Read Ebook: The Masques of Ottawa by Bridle Augustus

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 916 lines and 93024 words, and 19 pages

le of the strange garb in which he turned up at a friend's wedding, even before he was famous enough to be able to do that sort of thing with any degree of contempt for the conventional forms.

If Meighen remains Premier of Canada long enough, no doubt some really apocryphal yarns will arise out of these little idiosyncracies, just as legends wove themselves about John A. Macdonald, and Laurier. I remember that the clothes Meighen wore the day I shook hands with him were dingy brown that made him look like a moulting bobolink; that he had not taken the trouble to shave because a sleeping car is such an awkward place for a razor, and it is much better for a Premier to wear bristles than court-plaster. Some one will be sure to remark that the Premier travels in a private car. Arthur Meighen never seems like that sort of Premier. One would almost expect him to choose an upper berth because some less lean and agile person might need the lower.

We were told by cable that the Premier took part in most of the sports on board ship, and of course lost most of the events. Well, there is no harm in a Premier beginning to be whimsically athletic near fifty. But, unless now and then he could manage to win something it was obviously only an attempt to make him interesting to the cables, on the principle that a polar bear is prodded in a cage to make him perform for the "lidy".

Weeks before he went the Premier foreshadowed the attitude he would take at the Conference. Again and again it was repeated as he slowly left the country, even pausing at Quebec to say it again; and thereafter the cables took it up, repeating it over and over, until the people of Canada began to suspect that the correspondents were almost as hard up for news as some of them were during the war. Mr. Grattan O'Leary knew he had a difficult character to popularize on the cable; a man who until he became Premier, outside of Parliament was as diffident as the hero in "She Stoops to Conquer"; at High School in the little stone town of St. Mary's, Ont., so studious that he never could catch a baseball that wanted to drop into his pocket; at college immersed in mathematics, at Osgoode in law; as a young man opening a forlorn office in Portage, still a sort of lariat town, when Meighen was shy of even a family saddle-horse.

In Portage Meighen lived in a weather-boarded frame house, during the time when in bigger Western towns other politicians were putting up little palaces, causing their electoral enemies to wonder where they got the money. In Ottawa when he became Premier he lived in one of the plainest houses, with no decorative fads, no celebrated pictures, not much music, but plenty of room for the juveniles; described by a political writer who was there the evening of the appointment as "just comfortable." He was at home that evening, discussing simply a number of public matters, but not a word about the Premiership, till as the visitor was rising to go and said, "Oh, by the way--permit me to congratulate you," Meighen broke into his bewildered smile and said bluntly, "Thanks!" He was not outwardly impressed by the least impressive Premiership that ever happened. The nation had nothing to do with it. Meighen had not been elected. He had drafted no platform before he became Premier. He did it afterwards. All that happened was a change of captains on a ship.

Meighen had been spiritual adviser to Borden in other remakings of his Cabinet. This time he was not consulted. Sir Robert never had such a predicament. In the words of the old song, "There were three crows sat on a tree." The names of the crows were--White, Meighen, Rowell. Their common name was Barkis. Which should it be? White echoed--Which? So did they all. Great affairs are sometimes so childlike. Meighen was willing to accept White as Premier. White had been for years in the spotlight. Did he hope, or expect, that Sir Thomas would refuse? We are not told. But he must have surmised. In any case White was off the ship.

The choice came down to two. Here again it was a spotlight man--or Meighen. Rowell had become famous when Meighen had not; but he was a converted Liberal, and of only three years' experience. The necessity was obvious. Sir Thomas, declining the leadership, must have recommended Meighen, much to the Premier's joy.

Yes, it was time for a leader. Mr. Rowell was out--and off the ship. Happily there were no more crows on the tree, or Meighen would have been forced to hold an election in order to get a Cabinet.

However, the three of them consented to remain in the crew, until further notice. Thus much was settled. Meighen should lead,--but what? As yet little more than a hyphenated and quite stupid name, which had never yet resolved itself into a platform. But the name and the platform were both as clear as the constitution of the party, in which, under the political microscope, there was clearly discernible a Unionist Centre, a Tory Right and a Liberal left.

"Lacks solidarity," mutters Meighen. "Looks like tick-tack-toe. But wait."

The third disturbing feature was the condition of the country. From his wheel-house Meighen could see many clouds. The Reds, whom he had ruthlessly handled in the Winnipeg Strike; the rather pink-looking Agrarians; the Drury Lane coalition of farmers and labourites in Ontario; Quebec almost solid Liberal behind Lapointe; Liberals angling for alliance with Agrarians; Lenin poisoning the Empire wells of India with Bolshevism; League of Nations every now and then sending out an S.O.S., interrupted in transit by Lord Cecil or Sir Herbert Ames; and--not least threatening of storms but if properly negotiated favourable to this country on the Pacific issue--Mr. Harding busy on a "just-as-good" substitute for the League of Nations with Washington as a new-world centre when Mr. Meighen had hitherto neglected to advocate a Canadian envoy to that Capital.

Having scanned all these weather signals, Mr. Meighen decided that diplomacy for the present was dangerous and that boldness was better. In his programme speech at Stirling he divided the nation into two groups--that of authority and order to which he belonged, and the heterogeneous group of incipient anarchism to which belonged all those who did not agree with him.

Having done this with such further definition of his programme as might be necessary, the Premier took a trip to the West to prepare the way for Sir Henry Drayton's tariff tour. He went to that land of minor revolutions as a representative of government by authority, high tariff, conscription during the war, the Wartime Elections Act, and a minimum of centrality in the Empire as opposed to a maximum of autonomy. It was a disquieting outlook. But Westerners love to hear a man hit hard when he talks. Meighen has often been bold both in speech and action. In the Commons last session he paid his respects to Mr. Crerar by calling the National Progressives "a dilapidated annex to the Liberal party." Which adroit play to the gallery with a paradox came back in the shape of a boomerang from a Westerner who called the Government party "an exploded blister." On a previous occasion talking to the boot manufacturers in convention at Quebec he took a leap into the Agrarian trench with this pack of muddled metaphors. "I see the Agrarians a full-fledged army on the march to submarine our fiscal system."

Epigrams like these do not make great Premiers. But they are the kind of schooling that Meighen had. In his young parliament days he was an outrageously tiresome speaker. He heaped up metaphors and hyperboles, paraded lumbering predicates and hurled out epithets, foaming and floundering. He had started so many things in a speech that he scarce knew when or how to stop. Commons, both sides, rather liked to hear him struggle with his verbiage. Later he developed the rapier thrust, some snatches of humor, a trifle of contempt. He learned the value of playing with a rhetorical period that he might later leap upon a climax. Frank B. Carvell was periodically egged on to bait the member of Portage. He did it well. I recall once when the member for Carleton was spluttering vitriolic abuse at the member for Portage that Meighen muttered, "Oh, you wait. I'll get you." Which he did--immediately. Young Cicero had his Catiline.

One of Meighen's best speeches now will rank with the best in any country where dignity has not quite deserted the art of parliamentary oration. But he is rather too fond of picturesque language to make a really great speech. He has a strong intellectual grasp of what he wants to say and a high moral measure of its significance to the nation; but for a Premier he is too prone to lapse into the lingo of partisan debate which in Canada--since the battering days of the giants that followed Confederation--has not been on a very high level. Meighen's best speeches are temperamentally big, but he has yet made no great speech which will live, either in whole or in part, as a glorification of his country. It takes a Lincoln or a Roosevelt to be in high office and say things that palpitate in the heart of a crowd. Wilson did; but he was dangerous. You judge a man in high office by words and deeds. Lincoln was great in both. Lloyd George is great in either, but not always in both at once. Macdonald could thrill a crowd with a homely epigram and turn his hand to a vastly national piece of work. We have yet to be sure that Meighen can be as big in action as he has sometimes been in speech.

Unless one is too easily mistaken, the Imperial Conference imparted a steady sense of responsibility to Arthur Meighen that he rather lacked when he took office. He found himself in a very uncomfortable spotlight. He had not been used to measuring his words to suit such momentous occasions; nor accustomed to realizing how small the greatest men and the most impressive human arrangements are when you get to the centre and no longer have the perspective. He represented the oldest self-governing Dominion. A word misplaced might make a vast difference. He realized the significance of the event--especially before an election. He was never able to keep out of his mind what might be happening at home in such places as Medicine Hat. The issues which he discussed were big. He handled them worthily, with a due admixture of boldness and caution.

It was no time for mere sentiment, but for careful deliberation of matters that lay beyond Canada, beyond the Empire, in the danger zones of world politics, more especially of the Orient. The status of Canada as a nation north of the United States depended in that case vastly more upon a definition of Japanese and Pacific policy than upon any heroic allusion to the Great War. No man could have traversed this precarious business with more insight into the probable effect of what he had to say upon the Empire, the United States, and his own electoral prospect in Canada. The day after his announcement of a general election this year the Premier spoke to an open-air crowd at the Canadian National Exhibition. He chose the Imperial Conference, and mainly the Pacific issue, as his theme. In twenty minutes of unrelieved, almost solemn seriousness, he made that weighty business interesting to a crowd not too friendly in politics, with scarcely a gesture, speaking direct to the people instead of using the amplifier tube, making himself heard and understood with the clarity of studious conviction and straight mastery of all the links in his logic.

And Meighen knows how to lead. His bewildered smile is a prelude often to a strong move in action. Older and wiser men learn to love this lean wildcat who knows the strategic spots in the anatomy of the foe; who can spit scorn at the Agrarians and venomous contempt at the Liberals; who dares to glorify a government of authority and of force as though it were a democracy; who can hold the allegiance of some Liberals and lose that of few old Tories. He has earned that allegiance. He carried his load in the war. Long enough he lay up as the handy instrument of a clumsy Coalition, as before that he had been dog-whip for the Tories. When Premier Borden wanted a hard job well done he gave it to Meighen, who seldom wanted to go to Europe when he could be slaving at home.

Fortunately for Meighen he had been but a year in office when Opportunity came to him with a large blank scroll upon which he might write for the consideration of other people his views about, "What I Think of Canada as a Part of the Empire."

No law examiner at Osgoode ever offered him such a chance to say the right thing wrongly or the wrong thing first. It was a fascinating topic. Other Premiers had done such things off-hand, almost impromptu as it seemed, and inspired by merely patriotic sentiment. This was a notice that the Premier of Canada could speak his mind in advance, or if he so preferred, wait till the Conference of Premiers opened and spring a surprise. Meighen lost no time in deciding to prepare for the N.L.C. party a brief on Imperial relations. Here was a thing out of which he could make capital--for Canada and the party and the coming elections. And if ever Meighen had delved for material he did it now. He was going to the Imperial Conference of Premiers with a mandate--to help define Canada's position in the great Commonwealth about which Mr. Lionel Curtis had written two large books and the Round Table had published forty-four numbers since 1910; when nobody had as yet issued the one clear call for Canada. Foster, Borden, Rowell--since Laurier and Macdonald--had all taken a hand in this. But there was some new way to state the case that would--or might--seem as large and strong for Canada at the Imperial Conference as the voice of either Borden or Rowell had been at the Peace Conference or the Geneva Assembly.

The Premier could picture Sir Robert scanning his manifesto to the British press; Sir George, his old mentor of speechmaking in the House, comparing it to what he used to say for Joe Chamberlain; more clearly than all, Mr. Rowell himself, who for two years in the Cabinet had a monopoly of that great subject to which he had devoted clear thinking, concise language, and some diplomacy.

The author of "Polly Masson" might have drawn from the new Premier on this subject some such confessions as are suggested in the following imaginary, but not improbable interview.

Mr. Meighen, intensely revising his manifesto for the cables looks up and says:

"Er--what did you remark?"

"Was I? Oh, yes--about the Round Table. On three legs. Hasn't even as much stability as the Canada First minority--most of whom are not in Quebec. These are the negligible but uncomfortable extremists."

"Ah! Then you are of the moderate majority?"

"You mean I used not to be. Well, events move fast. Men change with them. I have been called a Tory."

"Yes, a tariff Tory."

"A moderately high tariff--sufficient unto the day."

"Quite so. But not a tariffite in sentiment."

"Tariffs are not properly sentiment. They are business."

"But Joe Chamberlain sentimentalized the tariff. He was even willing to have free trade in the Empire to get an Imperial zollverein against the rest of the world."

"Why mention Chamberlain? Are you--twitting me?"

"Because he afterwards wanted an Imperial Cabinet. And if I'm not mistaken you began to learn parliamentary speeches from one George Eulas Foster only a few years after he stumped England for the Chamberlain idea."

Meighen smiles; that wan but wholesome illumination of a thought-harassed face.

"Hasn't the old flag been some sort of issue in every Federal election since Confederation?" he is asked.

"Of course. No Federal election can be held in this nation, except by virtue of the B.N.A. Act, and every election carries with it an inferential challenge to amend the Act. Macdonald settled that--by a grand compromise with Quebec."

"But--as a Canadian first."

"Granted. But he also said in 1891--mm--now what did he say?"

"And a British subject I will die. In his day--well said."

"You will not say that in 1922?"

"And parties. Even Premiers?"

He turns his spindling anatomy about in the chair, suddenly rises and darts to a bookshelf, seizes a book and flicks over the pages.

"After all," with a yawn, "we have now and then to go back to Laurier, the biggest if not the greatest autonomist of all Premiers--though Sir Robert Borden years ago spoke at Peterborough quite as broadly, if less eloquently. Here it is--spoken during the war by Laurier. 'We are a free people, absolutely free. The charter under which we live has put it into our power to say whether we should take part in such a war or not. It is for the Canadian people, the Canadian Parliament and the Canadian Government alone to decide. This freedom is at once the glory and the honour of Britain which granted it and of Canada which used it to assist Britain. Freedom is the keynote of all British institutions?'"

The clock ticks louder. It is time to go.

"Tell me, Mr. Meighen, is it not after all the mandate of Canada's part in the war that stands behind the attitude you are bound to take at this Conference?"

"You mean that if Canada had not gone to war magnificently as she did, the war--might have been lost?"

"Essentially that. Hence the new nationhood of Canada born of the war. You, or any other leader, even as Tory or as clear Grit, would not foist upon this free nation any issue which does not do justice to the sense of nationhood begotten by the war. Would you?"

"I will say--no."

"Then as to the Anglo-Japanese Alliance?"

"Canada must be free, because she has a vital interest in the American aspect of such an Alliance that even Britain has not. This nation is the electric transmission transformer between Britain and the United States. There is a Pacific zone of policy in which Canada has a big stake."

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet