N. W. Rowell has the bearing of a man who long ago felt that he was
called to do something for a cause or a country and has never got over
it. Meanwhile he has done much for both a cause and a country, and
seems to have quit before the country had begun to enjoy more than the
least agreeable elements in his character. To have suffered the
insistent righteousness of Mr. Rowell so long, and at the close of the
first period of his life when he seemed to be getting his own measure
as a public man on a big stage, to see him withdraw like a chambered
nautilus into his shell, not only from the Cabinet but from his seat in
Durham, is a little hard on public patience. But of course the
chambered nautilus may emerge again.
Years ago Mr. Rowell had moral energy enough to reconstruct a large
part of the world in Liberalism and in the Methodist Church. Today he
finds evangelic Liberalism rampant out on the skyline under such men as
Crerar and Drury, and the church discussing social reformation in
phraseology associated with dynamic ideas to which he never could be
assimilated.
Mr. Rowell's career reminds us that there are four brands of Liberals
in Canada: Evolutionary; Manchester School; Laurierite; Agrarian.
Tories never evolve. There are only good Tories and bad ones.
He belongs to the first group, and there is nothing in his temperament
to make him anything else. Free Trade never did convince him; he broke
away from the enchanting tyranny of Laurier; and, though born on a
farm, he never could revert to the plough-handles for a vision of the
world.
Judging from some fairly recent preachments by able reverends such as
Wm. Woodsworth and Salem Bland, there may be as many brands of
Methodism. If so we unhesitatingly place Mr. Rowell in the
evolutionary group. Therefore by personal development he is next thing
to a Conservative; and the latest phase of his career proves that in
working it out he has practised the fine old platitude of Polonius to
Laertes:
"To thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man."
Mr. Rowell is one of our most encouraging types of what is called the
self-made man. Any Oxford professor hearing him make a typically good
speech in London on "The Commonwealth of Nations under the Union Jack,"
would infer that he had taken a post-graduate course in political
history after graduating as a B.A. But Mr. Rowell never even attended
a High School. He went from the farm as a lad to be a parcel boy in a
London, Ont., dry-good store. The class-meeting and the sermon and the
Mechanics' Institute gave him a taste for serious literature. He came
up in the oratorical county that produced G. W. Ross and J. A.
Macdonald. He must have regularly read Tannage's sermons. He was a
youth when the Y.M.C.A. movement invaded Canada along with baseball.
He made the choice. He passed into the Law School, somehow dodging all
the good brethren who advised him to go into the ministry. And through
the opportunity afforded him by the successful practice of law and
Liberalism on a large scale he has been able to preach his sermons to
much bigger audiences than he ever could have found in the Methodist
Church.
If some of the advanced radicals of these days would con over the
outlines of a career like this, they might get rid of some of their
fantastic notions about State-devised equality and emancipation. Mr.
Rowell instinctively reached out by industry and enthusiasm for the
forces that would better his condition. In so doing he spent a large
part of himself upon the betterment of society. The result is an
intellectual, moral and financially successful character of which any
community might be proud--so long as the community contained but one of
the kind.
Rowellism is a good salt. It is not good porridge. The average
unprofessional Christian man cannot live on the levels where Mr. Rowell
breathes so easily.
Time and again have we heard the equivocal remark about this man; if
such, and however so. Why not take the man as he is and make the best
of him? Surely by now he has proved that he has a definite and
uplifting leverage on public life. It is of no use to complain that he
never was cut out to be a leader in anything but ethical ideas of
statesmanship. It was political makeshiftery to make such a man the
leader of Ontario Liberalism, which did not ask to be led but to be
cajoled and tricked up for the carnival. It was fatuous to imagine
that he could ever become a chief of the National Liberal and
Conservative party to which he now inextricably belongs. If secret
ambition ever spurred him to indulge that dream--which seems
incredible--sober reflection at the looking glass should have corrected
the strabismus. Mr. Rowell is not a leader of men, in action; never
was and never could be--without some drastic transformation in his
outward character such as he has never shown.
The last time I observed Mr. Rowell he was in the lounge of a club
where he had just finished lunch. All about him were scores of men in
groups, each group animatedly intent upon some topic from baseball to
high finance. A few weeks earlier that same club had given a public
dinner to Mr. Rowell and Sir George Foster, when each seemed to overdo
the other in gripping those present by the presentation of a world
theme backed by a striking personality. In the lounge Mr. Rowell, our
best authority on the ethics of the Empire and the League of Nations,
went about alone, unobtrusive, drab-coloured, almost insignificant. He
spoke to nobody and few men as much as noticed him. He nodded gravely
now and again, but never smiled. Both hands in his trouser pockets, he
seemed to be gazing at some vagabond blind spot in the room. He almost
seemed to be whistling to himself like a lad in a forest. Presently he
wandered out.
By no exercise of imagination could one conceive such a man as a
Canadian political leader. If there is anything in an aura he has it
not. A halo would have suited him better.
Three elements conspire to make Rowell:
Conscience; oratory; opportunity.
Most men have trouble enough with any two of the three. Mr. Rowell
continues to hold our respect in spite of the whole trinity. Too much
conscience always on duty at a peak load is no way to attract a vast
variety of people who relish a degree of sinfulness now and again. We
do not repudiate the value of conscience in public affairs. The public
man without it provides almost the only sane argument for the
preservation of the gallows. But when one man carries so much of it, a
number of others may be excused for carrying less. This is an age of
specialties.
It is required of a truly efficient conscience, however, that it be
instant in season and out of season, and that it do not wait upon
opportunity. When the Ross Government was so old in sin that even the
new _Globe_ editor accused the ship of having barnacles, we fail to
remember that Mr. Rowell lifted his voice against it. He was a
candidate for the Commons five years before James Whitney began his
regime of government by indignation; at a time when if Ontario went on
a political spree Ottawa got a headache. Big-party government was
pretty strong in those days to keep a man like Rowell from talking out
in meeting. The value of a conscience to a community, whatever it may
be to an individual or a party, is in giving it a chance to speak out
when something is wrong with your own group, not when it is politically
convenient to take off the muffler. Mr. Rowell's method of opening
Durham as a safe seat for himself by making a Senator of the
Conservative member for Durham, was one way of reforming the Civil
Service, which was one of his Government hobbies. But in practical
politics it is sometimes necessary to do evil that good may come. Mr.
Rowell needed a safe seat--in order to do his work for the country. It
seems a pity that a constituency so shrewdly obtained could not have
been steadfastly held.
As an orator Mr. Rowell is remarkable in spite of two defects; no
classical or humanities education except what he diligently dug out of
books, and a very thin voice. Few public speakers of our time use such
admirable diction, and it is a rare one who can make so lean a voice
thrill so completely with passion in the presentation of powerfully
synthetic ideas. This is a great gift; but like personal beauty it has
its fatal fascination. Mr. Rowell has not ceased to suffer from a sort
of bondage to his oratory as he has from the tyranny of his conscience.
In conversation he seldom just talks. He seems to deliver dicta. He
rarely glows with the fire of the moment; he seems to be preparing for
the grand occasion. The stage must be set. When did he ever make a
poor speech that he had time to prepare? Or a good one impromptu? One
cannot soon forget his remarkable speech in the Toronto Arena at the
citizens' reception to Premier Borden in 1915. Here this lifelong
Liberal made what up to that moment was the greatest speech of his
career; and he was speaking as a British citizen, not as a Canadian
Liberal.
With equal power, to a small group, but with even more passion as a
broad-minded Canadian, he spoke to the Bonne Entente in Toronto in 1917
on a subject which may have had something to do with his future as a
Dominion instead of a Provincial statesman. In this connection I quote
from a report of that meeting made by the writer:
"He took his preconsidered skeleton of argument with all its careful
alignment of crescendos and climaxes and clothed it with the passion of
a rousing, emotionalizing speech. The points somewhat roughly made by
other men he remade by a new grouping of the ideas. With eminent
juridical clarity he worked himself up the ropes of oratory, and when
he got to the tiptop of the trapeze he flung out his big compliment to
the French-Canadians now at the front. Of course he said other things.
He made fine use of the historic as he always manages to do. But when
he got away from that into the great little story of Courcellette and
the gallant 22nd with its sole surviving eighty men and two officers
besides the C.O. "fighting the Germans like devils," he had voltage
enough for an audience of ten thousand."
It is doubtful if Canada ever had a public speaker who with so little
personal makeup for the part could so wonderfully deliver himself in
orational speeches on any topic of nations, commonwealths and empires.
If Rowell were less of an orator he would be more of a power as a
public man. Carrying around loaded blank pistols is not nearly so
congenial to most men as a cigar in the left hand vest pocket. There
is in most of us a strain of buncombe which we exhibit often when
others are not looking. I think Rowell exhibits most of his in solemn
form in public. If one has not what is called _savoir faire_ he must
make his abstractions and silences confoundedly interesting. Rowell
packs all his power into a speech. Therefore even his greatest
speeches are sometimes to some people a bore.
I think he must have risen to about his height of unceremonious
informality at a Peace dinner in London when he sat next to the
plenipotentiary from Serbia, to whom he remarked:
"I should think so many dinners and public functions would be hard on
your constitution."
"Yes," rejoined the Serbian with a gravely astute look at his
companion; "but we have an upper and a lower chamber."
Rowell told this on himself. Even that he could not have done five
years ago. Mingling with men more solemn than himself he observed the
inconvenience of solemnity. He really wants to be a conductor of the
little currents of energy that make men think and act in small groups.
Some good parson years ago should have encouraged him to smoke between
speeches.
Opportunity. This focuses the other two. Rowell has seldom neglected
this mistress. It is comparatively easy for many men to make
themselves at the Sign of the Dollar; as a rule more difficult at the
Sign of Culture. Mr. Rowell is a man of fine intellectual attainments,
which he has seldom failed to use in furthering his public success.
Yet he was a good while becoming incorporated into the body politic of
Liberalism. The world was his parish. Wesley was his idol; then
Laurier. Between these two it is a marvel that even at the rather late
age of forty-four he came to the leadership of Liberalism in Ontario.
Here he became the prophet who would abolish the bar even before its
time, not without provocation. There had been stories of wild drinking
escapades among some of the Liberal leaders in Queen's Park. Mr.
Rowell can therefore be amply forgiven for having been the instigator
of that poster, "Is That You, Daddy?"
This can be remembered from his five years of misfit rule in Queen's
Park when many of his good offices there are mainly forgotten. It was
rather pitiful to observe how incapable Mr. Rowell was of giving vent
to his great talents in that Legislature. He did not understand the
lingo. Most of it was too piffling and small. He knew Ontario better
from the angle of corporation law. He made a poor showing as leader,
for there were no great issues in which he could lead; though he did
initiate a great deal of useful welfare legislation. He made one
heroic effort to understand New Ontario in the rough when he donned
overalls and went down in some of the mines. But it was all too much
in the rough. One imagines there must have been many a moment when he
wished he had never taken that leadership with so precious little to
lead, and yearned for some larger way. But it was a long, long trail.
And Laurier was now a strange old man. Whichever way he looked he was
in a blind alley.
The Coalition gave him a way out. The old chief's attitude towards the
war made Laurier Liberalism still more unpalatable. Rowell was deeply
stirred by the war. He could see in the upheaval of old and new world
ideas the sort of grand realignment which he could understand; the
assertion of true Liberalism in true democracy. Any average speech of
his during the war demonstrates that he was among those few leaders of
thought whom the struggle lifted into a larger conception of manhood in
the State.
Again, honesty to himself suggests that Mr. Rowell did not suffer such
pangs at his severance from Laurier as did men like Carvell, Guthrie
and Clark, who had fought under the old man in Commons. At the Liberal
Win-the-War meeting in 1917, he threw off all disguises and fervently
proclaimed that he had chosen to take office under "the greatest
Premier in the world." The statement smacked not so much of
insincerity as of a sense of emancipation. Mr. Rowell was no longer
labelled a Laurier Liberal. He was a free agent in a new great
conflict of force. He was stirred as never he had been. Of all the
Liberals who took oath under the new administration he was the
strongest, and the most difficult to assign a competent task. He was
made President of the Council and Minister of Information. The
peculiar advantage of the latter was that as real information was the
last thing that seemed to be wanted by anything resembling a
Government, there was very little for Mr. Rowell to do at his desk and
very much time for him to be absent where he felt much more at home, in
Europe. As President of the Council he had great ability.
This one year of Ministry before the end of the war gave Mr. Rowell an
opportunity to survey forces of whose operation he had no knowledge
while he remained a mere Liberal. He became officially familiar to
London and as the constant companion of the Premier came very near to
the elbows of the great, when he did not suffer by comparison.
But it was the Peace Conference that gave him his real work. During
the war any nation got the prestige that it could win, either by its
own efforts or in league with others. All nations on each side were
more or less animated by the one great purpose. Suddenly the golden
grip of union was off. The second war began around the Peace table.
In this new and more precarious conflict of pour-parlers and old secret
diplomacies under the dangerous flare of the self-determination torch,
national selfishness rushed to the front of the stage. Every pocket of
people in Europe hemmed between a river, a mountain and a dialect
claimed the rights of a nation, when more than half of them should have
been conveniently merged into workable groups having some form of
government with which nations of experience could deal.
In this clamour of the _voces populi_ the voice of Canada was not to be
disregarded. We had reason that it should be heard. We were in sudden
danger of being overshadowed at the Conference by the vast figure of
the other half of North America. Mr. Rowell has never been an
anti-Yankee. He has too much fine sense ever to pull feathers out of
the eagle in retaliation for twisting the lion's tail. He knows as
well as any man the strategic and moral necessity of Canada being the
real House of Interpreter to the two leading Anglo-nations. He knew it
at the Conference. But he knew also that in proportion to service and
sacrifice in the war, Canada in the Council of Peace had a right to be
heard and considered as the voice of a nation occupying the northern
half of North America.
There was great sense in the estimate of a leading London correspondent
that among the four most impressive and masterful personalities at the
Geneva Assembly of the League, Rowell the Canadian was at least the
fourth. This was not merely a personal or natural compliment. It was
the sincere recognition of a fact.
Mr. Rowell had the gift and the energy of will to translate the Peace
into Canadian language. He gave Canada a voice in Europe. He did try
so far as one man might to play up to the voice given to Canada by the
dead in Flanders. In the big occasion when great tumult of forces were
rushing to a climax Rowell rose to the opportunity--as he always has
done--and he earned the lasting gratitude of his country. We needed
just that intellectual power and that moral audacity, not only in
Europe but in Washington.
Yes, N. W. Rowell has made a big use of opportunity. He has even
created it. But it was seldom the little simple thing at his door that
roused his great qualities. It was the bigger issue that lay out among
the mountain tops. He was overwhelmingly eloquent for the universal
eight-hour day when he attended the International Labour Conference in
Washington. The League of Nations had recommended it. But what of the
cheap-labour competition in the Orient? And what did Mr. Rowell know
about Industry and Democracy at all?
Mr. Rowell made a bold bid for recognition as a statesman of
international repute. And he got it. His speeches on the Empire were
consistently a greater voice than Borden ever could have had. The
colleague of the Premier became his Imperial master because he had the
power which Borden lacked, of making the British world-Commonwealth
live in great public utterances.
What a journey had this man travelled now from "Is That You Daddy?" in
Queen's Park!
And it may be sensibly asked--What was his great intention? Canada is
interested to know what is "the big idea" in this man's mind.
Corporation law cannot contain him now. He has tried his strength and
knows it. He knows that other men know it.
Once during the derelict days of the Coalition it was rumoured that
Rowell on a Western trip would sketch out a new leadership--for
himself. But he was not a man to throw Borden overboard. He had a
profound respect for the Premier, who had made great use of him.
Perhaps, if only Rowell had been born Conservative instead of a
Win-the-War Liberal converted into a Coalitionist, the Premier might
have called him to succeed. We know not. There was a predicament.
White, Meighen, Rowell--all must be considered. There was the
Washington post, if ever it should come to be. Did Mr. Rowell ever
intimate that he wanted either of these? Nobody has said. But Sir
Robert was wise at least not to have offered him the Premiership. Too
long had that been the office of a man who could not lead. It was time
for a leader. It is not surprising that Mr. Rowell should have stepped
out of the Administration when Meighen went to the head of it. He
could not comfortably serve under Meighen. Ambition is a tyrant.
Self-sacrifice is usually easiest when great moral issues are
uppermost. For more than one session he would not even retain his seat
in the House. His retirement opens Durham, a safe constituency under
Rowell, and may weaken the Government.
But what if it does? Mr. Rowell took office as a Coalitionist to win
the war. The war is won. But his work--is only nicely beginning. How
is he going to finish his work for this nation? He has not said. Not
by making sundry speeches about the League of Nations.
If this country is to go ahead on its own native steam, it must be wise
enough to find a big public place for the great talents of N. W.
Rowell. And if Mr. Rowell, or any other disciple of opportunity in
public affairs, wants to give Canada what she has a right to expect
from him, he will do well to make his needed money now at corporation
law, and when he comes back to public life have a constant eye single
to the glory of his country.
To evolve men of that stamp is not easy. Rowell, like Meighen, is a
product of the older studious days when youths buried themselves in
books for the sake of getting on in the world without reference to mere
money. He is now at an age when the best he has made of himself might
be of incalculable good to the country if he could help the Government
to go back to power and go with the National Liberal-Conservative Party
as conscientiously as he entered the Unionist Government.
Conscience; Oratory; Opportunity. The greatest of these is Conscience;
the least, Opportunity.