Chapter IX: Part 9

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE SPHINX FROM SASKATCHEWAN

HON. J. A. CALDER

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are privileged therefore to conjecture that:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A TRUE VOICE OF LABOUR

MR. TOM MOORE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Revolutionary ideas were everywhere.

Everything prepared the public mind.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A MAN WITHOUT A PUBLIC

SIR WILLIAM MACKENZIE

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

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

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

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

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

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

A study of Mackenzie is useful under the head:

WHAT DID YOU--NOT--DO TO WIN THE WAR?

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

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

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

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

"By Jove! Mackenzie's back again."

"And is that William Mackenzie?"

"Did you never see him before?"

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

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

"Who's that benign man with him?"

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

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

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

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