After a life of wearing Joseph's coat, Sir John Willison, ex-editor of
the _Toronto Globe_ and of the _News_, finds himself President of the
National Reconstruction Association. Programme--to reconstruct Canada,
beginning in 1918, after fifty years of Confederation.
A supercilious editor once asked why on such an Association no farmer had
been appointed. The answer was simple enough. Sir John was born a
farmer. He used to wield a handspike at logging bees in Huron County,
Ont. Why no Liberals? But Sir John used to be the leading Liberal of
unelected Canada. Why no professor of political economy to represent the
great universities who are always supposed to be reconstructing a nation?
Simple again. Sir John himself once conducted a university of culture,
economics and general information known as the _Toronto News_. In fact
there was no need of an Association at all. Sir John Willison was
sufficient unto the day.
One finds it tolerably easy to be sarcastic about Sir John Willison,
because for many years he was to some of us the sort of man that
compelled a sincere, almost idolatrous admiration. In this also he is
more adept than the average man. He himself once idolized Sir Wilfrid
Laurier in two volumes; but a few years before he turned all his
political guns on the French-Canadian Premier to get him out of power for
good.
In all Canada there has never been a more versatile character; never one
who after a _volte face_ in politics could turn with such poise and
dignity upon any critic cradled in the foundations of belief and ask,
"Well, what's new?"
From his crisp manner of speaking and a certain austerity of manner, I
used to think that Sir John was in a measure inscrutable. He had such a
curt way of summoning a reporter, as once,--
"Never," he began when the culprit had got into the corridor facing the
editor-in-chief, "never, when interviewing a man in his own home, say
anything about the furniture."
Born a Conservative and a farmer, Willison became on the _Globe_ Canada's
greatest unelected Liberal. He conserved Liberalism. On the _Globe_ he
held the balance between the Free Traders who believed only in
reciprocity and Brastus Wiman, who with Goldwin Smith made Taft a mere
plagiarist when he said that Canada was an "adjunct" of the United
States. It was Willison's attempt to consider commercial union on its
merits that made the _Globe_ seem like a mark for the annexationists, at
a time when the high priest of the movement in Canada had the effrontery
to remain a citizen of the nation which he was openly trying to sell at a
bargain counter. The man who kept the _Globe_ from becoming an annex to
Goldwin Smith in 1891 had an experience that would fit any man to become
a protection-tariff Chairman of Reconstruction, and to remember the
sirens that tempted Ulysses.
Nobody could have predicted in those days that the great editor of the
_Globe_ would live to become first an Independent, next a Tory, and at
the last a Liberal-Unionist. And perhaps none of these transformations
would have been necessary if Sir George Ross had not tried the trick of
"32 years in the saddle" from the days of Mowat; to do which and to
remain politically virtuous was an impossible feat, even though the
Premier of Ontario was a director of the _Globe_. Ross remained
director, and also Premier. But it seems that Mr. Willison saw in such a
dual role a greater inconsistency than even he deemed to be worthy of so
brilliant a man. As he could not remove the director, he took what
seemed to be a providential opportunity to remove the Premier.
The reconstructed _Toronto News_ was the opportunity. The elimination of
Ross was the first result. The removal of Laurier was the necessary
sequel. The first was a pleasure. The second must have been a pang.
Because of the first, in place of Sir George Ross, Willison had as
frequent visitor to his sanctum James Pliny Whitney, the new Premier of
Ontario, "honest enough to be bold and bold enough to be honest." From
that to Toryism was merely opening a door. It took the new Tory editor
eight years to remove his old idol Laurier, the result of which was a
sort of intense and bigoted animosity to the Province of Quebec which Sir
John is now learning to overcome. When the Tory _News_ became a
Northcliffe Imperialist organ it was inevitable that Sir John should
convert his common hostility to the western Laurier-Liberals into a
polite suspicion of the Radicals who were becoming Agrarians.
When finally, weary of mere politics in which he was our greatest
journalistic expert by instinct and experience Sir John left the _News_,
he was free to engage in work of a more practical character than writing,
and to become Chairman of the Government's most important branch of
active agenda outside of professional politics.
In all these Protean changes of makeup, if not of character, Sir John
Willison has never abandoned two early habits; lawn bowling and reading
the _Globe_. He is an expert in both. Bowling vexes him least, because
its rules never change. The _Globe_ gives him pangs because alas! it is
now engaged in the unpardonable effort to merge the Liberals with the
National Progressives as a greater Liberal Party.
Inconsistency may be the evolution of greatness. Inconstancy never. The
_Globe_ of a certain date in June, 1921, contained a front page display
of the Agrarian bye-election victory in Medicine Hat. On another date
there was an editorial once again advising the Agrarians to make common
cause with Liberals against the common enemy, Meighenism, or as it might
be said, Willisonism.
Perusing the _Globe_ in his Reconstruction office, Sir John glances
up--leisurely at a spot on the wall, next to the portrait of Sir John A.
Macdonald. Like Macbeth's dagger, he sees a cold, organizing face
smiling like Mona Lisa, fair at Sir John; the face of T. A. Crerar.
The Levite of Reconstruction shakes his fist.
"Down with you," he mutters. "Avaunt! I'll have none of you. There's
nothing under Medicine Hat--except what Kipling said, 'all hell for a
basement,' Natural gas, Crerar, not a test case at all. Oh, no. Too
near the border."
Sir John yawns and peruses a proof of the 745th pamphlet issued from
Reconstruction, total of nearly seven million copies paid for not by
taxation of the people, but inferentially by tariffs. Probably a very
patriotic minority read these Willison bulletins aiming to reconstruct
the country by putting a crimp in the exportation of the Canadian dollar,
looking after welfare work in factories, women and children, grappling
with unemployment, helping to change over industry from war to peace,
aiming to "stabilize" the nation, to curb that team of wild horses,
Bolshevism and Agrarianism, and generally to keep Canada from going to
perdition.
In spite of Sir John, in 1919 and 1920, people bought Canada almost
bankrupt on the exchanges. Hence among the items in the cheapening list
may be placed the Canadian dollar which is now worth about 89 cents in
New York. That is what happens to the dollar when it goes away from home
and plays prodigal son. What Sir John works to see is Canadian
commodities crossing the border and the Yankee dollars coming back in
exchange.
Here is one of the greatest moral issues of the age for this nation.
Even the preachers, if they could see us put up the barriers against
luxury imports from the United States--said to be such a wicked
nation--would breathe more easily. People so often buy sin done up in
dutiable packages. For the fiscal year ending March 31, 1921, Canadians
went into debt to the United States over a million a day--adverse
exchange. Nearly $400,000,000 in one year spent for Yankee goods more
than Yankeedom spent buying goods from us.
And now comes the need for the rationalizing philosophy of Sir John
Willison, truly our most versatile expert on tariffs from the _Globe_
reciprocity down to the Reconstruction. Beginning in 1917 with Foster's
"economic unity" in North America, a friendly Democratic tariff had let
Canada send certain natural products into the United States free of duty.
Private interests found it profitable to handle Canadian trade, much of
it in transit to Europe in a state of high demand. The democratic
element in Sir John must have approved that. Grit as he used to be, Sir
John must believe in letting the great United States practise free-trade
if it be so disposed. Those good Democrats! Had they not enacted the
Underwood tariff, what a mountainous load must have been imposed upon the
Atlantean shoulders of Reconstruction!
Which brings us to the eve of Dominion Day, 1921. Sir John was not
bowling; he was reading the _Round Table_ for June--at least if not he
should have been--an article on the meeting of the "Imperial Cabinet".
"Mischievous title!" he mutters. "It's an Imperial Conference of
Premiers. John S. Ewart will be sure to make a kingdom article out of
that. Very ill-advised. Er--Come!"
"Evening paper, Sir John," says the boy.
Sir John takes up the paper and is at once confronted by an item which
convinces him that if ever Canada needed protection from the United
States, now is the time. The item is the repeal of the Underwood tariff.
Accustomed for life to unpleasant sensations from printed pages, his face
gives no sign of emotion. Swiftly he reads through, flings the paper
down and looks up. At once he rises, glaring coldly at the Crerar
palimpsest on the wall. Again that Mona Lisa exporting smile, as the
lips seem to say:
"Well, Sir John--what will be the Republican Reconstruction price of the
Canadian dollar now?"
"Bah!" Sir John snorts into a handkerchief, like a Tory squire. "That
tariff, Sir, is not a menace, nor a prophecy of agrarian victory at the
polls. It is a challenge to this nation. Canada will not let down the
bars. We shall put them higher! Keep the Canadian dollar in Canada.
Sell our natural products to Britain. Build up our towns and our
industries. Utilize our great water powers, the cheapest power in the
world. Use our raw material; our manufacturing experience gained in the
war. Develop the home market. Sell more to ourselves and spend our
incomes in countries that do not put up economic barriers against our
products. Without some adequate protection, sir, we are economically as
extinct as the Dodo. There's but one alternative--commercial autonomy
from the United States or commercial annexation. Nobody but a lunatic or
an Agrarian would ever doubt which of these we shall choose--eh, what's
that you say?"
The portrait chuckles. An uplifted hand appears in the unframed picture.
"I said, Sir John--put the repeal of the Underwood tariff under your
Medicine Hat."
In sudden fury Sir John flings the _Round Table_ at the place where the
picture vanished.
This may be a whimsical conclusion to the study of a personality so
perplexing and vagarious as Sir John Willison. But he himself, having a
high sense of humour, will appreciate its psychological justice as much
as he regrets its historical inaccuracy. Sir John has always aimed at
being a big Canadian, and he has usually succeeded. He did his share of
contribution to right thinking about the war, as he did in vicarious
action when he lost one of his two sons in that struggle. He could not
do otherwise, because in spite of his bewildering superficial changes of
coat, when even his detractors almost admired the dignity with which he
changed it, Sir John, the Tory at heart, has always been a loyal servant
of his country. Without him the story of political journalism in Canada
would be a thing of shreds and patches.
He has at various times wielded an immense power usually in the direction
of shrewd, sane thinking about national affairs. No Canadian editor of
his time so thoroughly mastered its intricate problems. He has a faculty
of clear, constructive thinking and a fine style of writing. With no
college education he became a cultured journalist--which is sometimes an
anomaly--though he never showed any zeal for the "humanities" and never
knew much about that peculiar sociological phenomenon called the
proletariat.
Since he drew away from the farm Sir John has never had a desire to
return, even in sympathy. With a fine sense of humour he has never
relished reminiscences of the backwoods and the smoke of the log heaps.
His published "Reminiscences" are a fine contribution to our political
history, but they show no real sympathy with the rude pioneer life from
which the writer came and to which he owes a debt that he could very well
discharge, if he would write a book about the social and craft life of
the Canadian farm as it was in the Victorian Era. There is more national
vitality in the story of that than there is in the programme of the
National Reconstruction Association. Sir John has a true sympathy with
that life, because he knows it has been at the root of all his own big
Canadianism in all its forms. He is one of the kindliest men alive and
he writes with great discernment and dignity. Let him stop writing
Reconstruction bulletins and do something of more value to the country,
so that the older enthusiasm of men who used to think he was Canada's
greatest editor may not althogether die.