Whatever may be done by the Washington Conference to the League of
Nations, there still live two men to whom it is and shall be the hub of
the world. Lord Robert Cecil and Sir Herbert Ames at least will never
admit that the League was a mere Wilson-Democrat device for making the
world safe for humanity, and that the alternative is a Harding-Republican
expedient for making Washington the new hub of the world.
Sir Herbert is much too cordial a cosmopolitan to begrudge Washington any
eminence she can get from imitating the League. He is too charitable
even to admit that if Dr. Wilson had stood for peace first and covenant
second, no Washington Conference would have been needed. He is also
Canadian enough to realize that transferring the centre of the Peace
propaganda to the leading Capital of the New World is a good way to
remind the Old World that Ottawa has more to do with Washington than even
London has. Out of the Washington Conference may arise the Canadian
envoy. Whatever happens in the Pacific zone of the world-open diplomacy
can never hurt Ottawa---nor disturb the complacent optimism of Sir
Herbert Ames, Financial Director of the Secretariat to the League of
Nations. The time may come when even Ottawa is considered a better place
than London or Geneva for the conduct of world-peace agenda.
When Sir Herbert Ames was chosen Financial Director of the League
Secretariat he was chosen less to please Canada than to vindicate his own
ability. When he spoke in Canada on how the League works he showed his
remarkable optimism by extolling its operations at a time when Europe was
more anarchic than at any time since the war.
Every forward nation should have its Ames. This one justified his
existence in Canada long before he became a knight or even an M.P. for
St. Antoine, Montreal. At one time in his citizenship he was the
incarnation of what a large number of people would be anxious to avoid;
in the days when he used to pack his grip from Montreal and go forth on
lectural pilgrimages over Ontario and other parts. On a platform he
always seemed like a long, lean schoolmaster. Sometimes he used a
blackboard. One of his pet subjects was prohibition. He looked entirely
like it. One could scarcely recollect having heard quite so dry a man on
any subject. He looked like the genius of self-denial--like a man who
long ago should have gone into a monastery, doing penance for the uplift
of the world as mirrored in his own conscience, instead of remaining at
large a common Presbyterian and a very uncommon sort of Tory.
I was agreeably startled to find Sir Herbert in 1920 one of the most
cordial and amiable men on the roster of Who's Who. He was no longer
dry, bigoted, or pedagogical. In fact he was almost benignly human, even
humourous. And I concluded that if intimacy with the League of Nations
could work such a change in the average man connected with it, there is
surely some function for the League as a cheerful solvent for the world.
Sir Herbert Ames' previous work as Hon. Chairman of the National
Patriotic Fund of course did a good deal to reclaim him. Of all war work
this was among the most destructive of personal bigotry and political
prejudice. If Sir Herbert imbibed the real philosophy of the Patriotic
Fund he must be, speaking humanly, one of the wisest men in Canada. It
was a scientific fact that at a time when men in the army were displaying
incredible heroism, certain people at home were exhibiting unbelievable
meanness. The people who used to attempt graft on the Patriotic Fund
were the kindergarten of the college of national profiteers who came
later. They were happily out-numbered by the people who were thankful
for all they got and who in the greatest losses that life can inflict
showed almost sublime fortitude and patience.
Preparation for some form of public service by doing it as he went along
has always been Ames' strongest characteristic. He had eyes for the
homely, sometimes mean, job under his nose. There was an evangelism
about him. Why? Because he was a citizen. Where did he live? In
Montreal. No man can be a reforming citizen in Montreal unless he has
plenty of time, and some money. Mr. Ames has always had both. He also
has endless patience.
Perhaps the most remarkable proof that he intended to be a practical
philanthropist is the fact that for eight years he was one of the feeble
Anglo-Saxon minority in the Montreal City Council. An artist in search
of contrast could never have found a finer example than a comparative
study of the leader of the English section Ames, and the French boss, the
late L. A. Lapointe. In the bilingual Legislature of an incorrigible
city Mr. Ames spoke two languages. If he had mastered twenty he never
could have equalled Lapointe, who in my recollection of a long
conversation some years ago could genially and grandly boast that the fad
for reforming the City of Montreal would never make much headway so long
as he remained boss of the French section in Council. Lapointe was
Montreal's Tammany. He held Montreal under his patronage and executive
thumb before Mederic Martin had begun to achieve any fame beyond that of
a maker of cigars. He knew every cranny of Montreal as intimately as the
late John Ross Robertson used to know Toronto. Mr. Ames' knowledge of
the big town was fairly complete. But if Mr. Ames and Mr. Lighthall, the
genie of civic information in Montreal, could have been one two-headed
man, they never could have matched Lapointe in the expert business of
knowing where to plant a man to give him a civic job or how to create a
job to suit a man in need of it.
Yet for eight consecutive years Mr. Ames with no other desire than to do
his duty, to study Montreal, and perhaps qualify for larger service
later, remained a member of the City Council. And he did his work there
before the English-speaking element undertook to clean up the city--the
most genial, sarcastic failure of modern times. He wrote little books
about Montreal. He mastered French by studying it first-hand in France.
Those who used to listen to his evangelical speeches in his own tongue
sometimes wished he had learned a few nuances and inflexions in English.
He was for some time Chairman of the Municipal Board of Health, in a city
where infant mortality is such a constant epidemic that babies' coffins
are displayed in shop windows. In 1907 he wrote a tractate on the
housing of the working classes, just on the eve of the period when
Montreal began to be the worst city in America for high rents,
extortionate charges for moving and intolerable congestion. The
publication of his views on the subject, however, showed that he had the
courage to point out what was wrong, even though he had no concrete
constructive proposal which any municipal government in Montreal or any
Legislature in Quebec would ever accept as a working basis for putting
the thing right. As far back as 1901 he indited a treatise on The City
Problem, What Is It? Twenty years later, after all Mr. Ames' burnings on
the subject, Montreal has slumped back into sheer mediaevalism in civic
government under the wheedling despotism of Mederic Martin, who presided
at the public funeral of the only effort the city ever made to establish
a real business administration. In that Quixotic eruption of public
virtue in 1912, Mr. Ames, after all his publicity on the subject of
redeeming Montreal, was not even considered as a candidate for the Board
of Control.
On the whole scarcely a public man, or even a reforming editor, in Canada
has talked so consistently and so cheerfully for so long a period and to
so little apparent purpose, on the need for cleaning up civic government.
The difference between Mr. Ames and the average public-service expert in
Montreal on this question is that Mr. Ames has never been worldly-wise
enough to become an avowed cynic on the question. He probably knows as
well as anybody that to clean up Montreal is in the same category as
making Europe safe for the League of Nations; a much harder city to
regenerate than even Philadelphia. Muck-raking has no effect, when
two-thirds of the population read French papers which never use the rake,
and when the boss of three-fourths of the rest is himself often a target
for the yellows. Mr. Ames should long ago in this connection have
propounded a thesis, Hugh Graham, What Is It? He would then be free to
dissect the ethics of Mederic Martin and the late L. A. Lapointe.
Martin rules Montreal in spite of Lord Atholstan, the Archbishop and the
International Union, because in his own person he interprets the
distinction between Anglo and Franco. In Montreal a dominant minority
controls three-fourths of the commercial wealth. A couple of dozen men
control big industries, railways, electric and water powers, finance and
newspapers. When these men want the City Hall they consult the
directory. To them Montreal is a convenient sea-wharfing spot to conduct
big business; otherwise a French Canadian city and so, hopeless. The
chief common bond between this group and the city at large is the labour
market. The elections are a mere superficial disturbance. The old
courteous alternative of a French mayor, an English mayor, and an Irish
mayor has been discarded. The mayors are all French now. The population
is overwhelmingly French. The City Hall is as French as the courts. The
civic jobs are given to Frenchmen. As a rule there are plenty of jobs.
It is a fair compromise--that if the Anglos will monopolize most of the
big productive business, the civic administration must go to the Francos
who are the elective majority.
Sir Herbert Ames, who was born in Montreal and is the only man who has
ever undertaken to theorize openly as to its redemption, knows exactly
why the place is so absorbing to the cynical mind. He understands that a
man cannot have the same geometrical and diligent enthusiasm for Montreal
as he has for Toronto. To be a thoughtful citizen of Montreal stimulates
the imagination and disgusts the economic sense. For the past ten years
Sir Herbert has been too much absorbed in Ottawa and the League of
Nations to care much about the city where he spent so much of his earlier
zeal for reclamation. The member for St. Antoine has a larger orbit--to
negotiate which he has resigned his seat in the House.
One is tempted to consider whether there are not enough secretarial minds
in Europe from which to take a man as Financial Secretary for the League
of Nations, and let Sir Herbert come back to Canada to finish his work.
He has had world experiences enough to come back and be of some real use
to the country. He is not yet sixty. He has ahead of him twenty years
in which he could do a great deal more for the Empire about which he is
so earnest by working in Canada than by occupying a conspicuous post
somewhere in Europe. It is not the fashion for ex-Canadians who have had
political or other experiences abroad to come back here for anything but
speeches and banquets. Sir Herbert may be permitted to change the
fashion. With his versatility in French, his knowledge of Europe, his
acquaintance with large public questions of finance and his general
_savoir faire_, he seems to be just the kind of man who could head a
movement to nationalize Montreal.
But of course he never will do it.