"Oh?" he said, wearily. "Yes, I've read your articles. Er--Tom Smith,
isn't it?"
But Tom was not the name, I had scarcely time to say, and it made no
difference. I should like to have shoo'd away the crowd and let him
call me Jake just for a few minutes to get the point of feeling of this
young man--though he is nearly 50--on how it feels to be Premier
without a general election.
There may not be as much finality, but there is sometimes as much
wisdom, in the choice of a leader by a small group as in his election
by the people. Majorities frequently rule without wisdom. In
accepting the gift of an almost worn-out Premiership and a year later
entering the most significant general election ever held in Canada, at
least since 1878, Arthur Meighen falls back upon his courage without
much comfort from ordinary ambition. He faces a battle whose armies
are new, pledged to hold what he has against two enemy groups, and to
hold more than John A. Macdonald fought to get, without the sense of
one great party against another such as Macdonald had. No Premier ever
went into a general election with so little intimate support from "the
old party", with such a certainty that whichever party wins as against
the others cannot win a working majority without coalition, and with
the sensation that the party he leads is already what remains of a
coalition.
Whenever I see Meighen I feel like hastening home to "cram" on
citizenship for an examination. I behold in him picnics neglected and
even feminine society deferred for the sake of toiling up a political
Parnassus. In his veneration for constituted authority I can
comprehend something of the Jap's banzais to the Mikado before he
commits harikari.
Whatever there is, or is not, in the character of Arthur Meighen, he
has a draw upon other men. Any public task that he has in hand looks
like a load that challenges other men to help him lift. A really
intelligent camera would show in his face a mixture of wholesome
pugnacity, concentration of thought and feminine tenderness. He feels
like a big intellectual boy who unless mother looks after him will get
indigestion or neurasthenia. Sometimes men pity their leaders.
Meighen, with his intensity and his thought before action looks such a
frail wisp of a man. The last time I saw him in public he was
bare-headed on an open-air stage, a dusky, lean silhouette against a
vast flare of water and sky. On the same spot less than two hundred
years ago, that singular, overbuilt top head and sharply tapering,
elongated oval of a face might have been that of some aristocratic red
man, deeply serious on the eve of a tribal war.
The little blank spots in Meighen's temperament are things that people
like to talk about; when the same idioms in an average man would be set
down as mild insanity. Rumour says for instance that every now and
then he must be watched for fear he go to Parliament without a hat.
Why not? It is only a British custom to wear a hat in the Commons
except when making a speech. A bareheaded, even a bald-headed, Premier
may be a great man. Meighen's negligence in the matter of a hat
perhaps comes of the bother of finding the clothes-brush at the same
time. Since Mackenzie Bowell, Canada has never had a Premier so
naturally oblivious of sartorial style; though his later appearances
suggest that even he has fallen into the mode of well-dressed Premiers.
In his early law days at Portage it is said that one evening when Mrs.
Meighen was at a concert, he was given the first baby to mind, that
when the baby cried he marked a paragraph in a law book he was reading,
stole into the bedroom and took the baby over to a neighbour's house;
that when he was asked later where the infant was he gradually
remembered that he had put the child somewhere--now where was it?
There is some other half forgotten tale 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.
No doubt much of Meighen's democratic _gaucherie_ about garments was
abandoned at the Imperial Conference. He never could have worn a dingy
brown suit when he got the freedom of London. Upon some State occasion
the Premier may have worn the Windsor uniform. Not without scruples.
That uniform may not misbecome constricted Mr. Meighen more than it did
the spare Mr. Foster, or the lean Mr. Rowell. But the Windsor uniform
spells conformity, colonialism, Empire--not commonwealth. And Mr.
Meighen went to London to represent the Commonwealth of Canada.
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?"
"That you were about to say----"
"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?"
"A British subject I was born----"
"And a British subject I will die. In his day--well said."
"You will not say that in 1922?"
"Probably not. Subjects do not vote in true democracies. Events
change men----"
"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."
"I see. Now as to the next election?"
The Premier rises: now thinner and more intense than ever.
"My friend--just this. The solidarity of the British Commonwealth
League of Nations is at the root of the welfare of the civilized world.
In every nation of this League, no matter by what party label the
Unionist cause is identified in the baggage room, it is a matter of
vital importance to the solidarity of the League that such party should
remain or go into power. So--I hope to get from the Conference such a
reasonable endorsation of Canada's stand on the main issues that our
party here----"
He pauses and gazes fixedly at a large map of Western Canada. The
visitor imagines that he is looking at Portage, his home town.
"Er--you were saying, Mr. Meighen?"
"Medicine Hat," he answered vacantly. "Somehow, you know--I wish
Kipling had never made that remark about Medicine Hat,--'all hell for a
basement.'"
"You don't worry about the Hat just because there's going to be a
bye-election while you're away?"
"No,--for I know pretty well that I won't hold that seat. What worries
me is the fool use that some people will make of a freak election as a
forerunner of doom. However, as I was saying about the Conference--I
hope to get such a reasonable endorsation of Canada's stand on the main
issues that our party here can work to victory advantage in the next
election. I may as well be honest. Arthur Meighen, Premier, has not
yet been elected. But he intends to be, because he ought to be,
because the party he leads can do this country more good for the next
few years than anything else in sight; because the party which carried
the war and the re-establishment has been given a new lease of life, at
least some vision, and a vast deal of experience which Canada is going
to need from now on more than she can ever need the wholesale patent
nostrums of millennial doctors who think the plough-handles are a sign
manual of a new efficiency in government. We all know what is
happening to Russia. I'll be perfectly frank, and say that I fear this
young nation may be induced to scrap experience for experiment--which
above all times would at present be the inauguration of an economic
system for which the nation is not prepared, for which it has not been
educated, and because of which it cannot afford to take for its
education the bitter experience which too often succeeds glittering
experiment. What the world needs to-day is economic justice, not
economic revolution. No nation in the world has a better chance than
Canada for sound economic justice to all that makes her the world's
young leading democracy. But economics isn't everything. Good-night."