A zig-zag old rack with its ivies and moss,
Just fifty-odd panels or so;
A wheat-field, a scythe and a boy his own boss;
He had the fence-corners to mow.
He slivered the whetstone clear out to the tip
Of his snake-handled, snubnosed old blade;
And he swung his straw hat with a sweep and a rip
With the sun ninety-four in the shade.
He thought of the water-jug cool as a stone
Right under a burdock's green palm,
By the leg of a fence-corner hickory half-grown,
Where the breeze always blew in a calm.
But the boss saw him loafing clear over the corn,
The next the boy heard was a shout;
And he wished for a moment he never was born
To mow all those fence-corners out.
Past the elder-bush blow it's five corners to mow,
To get to that burdock's green lug--
So he put on a spurt till the sweat blacked his shirt,
And he mowed his way in to the jug.
What cared the boy then for the boss in the corn
With a beaded brown jug at his feet,
While he pulled out the corn-cob as glad he was born
As the bobolink there in the wheat?
He unbuttoned his shirt and got on the top rail,
He hung his straw hat on the stake,
And he smiled to the hickory leaves' rustling tale,
As he gazed at that berry-bush brake.
Till chuck! went the scythe on a piece of old rail
That lifted clear out of its bunk;
And he said what he never had read in a tale,
To that innocent, rotten old chunk.
And then he heard something that never was sung,
That no bobolink could have said,
That never was rendered by pen or by tongue;
But it made his heart thump in his head,
As he let the scythe drop and he picked up the chunk,
And sneaked up as soft as a breeze,
And poked at the noise in that rotten rail's bunk
Till out came a bumble of bees.
Oh! the jug it was cool and the berries were red,
And sweet was the bobolink's strain;
But bumble-bee cups in a rotten rail's bed
Make a jug and a bobolink vain.
By noon at the nest there was only one bee,
And only one berry to pick,
And only one drink in the jug at the tree:
But that boy was as full as a tick.
They have torn the old zig-zag clear out of its snake,
And the bushes have gone up in fire;
The hickory stands but it's only a stake
To hold up a fiddle of wire.
The wires are strung tight for the fiddle is new,
And straight as a beam of the sun:
The plough slides along it, the wind whistles through,
And the fence-corner blue-grass is done.
The old mossy rails and green ivies are gone
With fifty grass crooks in a row--
But the bobolink sits on the wire and sings on--
The music he sang long ago.
And now 'mid the jostle and rush of the street,
That boy has his dreams in the day,
When he sits on the rail 'twixt the clover and wheat,
And mows out the fence-corner hay.
Whenever E. C. Drury whetted a scythe mowing fence corners he was, so
far as can be reasonably surmised, thinking about the tariff and the
waters of the Red Sea that swallowed up Pharaoh. It may be a
coincidence, but it seems like fate, that he was born in the same year
as the National Policy; the indignity of which was so great that he
vowed to spend his life living it down. He went to sleep with blue
books and the Bible under his pillow. He gave way to both. He has
never gone back on either. The iniquity of a tariff to him was part of
the moral law. The more he exhorted at revival meetings and
local-preached and led class-meetings, the more deeply he was convinced
that tariff-Tories are in constant need of economic salvation. At
threshing bees I can fancy this broad-faced, dreamy-eyed, large-mouthed
young "Reformer" who never was born to take life mentally easy, saying
to himself as he shoved the stack straw past his boots, that the old
boys talking so hard about elections knew nothing about economics; and
he wished to heaven that barn was all threshed out, so that he could
get back home to read some more tariff statistics.
The Drury farm, hewn from the bush by his grandfather, cost the young
man nothing but taxes and upkeep. It gave him leisure in which to
study the ills of farming. What a blessing all farmers have not
leisure! Travelling up and down that peninsula between Huron and Erie,
constantly at some sort of "Meeting," Drury could see "Hard Times" on
almost every telegraph pole. The average farmer had a small lot, a
heavy mortgage and a large family; scrub cattle, thin horses and poor
hogs. No doubt Drury read, when it came out, that amazing pamphlet of
Goldwin Smith--Canada and the Canadian Question, in which the writer
alleged that the Canadian farmer sold the best he produced and ate the
culls. Well, with hogs at $3 per cwt., oats 20 cents a bushel, hay $7
a ton, and wheat under a dollar, from stumpy little fields--the farmer
in Drury's youth did well to escape cannibalism.
To know Drury, one must understand the oddly interesting epoch and
region in which he came up. The men with whose sons he went to the
village school were manufacturers first, farmers second. Their raw
material was the hardwood bush; their factory the saw mill; their
common carrier the Yankee schooner. In my own bush days a few counties
further down in that same peninsula, I recall heaps of white oak slabs
in the forest which I was told were the remains of the timber-men who
had gone through buying and cutting out the oaks for square timber that
floated away in rafts, probably to build tramp steamers in England.
The bush farmer hired to wield the broad-axe on that oak was as much an
industrialist as any moulder in a foundry. He would have fought with
his naked fists any agitator who proposed to interfere with that wages
revenue.
After the oak was gone came the elm buyers, shrewd Americans who paid
as much for a thousand feet of prime swamp elm as the pork buyer twenty
miles away paid for a cwt. of dead hog. Mr. Drury must have known
something about those friendly but niggardly Yankee dollars that saved
many a bush farmer from being sold for taxes. He may have seen bolt
mills go up and young men betwixt haying and harvest swagger down to
the docks to get 25 cents an hour loading elm bolts into the three-mast
schooners. He probably saw stave mills arise in which hundreds of
youths got employment while their fathers at home fought stumps, wire
worms, drought and the devil to get puny crops at small prices. He saw
the wagon-works and the fanning mill factory and the reaper industry
come up out of these timber products. While he was a youth the farmers
were the first promoters of bigger towns, because the big town meant
more jobs for the young men whose father's acres were too few for the
families, and bigger markets close at hand for perishable products.
The farmers of that day would have tarred and feathered any
revolutionist who came preaching that a good market town was a wicked
conspiracy of _bourgeoisie_ and should become a deserted village.
Yankee money and Canadian industries were the economics of Drury's
boyhood. If he was as good a Canadian then as he is now he must have
had more faith in the Canadian factory than he had in the American
paymaster, or sometimes even in the Ontario farm. There never was a
bush farmer who would not have voted for a tariff that increased the
price of timber for the saw-mill.
By the time Drury was old enough to consider being a candidate for
Parliament, heaps of sawdust marked the grave of many a vanished saw
mill. Young men who could not get work in the near-by town drifted to
High School, to college, to law and medicine and the pulpit; they went
to the big cities across the border and got high wages; to the Canadian
West and got cheap land. The counties of Western Ontario began to
decrease in man wealth as they increased in the wealth of agricultural
industry. The schools that used to have boys sitting on the woodpile
by the box stove shrank to about four scholars in a class.
Congregations dwindled. Little towns lost their mills and began to
feel like Goldsmith's Deserted Village. Then came the age of farm
machinery, when the big towns had more overalls than the farms, and
every good farm began to be a sort of factory.
All this was meat and drink to E. C. Drury, who came to voting age with
the solemn conviction that though the fathers had worked hard, the sons
were not prosperous. They paid too much for what they had to buy and
got too little for what they had to sell; a fate which seems to
overtake most of us in varying degree. With stagnant local towns the
markets for perishable products declined. In the open markets of the
world, reached by long railway and steamship hauls, the Canadian
farmer's staple products were in competition with nations of cheap
labour. Across the lake a nation of twelve times our population was
retaliating against our protective tariffs by duties on Canadian grain,
cattle and hogs. The Tory party and the Canadian Pacific and the Bank
of Montreal and the Canadian Manufacturers' Association were becoming
British at the expense of the Canadian farmer. At the back of all the
gods of things as they are and ought not to be, stood the damnable,
desolating tariff that fattened the town and starved the farmer in
order to bloat the banks and the manufacturer and the railways--under
the cloak of patriotism! Heaven deliver us! Was it not a Tory
manufacturer of stoves who said in Toronto that he would build a tariff
"as high as Hainan's gallows?" Was it not a Tory President of the
C.P.R. who said he would have a tariff as high as a Chinese wall to
keep out the Yankees? Was it not the President of a great Canadian
bank who deserted the Liberal party when it sought to enact a measure
of reciprocity?
On all hands Mr. Drury could see the evidence of a master conspiracy
against the farmer, who was to become the helot of civilization. He
could see it in his own barn as he reckoned the cost of his machinery,
and over against that the price of what he had in the bins of his
granary and on the hoof outside. That thousands of farmers voted and
talked Conservative proved the astonishing power of heredity. That all
farmers did not become Liberals and make the Liberal party a solid
rural party proved that even a man's depleted pocket cannot compete
with the traditions of his family. Drury looked to Laurier to
emancipate the farmer. In vain. Laurier created more farmers,
thousands of them in the West; but he only enslaved them with the
voters' lists; the very party over which Drury had almost wept with joy
when at the age of eighteen he had felt them like the armies of Israel
sweeping out the scoundrels of the National Policy.
Thus his hope was no longer in Laurier, who knew nothing about the
farmer, nor dreamed that in the very West which he had put on the
political map with his prosperity of imported people and borrowed
money, there was arising a race that would repudiate him and his.
Drury had a weather eye on the West. There were farms in Simcoe county
now worked by old men whose sons had gone to that Promised Land. In
the constant drift of the hired man and the farmer's son to the town
and the city for shorter hours, higher wages and more amusement, he saw
the fluidity of labour, the first evidence that there was some common
ground between the farmer and the labour class. Working in his own
fields, driving his own teams, operating his own machinery, this
capitalistic labour-unionist of the soil said to himself that the
farmers of Canada were entitled not merely to representation in
Parliament, but to the organization of a class interest that should
take hold of the country's economic horns and turn it on to the right
road.
In the lonely furrow of the farm a man often thinks out conclusions
that are gloriously right in themselves, but in the chequered and
cynical experiences of men in office tragically impossible. Mr. Drury
was no stranger to Ottawa. He had been there on deputations; and on
tariff commissions; and each time he came back he had a stronger
determination to go there some day as the voice of the more or less
united farmer against the tariff that had sterilized the Liberals.
Drury was a rural Liberal. He saw in the reciprocity campaign of 1911
some glimmer of hope that Liberalism might succeed without a
revolution. The election settled that. From then on to the war the
philosopher of Crown Hill bent himself to the deeper study of the one
force that now seemed to him to be left capable of breaking the
nation's bondage. He no longer had the fervent desire to see a new
town grow among the farms that he had when he was a youth. Every
bigger town, unless it had industries that could widen the farmer's
low-cost market, was a mitigated menace. Every foundry and implement
works and furniture factory and boot industry making goods more or less
from imported material, considerably with imported labour, and selling
to the consumer at a normal price plus the duty, roused in Mr. Drury as
much hostility as a natively kind and Christian character would permit.
And at last he saw the predicted slump begin to come in the year 1913,
when the boomster dodged the boomerang of inflated and speculative
values; when east and west the farmers, crimped by high railway rates
and cost of materials, machinery and labour, ceased to be the backbone
of Canadian buying.
And then the War.
Whatever may be traced to the normal development of this Ontario
Cincinnatus, it was the War which made Drury. But for the war he would
have bided his time to be elected to Ottawa on a straight tariff issue.
The war, backed by the man's religion and his tariff theology, drove
him to the Premiership of Ontario.
There were times during the war when, if Mr. Drury was as honest with
himself as he is about government, he must have reflected that the
Canadian farmer was getting pretty well paid back in part of one
generation for the wrongs and adversities suffered by generations ago.
Pork at $20 per cwt., oats at $1.50 a bushel, wheat fixed by the
Government at $2.40 to keep it from bulling to more than $3--none of
these could have been economically justified by Mr. Drury except as an
act of compensating Providence. The farmer of all people as a class
benefited most, when he was driven to the worst labour hardship he ever
had by the terrific prices paid for war work, which robbed him of hired
help almost at any price. The higher the price and the scarcer the
help, the more the Government clamoured for production. The Ontario
farmer responded to the call. He was no more a patriot to do it than a
man was to buy Victory Bonds. He was simply a profitee (we leave off
the r).
And this was the first call of the war to which the farmers as a class
made a hearty response. No doubt most farmers were better servants of
the nation in the furrow than in the trench. But the time came when
they had to leave the furrows. On top of the Government's most frantic
call for more production by the farmer came the Military Service Act,
which refused to exempt him. The call to the plough-handle came before
the election of 1917. The call to the bayonet came afterwards in a
crisis unforeseen at the time of the election. Drury himself had been
defeated as a conscriptionist Liberal candidate in 1917. No farmer
could be in khaki and overalls at the same time. There was no reason
given for the drastic change of face except the message from the front
that more men were urgently needed or the West front was doomed. It
was not even reckoned that a farmer conscripted after seed-time in 1918
could not possibly be of use in the trenches till long after the time
when the fate of the West front would have been settled anyway.
Hence the ire of the agriculturist, driven now to become an agrarian.
The Ontario farmer made no distinction between the Unionist Government
that had conscripted the farmer, and the Ontario Conservative
Government which supported Ottawa. The farmer made up his mind
wherever possible to defeat both the old line candidates.
Premier Drury was the chief result. He never would have been offered
the post but for the cleavage caused by the war. The U.F.O. were not
unanimous, and Drury was not anxious. He had his eye on Ottawa. But
there was nobody else who could unite the group with labour. Drury had
himself been the first president of the U.F.O. and secretary of the
Canadian Council of Agriculture; he was a thinker, something of a
scholar, a futurist, and a good deal of a radical; and he could speak
well.
He picked a Cabinet mainly of farmers. He occupied more time drafting
his Cabinet than most farmers take to harvest a crop. He was in a
hurry, but he wanted nobody to suspect it. He said little; wisely.
There was no occasion. He had no mandate from the people. He wanted
sure-enough colleagues. The men he chose were all novices. The old
line critics watched him with affected contempt. They said Agriculture
and Labour never could mix. Drury went along. No Cabinet had ever
been so prayerfully hand-picked. Labour must not get the idea that it
was merely being sopped for the support of twelve men in a House
majority of one. There must be concession; common aims understood,
even ahead of experience, when there was as yet no common policy.
Mr. Drury had been only a few hours sworn Premier of Ontario when he
was summarily turned out--not, however, from Office. In company with a
farmer author friend who had been given the freedom of a certain small
but desirable Club and who wanted to show Mr. Drury one place where he
could have a quiet time of an evening, he went to have dinner. As
neither of the gentlemen was known to the housekeeping department a
member of the Club--a well-known newspaperman--was asked to inquire
their identity. The result was that the Premier of Ontario and his
friend left the Club, without dinner.
The next day the newspaperman looked over the shoulder of his
editor-chief in office and said,
"Who is the important-looking man in the photograph?"