeting of the Directors may be fine copy for the _Montreal Gazette_, but the yearly banquet of the officials is a matter of real public interest, especially to the young President. There is a psychology in this--"association"--that is not a corporation. How does he gauge it? From the officials. He does not visit the Angus shops; though if he did he would be welcome. It was an old axiom of Van Horne that what the head is, so also will the system be. Beatty extends the axiom--to include the officials. He would have them radiate optimism, not particularly caring that they get it from him.

For the past two years optimism has been needed. C.P. reports are not what they used to be. Even the stock exchanges tell the tale. But in comparison with American lines, with other Canadian systems--ah! here is always some comfort. Trust Beatty to miss no chance of intimating that he would much prefer to have real competition from Government roads. He fervently hopes for Government ownership to succeed. C.P. cannot thrive on weak competition. He has no fear that any sane Government will try absorbing the C.P.R. Even farmers, he thinks, would soon settle down to a sense of responsibility. The old pioneer is a hard organization to make into a tail that does not wag the dog. Steadily he has advertised to the public that the system is still the handbook of efficiency; let Government roads imitate. National ownership, being impersonal, somewhat Bolshevistic, and very vague, cannot develop the intensive "super-loyalty" of the big private system vested in a board of directors, and the chief.

Since ever he became chief Beatty has made this clear; for a purpose. Did I omit to say that he is the first C.P.R. president without whiskers; the first with a college degree; the first Canadian born, the first lawyer, the first bachelor and the first man from Toronto who had occupied that position; the youngest of all the presidents; that he used to be an expert at college Rugby; that at Upper Canada "Prep." he was much addicted to pugilism; not to mention the discarded tilt of his Fedora? If so it is because the man himself sets no value on these things. His faith is in the collective personality, called the Canadian Pacific, built up on the Personal Equation.

But Ottawa--what of that? Almost ever since Ottawa was, the C.P.R. has been said to own it. Governments of either party have never been inhospitable to the benign octopus--centipede it became--that had its origin in the Parliament of Canada and wrecked one Tory Government. The penalty of transcontinental railways is that they require to have mortgages on governments. Presently the worm turns. But that usually costs more money than the mortgage. We are now paying off the mortgages of two great systems. The C.P.R. mortgage was paid long ago. The President of the C.P.R. is usually regarded as second only to the Premier in point of national management. But Premiers and governments come and go; the President stays on. Suppose that in the year 19-- there should be a Cabinet mainly of farmers. Alberta has a farmer government. Saskatchewan with a "Liberal" government has a Cabinet mainly of farmers. Manitoba sometimes has to remind herself that Premier Norris is a kind of farmer. Ontario has a farmer Premier and more than half a Cabinet of farmers.

This is the age of the farmers' innings. Suppose that a Cabinet of super-Agriculturists at the Capital some day should not agree with Mr. Beatty that farmers when they get responsibilities measure up and settle down to conservatism. Such a Cabinet might not remember that the C.P.R. had really done so very much for the prairies in comparison with what it has got from the West. It might decree that a lawyer President should be called upon to elucidate why he judges that so efficient a Personal Equation as the C.P.R. should not be "nationalized", if not government-owned, for the good of the whole people, and especially of the people whose traffic creates most of the revenues?

This is merely supposing. In any case Mr. Beatty would be master of the occasion. The lawyer who argued against himself and won at Three Rivers might be able to put up a more convincing argument to Ottawa Farmers than Lord Shaughnessy did to the Union Government when he offered to amalgamate the C.P.R. with the Government roads providing the management should be C.P.R. and the dividends guaranteed.

But of course this is a merely hypothetical argument. There may never be a Farmer Administration in Ottawa. And if there ever should be, we may trust to conservative and progressive old C.P.R. to do its share of injecting a "sense of responsibility" into a Farmer Cabinet to help it measure up and settle down, even if some farmer should buy C.P. shares enough to get himself elected as a director. As it stands to-day in the estimation of the travelling public, who may or may not care a copper about the personality of its rugged and efficient lawyer president, the Canadian Pacific is the one greatest proof that Canada needs no revolution which will interfere with the morale of that system. In fact so long as the C.P.R. holds its own an economic revolution in Canada is impossible.

A BOURGEOIS MASTER OF QUEBEC

SIR LOMER GOUIN

Early in January, 1917, a remarkable dinner was held in Toronto, the first of its kind ever held in that city of Orange Walks. Protestants and Catholics sat side by side. They applauded the same sentiments. Orator after orator dug into the mines of national idioms. They cracked jokes and told stories and worked up climaxes. The three hundred rose again and again with glasses of orangeade, and Apollinaris, toasting--Quebec, Ontario, and United Canada. They waved napkins and cheered and sang again and again "For he's a jolly good fellow". A Methodist minister sat at the back of the room next a Congregationalist preacher and pretended to unwrap a _de luxe_ cigar. Orangemen sat at the same table with Catholics. Macs hobnobbed with 'eaus. They autographed one another's menus. The books of songs were bilingual--French and English. "God Save the King" was sung in both languages. "O Canada" was done in French. Methodist orators vied with French speakers. Col. George Denison sat next Gen. Lessard. They fraternized as soldiers. The Methodist local-preacher Premier of Ontario sat with the Roman Catholic Premier of Quebec. Sentiment ran high. But no French-Canadian was so emotional as N. W. Rowell, who glorified the heroes of Courcellette; and no Anglo-Canadian was quite so stolid, serious and impressive with homely common sense as Sir Lomer Gouin, the Premier of Quebec. This man spoke slowly, massively, almost gutturally like a Saxon, in fluent but accented English. He was far less excitable than the Premier of Ontario on the same subject:

THE RACE UNITY OF CANADA
PREFIGURED IN
THE BONNE ENTENTE

Three hundred public-spirited men of whom eighty came from Quebec were as one family on this.

At one in the morning the concomity broke up. Not a drop of vin or liqueur in any form had been served. The enthusiasm was, therefore, as natural as the tide of the St. Lawrence, which in the form of the great lakes and Niagara does its best to put its arms round the neck of Ontario before it cuts through the heart of Quebec. To the pure imagination it was somewhat as though a procession of St. Jean Baptiste had suddenly dreamed it was an Orange Walk.

This unusual Entente was held between the rancours of the bilingual dispute of 1916 and the Quebec revolt against conscription in 1917. Those present who doubted the sincerity of passionate speakers anchored a timidly steadfast hope to the practical, broad-angled Premier of Quebec, who, had he sat between Mr. Bourassa and the Premier of Ontario, would have inclined his ear to Ontario.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He blew a shaft of cigarette smoke.

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

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

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

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

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

"What about the Pope of Rome?"

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

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

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

I observed that the band was about to play.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A POLITICAL MATTAWA OF THE WEST

JOHN WESLEY DAFOE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The National Progressive Party.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HEADMASTER OF THE MANCHESTER SCHOOL

MICHAEL CLARK, M.P.

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

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

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