Here is a modest, honourable man who saw his duty to the nation and the
emergency never more clearly than he knew his own defects. Canada
never before had a mediocrity of such eminence; a man who without a
spark of genius devoted a high talent to a nation's work so well that
he just about wins a niche in our Valhalla--if we have one. It was the
war that almost finished Borden; and it was the war that made him.
Canada has been governed by strategy, imagination, and common sense.
We have had Macdonald, Laurier, and Borden. The first finished his
work, the second wanted to, and the third had finished his work two
years before he resigned office.
Sir Robert Borden was the only man in the world Premier both when the
war began and when it ended. Of all Premiers of Canada he was the
least like a Canadian, and he achieved European fame with less title to
personal greatness than either Laurier or Macdonald. For the crowd
there never was an inspired moment in Sir Robert's life, nor ever one
when he did not try to do his whole duty. He never interested the
people and did not always hold the profound allegiance of his party.
Yet there never was a public man in Canada to whom the average
politician would as soon take off his hat in absolute respect for his
moral purpose, integrity, fair-mindedness and sense of honour. There
was enough morality wasted in the equipment of R. L. Borden to have
supplied the lack of it in some of his heterogeneous followers. But it
was morality that he could not transmit except by silent influence.
Other celebrated Premiers had governed by the personal method. The
moral law was written all over Borden. He was a walking decalogue. He
worked for the good of the country without detriment to the
Conservative party. But there never was any Borden Mount of
Transfiguration. He never could lead except when he was considered by
the Majority to be right. In the war he took refuge in the nation, and
its patriotism. But for the war one doubts that Sir Robert would ever
have won any title to fame.
The man's whole makeup is a sort of righteousness. He had no use for
the mirror more than to adjust his necktie and his hair, of which a
woman writer said:
"That wonderful hair of his must have brought the unctuous fingers of
many masters, spiritual and otherwise, down upon it in commendatory
pats. . . . I daresay that it was his mother's pleasure in it and the
way she enjoyed running her fingers through it that made him
realize--subconsciously at least--that his hair was a very magnificent
asset." The writer also described the garden of the Premier--his
wonderful roses; how he talked about the personalities of the wild
flowers so dear to his soul, and the perversities of the wild
cucumber--but amiably declined to say a word about the destinies of
nations.
Laurier had his flute. Borden should not be denied his wild garden. I
used to think, watching the Premier in the House, that he would make a
splendid bronze bust of an Egyptian god.
But the man never could dress for the part of leader. He needed too
much grooming. He must always be immaculate. A trifle of neglige
would have ruined his career.
We never heard of his "iron hand within the velvet glove." He had
neither the hand nor the glove. He was an influence; never a power.
Even when the stage was all set for a show Sir Robert could not take
the spot-light. He did not abhor the calcium; he merely did not know
what to do when it was on. During the tour which preceded the
triumphal election of 1911 he was strong enough to win the country and
weak enough to pose for oratorical photographs of Sir Robert swaying a
crowd--on the roof of a Toronto hotel. Those photographs were
published as authentic pictures of the Premier in action.
But real action seldom happened to Premier Borden. He never could
invent occasions. He had no craft to play the game, no intuition to
penetrate into the conscience of a lukewarm supporter or of a man whose
policies and programmes might bedevil the union of the party. On his
tour in 1915 when, after seeing and hearing more of the realism of war
than any other man in the country, he undertook to translate his
emotions to crowds of people here, he was compelled to use the
tomtom-on-the-Midway performances of R. B. Bennett, at a time when
dominating men of both parties put their political makeups into their
pockets in order to do honour to the tragic cause of which on behalf of
the nation he was the spokesman.
Political history is very largely a chronicle of stupendous noises, of
pageants and tumults and shoutings, of strategies and manoeuvres,
secret conclaves and cabals, of sinister intrigues and specious
platitudes in parliament to cover them up, and of occasional great
episodes when the leader feels called to vindicate himself and his
followers. Most of these emotional experiences seem to have been
denied to Sir Robert.
I daresay it was mainly his lack of imagination. Borden must, "work
for the night is coming." The day's work was often bigger than the man.
His advent to the leadership was a moral makeshift. His defeat of
Laurier in 1911 was not a triumph for anything that might be called
Bordenism. His conduct of the political side of the war was
creditable, at times splendid, never consummately wise, never heroic.
His exit was as uneventful as his advent. Sir Robert had more than
finished his work.
The Conservative party as such carries no indelible imprint from the
man who for nearly a quarter of a century led it. He led it by going
alongside. He was not a great partisan. He had no overwhelming and
audacious bigotries.
Borden was the first Conservative leader of note who never could play
the ace of Quebec. The Laurier Cabinet knew how to play politics by
imagination. Borden had nothing but a demoralized remnant, which the
Liberals pillaged when they discarded Free Trade, helped themselves to
a high, virtually protective, tariff for revenue only, took a reef out
of the Tory "old flag" monopoly by establishing the British Preference
and sent a contingent to the South African War in the name of Empire.
Laurier was master in Quebec, in the new West whose two new Provinces
he created, in immigration, in great railways, in a deeper St.
Lawrence, in flamboyant adventures with great harbours, in the Quebec
Bridge. Borden as yet was master of nothing. Such brilliance and
success had never been confronted by such a demoralized party and so
much drab common sense in a leader.
Sir Robert's Premiership was a desperate inheritance. The direct
plunge into the Naval Aid Bill was a badly staged attempt to capitalize
the reaction against restricted reciprocity. That first session of the
Borden Parliament goes on record as the most complete one-act farce
ever inflicted upon a patient country. The Imperial issue was a play
to the gallery, and it is the one clear issue that seems to remain of
all the Borden idea.
Sir Robert in his whole life never constructed an epigram. His two
great predecessors had made several. Epigrams sometimes outlive
policies. He never delivered a great passionate speech. He had
opportunities but could not meet them. Fine speeches enough, to be
sure; many of them instinct with a sort of ethical nobility; but a
great palpitating speech, never.
It is not likely that if left to the logic of ordinary evolution Sir
Robert ever would have recreated his party even on Imperial issues; or
convinced the West that Conservatism was not merely anti-agrarian; or
shewn Quebec that Conservatives in the second decade of the twentieth
century are better Laurentians than the Liberals by preserving better
the anti-continental idea. Such things call for leadership by
imagination and a Cabinet of strong men. Sir Robert had neither. Even
in the House he was not the party leader. Conservatism established by
Macdonald as a great system of damnation to the Grits, was on the low
road to extinction. It was not in the power of Robert Borden to save
it. The country was swept by a new Liberalism that by astute
manipulation had kept sympathetic both manufacturers and radicals.
Long before the war came, Canada recognized in Mr. Borden a Premier who
knew the meaning of moral caution so well that he knew not boldness at
all except that his cause was right. Borden had the ethical stolidity
of Asquith without the latter's personal weaknesses or his powers of
oratory. He needed somebody with him as stage manager and makeup
artist. Even his virtues might have been advertised with
effect--though as a rule, except in characters like Lincoln, it takes
the perspective of time to put those into a poster. So eminently
respectable; so high in honour; so fair in judgment; so irresolute in
action; so defective in imagination; so content to be overshadowed by
lesser men in his own party even though he never was intimidated by
bigger men in the Opposition: such, so far as we could see him before
the war, was Sir Robert Borden.
Platitudes lay in wait for the Premier to utter them. Only by an
effort of will could he lift them to a plane of high interest. He
could sketch great issues with the solemn hand of a great preacher
pronouncing a benediction; but he never could utter an aside, or crack
a joke, or tell a story, or forget that once upon a time Fate had
picked him to be a leader and so help him he would go through the
motions of shepherding while the other men were the real collie dogs of
the flock. If only Borden could have broken some bucking broncho, or
worn some new kind of bouquet, or invented some imitation of a brazen
serpent to hold up, the people and the party might have got hold of him
and followed him.
Such was Premier Borden before the war, and so he remained, but under a
magnifying glass, afterwards. The war was a godsend to the Government.
It drove out alleged dissension in the Cabinet and gave the party which
had met defeat in the Naval Aid Bill a chance to perpetrate something
which no Parliament would dare try to defeat. Sometimes I almost think
Borden was for short periods in the war a truly great man--in the eyes
of the angels. He had known the war was coming; he had said so. There
was a secret plan of action on file in the Archives months before it
came. Not his to exult in I-told-you-sos to the leader opposite who
had mitigated the menace. He rose to his programme of duty. He did
not even wait till Britain declared war, but cabled assurances of aid
on August 2nd, 1914. Special Parliament was assembled. The hour had
struck. A Halifax writer present at the Khaki Parliament says:
"Sir Wilfrid easily bore off the honours in oratory. It was a great
occasion and he rose to it. . . . Sir Robert is no orator, but he
spoke in straight man-fashion of the great crisis. The climax of his
speech was a solemn warning of the dark days to come 'when our
endurance will be tried.'"
Had the Premier issued a referendum in that first month of Canada's
going to war he would have wept at the amazing number of Noes from the
Province in which Laurier was born, and the provinces in the Far West
which he had created; in the one, obvious indifference whatever the
cause; in the other enmity from the Nationals whom Laurier had imported
to make Liberal voters. Even in the rural areas, traditionally the
stronghold of Liberalism, indifferentism was the rule; and in the city
of Kitchener where Laurier had politically baptized Mackenzie King, his
successor, there was almost a state of civil war.
But the fervour of the Hughes programme prevented the Premier from
taking stock of the nation. He permitted Hughes to treat Quebec as an
automatic part of Canada at war--which it was not; and he failed to use
even the Machiavellian energies of Bob Rogers in getting a line on the
psychology of the West, supposed to be useful only in elections. Sir
Robert had long known of the menace of Germany, and his Naval Aid Bill
was one proof that he knew. But he did not understand the menace of
disunited Canada. There never was in Ottawa any informing vision of
Canada at war. Canada, in fact, was not at war. Political feuds were
indeed forgotten; thanks to a noble-minded Premier that was natural
enough. But had there been a national poet then big enough to
translate into great verse the true spiritual state of Canada, he would
have written with poignant sadness about Quebec; perhaps a few verses
on the overwhelming British-born majority in the First Contingent. He
would have explained that being a native son of Canada, whether you
were English or French by extraction, did not of itself lead to
enlistment in the ranks. The Premier should have known whether Sam
Hughes was awarding patronage by making officers from the Conservative
party or whether according to his own statement he was doing just the
opposite. In fact it was the Premier's business to see that the
Minister of War pursued neither policy.
But with the Hughes flares all about him it was hard for the Premier to
see the nation; most of all Quebec. In this matter of the two Canadas,
Sam Hughes saw his opportune duty and he did it. Sir Robert saw his
and shrank from it, not weakly but blindly. Quebec should have been
the instant objective of all the wisdom in Canada's Cabinet. Except
for one or two grand battalions and a minority of broad-minded
French-Canadians, Quebec was not at war, as part of united Canada.
Banging the drum and blowing the bugle in Quebec was as wrong in
strategy as to send Bob Rogers down to exorcise, as he did in 1915, the
phantom of conscription. Sir Robert knew that even in civil times his
Government was electorally ignored on the St. Lawrence. How much more
in a time of unpopular war? Was it not clear that every hurrah for the
Empire in Ontario, every fresh battalion mustered and drilled in
Toronto, every troopship down the St. Lawrence, was a nail in the
coffin of Quebec's potentiality in the war?
Yes, Sir Robert Borden knew that. He knew that Laurier was sulking
like Cassius in his tent; that he was gnawing himself over the failure
of his own predictions about the peace welfare of the world as well as
for his own defeat in the election of 1911; that the man of the "sunny
ways" was becoming a reactionary and a cynic, an old leader of great
power, which he was willing to use to the utmost for the prosecution of
the war had he been in office, but in opposition was manacled by a
sense of futility against forces in Quebec which he understood and
feared far more than did the Premier.
No doubt the Premier traversed all this, many a time and in great
concern. And it may be that he saw so sharply into the sad
hopelessness of it all that he decided not to ask Laurier for advice,
or even suggestion. Such is lack of imagination.
Laurier had his day in the grand expansion of the country. Borden
would have his, in the sacrifices and moral energies of the dark days
to come. It was a greater thing to be Premier in war than ever it had
been in peace. Canada was a greater land in action on the West front
than ever she had been stringing railways, settling farms and building
towns on the frontiers. The more Canada went to the front of her own
free will, the greater she seemed abroad. The credit of this nation at
war went up in London and Paris much faster than its investment credit
had ever gone on the exchanges. The further one got from Ottawa the
greater the country seemed. A Canadian Cabinet Minister meeting a
British Minister in London could talk for an hour on the wonderful war
character of this country. London was the centre of gravity of the
west front, and of Canadian Ministers. The Premier spent almost half
his time in or near London, whenever summoned, or whenever politic to
go--to a place where the rancours of Ottawa were all buried in the
grand cause. The Premier of Canada sometimes went to London when he
would rather have stayed at home; more often when he felt that it was
emotionally bigger to be Premier in London than in Ottawa. He was more
honoured in war than Laurier had been in peace. He would have been a
better Canadian had he stayed in Ottawa more. But there were many
Canadians who were more concerned about how to help Foch and Lloyd
George win the war in Europe than about how to knuckle down to common
business at home. The trek to England and to Europe became a fad. The
nations went world crazy. Premiers neglected to "saw wood." It was a
matter for gratitude that they did not parade in khaki.
Premier Borden's lingering objection to Coalition here, even after it
was established in London, did him no credit. He was displeased when
the Chairman of the Imperial Munitions Board, back from a business
conference in London, asked if the Premier had any objection to his
stating the case for the need of Coalition at a public dinner. Of
course the Chairman was out of order. But he was talking business, not
politics.
The war was not going well. The British part of it was badly enough
bedevilled by distance and differences of opinion between various
Dominions without the distraction of party politics.
But for the great services of win-the-war Liberals the Military Service
Act might have disrupted the Coalition even when it came. It was an
extreme measure; much more hazardous here than in Britain--except for
Ireland, of which we wanted no imitation in Quebec. There were times
when Sir Robert longed for the wings of a dove. His offer of Coalition
came at a time when he knew Laurier would refuse it. Conscription he
carried out as a necessity. He never wanted it. No Premier of a
free-will nation would. There were bigoted anti-Quebeckers who would
have had compulsion from the first to show the French that Canada was
greater than Quebec. But if Canada had sent conscripts in 1915 what
would have become of the glory of the Canadian army? The argument that
it was the best men who were killed, thereby robbing the nation of its
flower, is thoroughly ignoble. Canada has never regretted that her
best men died first, or that the Premier delayed conscription until it
was inevitable. Canada does regret that the Government did not until
too late, attempt to make any national register of the strength of this
nation as had been done in England before conscription came as the
final result. To have applied conscription before the United States
went to war would have driven thousands of slackers across the border.
Enough went as it was in the fear that conscription was coming.
The bilingual bungle in the Commons was even worse than the bad feeling
over conscription. In this debate the angry French element in the
House were a bad commentary on the still hopeful minority of
broadminded French-Canadians who wanted to carry on the honour of
Courcellette. The controversy over titles was no feather in the cap of
the Premier, who made a bad fist of defending a practice the most
glaring instance of which was the creation of hereditary titles in a
democratic country.
Canada's "dark days" were fast coming. The resignation of Hughes was
due before it came. The Premier's patience was scarcely any longer a
virtue in this case, when four months after the declaration of war he
had been compelled to make a diplomatic visit to Toronto's war camp in
order to smooth out the troubles created by his "Chief of Staff."
From that time on to the end of his career we had the spectacle of a
Premier overburdened and weary in his office, bewildered by the
insistent advices of other men and sad over the failure of even
conscription, in the face of such wastage, to get Canada's 5th Division
into the field without weakening the four divisions we had. The Union
Government was too heavy a load for so weary a man to carry. It had
done its work, most of it well, some of it too late. The head of it
was worn out. He was away much for his health, more for service in
Europe, coming back to reconstruct his Cabinet, with the aid of
Meighen, then away again. He had lost Hughes, Rogers, Crerar, Cochrane.
The strong men he had left, except Meighen, White and Foster, were
Union Liberals.
Why did the Premier not himself resign? His work was done. His Union
Government had finished the work which the nation gave it a mandate to
do.
The answer must be in Sir Robert's own conviction that as a Premier of
Canada he still had a great work to do in Europe in the settlement of
peace. That work he did, some of it much more ably than much he had
done at home. We had to read the headlines diligently to see where
next Canada's mobile Premier would be needed in the adjustments of
peace. More of the answer might be found in the doubt as to whether
any man in Canada clearly knew what the Government's work, and
therefore its mandate, would be. It was a time of upheavals when any
nation with a Government carrying on its work constructively according
to programme might have been glad to escape the further upheaval of a
general election. But political parties have usually been profiteers
in the emergency of a nation. Did the Premier fear that his
resignation would force an election before the new party was ready? We
are not told. Under pressure he called a caucus in 1919 to determine
the programme of whatever party he had in the Union. The caucus
determined nothing. Did he hope to carry on until the legal expiry of
his term in 1922, thereby evening up with the Liberals who wanted to
bring on an election in 1916?
This also we do not know. Sir Robert was a weary and baffled Premier.
He did not know how to let go. Once even his faltering hand was off,
who was to succeed him? There were three men to consider.
The man's work was done. He knew it. Much of it had been nobly done.
He knew that the nation was sure of this. And he now understands that
even with the failures and the weaknesses of his administration, both
as Conservative and Unionist Premier, we cordially concede to this high
mediocrity a place in our critical affairs only second to the credit
that he gained in England and in Europe as the head of a nation that
had gloriously fought and magnificently won--in the war.
Canada never had as great and noble a servant, who failed so
conspicuously on personal grounds to be the nation's master. But there
were elements in the patriotic servant-hood of R. L. Borden, higher
than the political masteries of more brilliant men.