The eminent headmaster of the Manchester School in Canada is one of the
few M.P.'s who know how to build a wheat stack. He farms in the spot
north of Calgary where the poplar bluffs begin to mark that you are in
the black loam of wonderful crops at a maximum distance from Liverpool.
It is an art to build a wheat stack. Michael Clark--so we believe--knows
exactly how many tiers to lay before he begins the "belly"; how to fill
up the middle so that the butts of the sheaves droop to run off the rain;
and how high to go with the bulge before he begins to draw in with the
roof. All day long as he worked on his knees, not in prayer, he had
mental leisure to think about one vast, fructifying theme; which of
course is Free-Trade as they had it in England; unrestricted trade
according to the Manchester School. And when he got his stack done he
could tell to a ten-dollar bill how much tariff the railways and
steamships would levy on that stack by the time the wheat got to
Liverpool.
During the War, Clark was a win-the-war Liberal. He broke away from
Laurier on conscription, which he openly supported. In July this year he
was scheduled in the press--another of those wish-father-to-the-thought
news items--to join Messrs. Drury and Crerar in an anti-tariff tour of
Ontario. He did not go. He probably never had the slightest intention
of going. Michael Clark had other wheat to stack. An Alberta election
was coming. It came. When it was all over Alberta was in the grip of
the Agrarians. Liberalism by constituencies was swept out as clean as a
barn floor at fanning-mill time. And Michael Clark sat down to think it
over. He had half expected that tornado. But he refused to like it.
The farmers had stolen his own programme of free trade and by means of it
had stampeded his Province for the sake of using it as a spring-broad to
make the grand jump into the Federal arena. The apostle of free trade,
himself as good a farmer as any of them, was now regarded as a chip on
the Agrarian stream at high tide.
Wherefore Michael Clark, after certain "conversations" with Mr. Crerar,
wrote the letter which, if Mackenzie King is as wise as he is hopeful,
will be used to flood the country. Hoardings and electric signs in the
interests of true-Liberalism should blazon abroad such sentences as these:
"The House of Lords, the Family Compact, the Manufacturers' Association
and the junkers and militarists of Germany are each and all examples of
group government."
"Class consciousness is none the less class selfishness, and therefore
doomed to die, because it suddenly appears in Farmer and Labour parties."
"The apostles of progress must unite upon common principles, sincerely
held to resist reaction, which is ever present like a dead weight to drag
down the aspirations of the race for freedom, justice and democracy."
"These were the things for which sixty thousand Canadians died in the
recent war. . . . I have been fighting 'class' for forty years. It
would be quite impossible for me to turn my back on my past and the right
in this election."
Our political history contains no declaration of independence more
significant, manly and sensational. Repudiation of the Free Trade,
group-governed, National Progressives by Michael Clark, the farmer and
the apostle of Canadian Free Trade, is the first truly emancipating note
that has been struck in all this pre-election barrage of group against
group. Michael Clark may be no bigger as a Canadian for such a stand,
but he is true to his own form as one of the rarest and manliest Radicals
that Canada ever had. And his declaration should be of immense value to
the Government, which confesses that its real fear is, not of Liberals,
but of Agrarians.
The headmaster of the Manchester School in Canada has had a multitude of
pupils; none more brilliant than Mr. Crerar, who seems to have made Free
Trade a species of bondage. In no other land could Michael Clark so well
have demonstrated the virtues of Free-Trade. On those plains, buffaloes
worth multi-millions of dollars in trade annually migrated across
"Parallel 49" into Montana and back again into the Territories. The
prairie schooner trekked northward over the border carrying migrants in
search of homes when there was no government official to turn them back
or to question the terminus of their travels. The freight wagons creaked
up from the south into MacLeod and past it into the valley of
Saskatchewan, carrying goods made and bought in the land of the Western
Yankee long before the great antidote to Free Trade, the Transcontinental
Railway, put those crooked trails out of business.
Clark was spouting free-trade on the prairies at a time when many men in
the West scarcely knew that trade had any restrictions except in the
matter of beverages. He was an apostle of Cobdenism almost before the
Territories were baptized into party politics at all; when Regina was the
home of a Territorial County Council that had neither Tories nor Grits.
He was farming and prophesying commercial union before James J. Hill
began to compete with the protective C.P.R. for trade north and south
instead of the long-haul east and west. Before ever a real Agrarian
began to head out on the plains he was contending like a tribune of the
plebs, that unrestricted reciprocity between two halves of a great
productive continent, of which one-half contains nine-tenths of the
people, was not a prelude to annexation away from the grand old Empire.
And when he got into Parliament the voice that had been so mighty in the
trail-side school houses and the little town-halls became more potent
than ever as "Red Michael" went full tilt in the House against the high
protectionists.
High courage was here. Bucking bronchos from the West who had gone to
Ottawa were duly corralled, haltered, hobbled, surcingled and thrown,
finally harnessed and driven by either of the old parties. In breaking a
political broncho the Liberal party was as good as the other. But the
House is full of insurgents now, lining up into a tyrannized and
tyrannous group organizing as a party. In Clark's inaugural days, and
for years after, there was but one real solo voice calling like a
trombone from a high tower for Free Trade as the Kingdom of God which, if
they would first seek it, all other things would be added unto them.
French psychology traces certain forms of insanity to the fixed idea.
There have been times when Parliament has regarded Michael Clark as a
melancholy victim of this big idea that warped his whole political
mentality. But it was a grand form of insanity. Nobody ever heard Clark
in the House who did not realize that here was a fine British rebel whose
brain should be a great hope to his party. The old chief knew that. He
kept his ear towards Clark when he was sometimes deaf to his ministers.
Clark was the mountain peak which the party had left for its fleshly
sojourn in Egypt. The Liberal party in Canada had once been a free trade
party--somewhat before Clark's time. In free trade and the universal
franchise had been its life. But Liberalism before 1896 was one thing;
afterwards another. Laurier in practice knew that Clark was
magnificently wrong; in theory superbly right. Therefore he indulged and
admired him; sometimes playing with him, conscious that Liberalism was
the only show in which Clark could be a national performer.
In truth Michael Clark was for long enough a man without a party. But
from the benches of the Liberals he could stand and preach his Manchester
doctrines to Hansard and the nation, even when the party yawned and held
dangerously on to the tariff.
It was always a tonic to hear Clark in the House. Like Carlyle he
breathed a certain inexorable vitality into public affairs. To meet
Clark in the corridors was to get a breeze that swept like a chinook
across the frozen waste of old-line politics. In the gloom of the lobby
this apostle of red hair and rubicund visage was a beacon light. I have
met him so, of a Saturday afternoon when the House was out of session,
and when the member for Red Deer was ripe for a free talk to any
stranger. A great friendliness possessed him always. He could laugh at
the besetments of party and the tyranny that opportunism imposes on great
minds. He himself was free. He wanted others to be free. He could
stand for half an hour in one gloomy crypt of those corridors in the old
Parliament and talk of the power of being that kind of Liberal.
It was the wheat that helped to keep Clark where he was on the outpost of
Liberalism. When his old leader became enswathed with election bandages,
Clark looked out upon the landscapes of the wheat, not so long ago the
limitless pasture of the free-trade buffaloes, and felt again the vision
of the life that is Liberal but is sometimes called another name.
Alberta was leaping to a great life. Almost in the middle of it north
and south is the town of Red Deer. All about it were the settlements of
"nationals" emancipated from bondage in Europe. What was the use, quoth
Clark, of bringing such people to a country of free homestead land, of
alleged free institutions and making them the slaves, first of political
machines, second of protected interests in the East? If enslaved people
were to become free in a new land why should the wheat and the oats and
the cattle which they raised not be made free to move for a market as
naturally as the wind blows across the borders?
This may not have been the precise order in which such ideas generated in
the mind of Michael Clark; but it is the way those ideas confronting such
a man strike a contemporary. I have lived in the land where Clark lives,
though not at Red Deer, and remember well the burning desire of twenty
years ago in that far northwest for economic emancipation. Then at any
meeting, no matter what, any little dinner to a citizen no matter whom,
men rose to talk about the need of conquering the isolation of the
country. They remembered the tyranny of the old Trading Company into
Hudson's Bay. They clamoured for more people, more farms, more towns,
more railways, more life--from the East. And when it came they said the
East was a tyrant, an economic monster to bleed them white. Clark, as
one remembers him best, has not been so much a foe to the East as he has
wanted to be a friend to the South.
But a new oligarchy was arising on the great prairies. As official
liberalism got its grip on the three Provinces and became itself a
tyrant, while unofficial Toryism in league with the big railways got a
stranglehold on British Columbia, and when even "Honest" Frank Oliver
ceased to be an independent Liberal and became a red-taped Minister of
the Interior, Clark the Free Trader in Parliament found himself striking
hands with a sect mainly of Liberal Radicals first called Grain Growers,
next Agrarians, and by some the very devil. With official Liberalism as
expressed by Scott, Sifton, Cross, Norris and Martin he had only
superficial sympathy. These men were more or less on masquerade. The
Agrarians were barefaced, one-faced Radicals who would open the borders,
and abolish the customs houses, and set up a sort of Western political
autonomy whose root idea was that trade should be as free as
grasshoppers. These people were not raising Old Flag wheat.
How far Clark fell in line with all the doctrines of the United Grain
Growers, I do not know. But one thing clear about this insurgent is that
he has always stood four-square for the British connection--and for all
that it means to Canada. Clark is a Britisher. He still has his English
accent. You would spot him at once as a transplanted Englishman. He is
prouder of being a Briton in Canada than he ever would have been in
England. Clark never forgot--Manchester and Cobden. He stood among the
wheat and saw the Empire.
When the War came and his adopted Province of Alberta for a long while
held the lead in enlistments for war, no man was happier in the grim
outlook than the member for Red Deer. The War to him was a great
emergence of Liberalism the world over when Peace should bring Free
Humanity, Free wheat, Free trade. Why not? His son went to the war--and
he lost him. His speech on the Military Service Act was in many respects
the best of all in that debate, not in rhetoric, but in logical virility.
It was a howitzer broadside, slow, deliberate, but every shot a hit. His
old leader had already declined a belated offer of Coalition and was now
opposing conscription and arguing for amendment by Referendum. In all
his life he never got from a political foe such a searchlight on his soul
as his once devoted follower gave him in this speech.
Laurier had previously executed the Nationalist dodge of taking refuge
behind the Militia Act, asserting that it was right to enforce that Act
calling out the Militia for the defence of Canada; to which Clark replied:
"England is fighting this war wherever she sees the turban of a Turk or
the helmet of a Teuton. She is fighting it in Egypt, Mesopotamia, in
Macedonia, in Belgium--most of all in France. . . . America, whose
independence had been fought in a struggle of blood for sound fiscal
ideas was now immortalizing her reunion with Britain, her old
enemy. . . . If organized labour was opposed to conscription, so much
the worse for labour, whose own trades unions were a form of
conscription; in England he had never named either lord or labour with a
capital L. . . . Canada should be in the war to her last man and her
last dollar. . . . As to the referendum amendment, it was fathered by
the man who down to his attitude on this question had gone into history
as the greatest of all Canadians, but who had applauded Pugsley when he
argued against extending the life of this Parliament, and who in the
matter of sending men to fight, in organizing the whole nation for war,
in conserving national unity, and in making an election a smaller matter
than the honour of a nation was opposed to the Government. If the
amendment should carry, and the Referendum show a majority against the
Government measure by omitting the soldier vote and piling up the vote
from the Province which had given birth to the Referendum, then when the
author of that measure should be returned to power on a no-conscription
issue what chance was there for Canada to win her part of the war with
the lion Laurier and the lamb Oliver lying down together--and a little
child--Macdonald from Pictou--leading them?"
Not as a climax, but as a mere personal note midway in his speech, he had
said:
"I have a little toddling grandson on my farm out West to-day whose
father was killed with a gunshot wound in his neck two weeks ago. I say
to you, sir, on my soul and conscience I support this Bill, because I
believe it to be a part of the necessary machinery which can save that
little fellow, born a Canadian, and thousands of others like him from
ever going through what his father and his uncles have gone through."
Parliamentary debate has risen to much higher levels of oratory, but
seldom to such a height of accusing vindication and personal affection
for the accused from whom an insurgent is driven to sever his allegiance.
Clark can always make some sort of big human speech with a natural knack
of getting at the vitals of a subject in simple, dignified language and a
searching logic--once you admit his major premiss. That one speech flung
into bold relief, almost as the No Man's Land under a flare of a great
barrage, the issues between men who for so many years had been political
confederates.
A couple of years later I again met Clark when he was speaking guest at
an Empire Club luncheon. His topic was--the Empire. His brand of
political ideas was vastly different from those of the average man in his
audience, and he knew it. The Club had invited him, because he was
Michael Clark. He said not a word about trade. He uttered no
propaganda. He talked simply and strongly about the race that had made
the Empire which to him was a commonwealth of neither trade nor conquest
but of liberating ideas.
I don't think that any of the Chamberlain-Foster school could have
uttered quite so broad and noble a tribute to the inner vitality of the
British League of Nations. And not even Mr. Rowell could have surpassed
it for breadth of view on that subject, Clark looked at the Empire from
within outwards. He saw in it the expression of a great race of people
working the leaven upon other races; a mighty confederacy of free nations.
Red Michael has been a great informing Liberal, and a big illuminating
Canadian. Whether grandly right or magnificently wrong, he is never
uninteresting; a man who could come off a stack of wheat, wash himself up
bare-armed, and in Sunday clothes but seldom well-dressed and never
groomed, step on to a platform over in the schoolhouse or the town hall
and make a great speech to men who believe in the simplicity of a big
mind that thinks hard on the welfare of the majority. John Bright would
have loved such a man. Even John Macdonald might have loved him. And
the one regret among those who value the power of a big free nature in a
nation is, that owing to some fatalistic streak in his genius, Michael
Clark has not risen to the inspiring height from which the country might
get the best that he has to give. Never cured of his insurgency in
Parliament, he has become an uncompromising conformist to one big and
bigoted idea that universal Free-Trade is the need of the world, and
especially of Canada. He persists in the delusion that what has been
good for Britain must be good for Canada; not only is Canada at war when
Britain fights, but when Britain has no tariff Canada must have free
trade.
All which is freely forgiven this stalwart on account of his challenge to
the group who took his Free Trade luggage and attempted to label it
National Progressive. The Free Trader who could watch that caravan of
adventurers going down the trail and stoutly tell them all to keep on
going to the devil, deserves well of his country. Michael Clark's
advocacy of Progressivism might have got him the promise of a Cabinet
position. His rejection of it is the proof that the free-man who
believes in great parties can never be bound by a class-conscious group.
"Better a dinner of herbs . . . ." Michael Clark, whether M.P. or not,
is free to consider himself if need be a party of one man--without a
platform, but not devoid of a cause.
Whatever Michael Clark knows about the benefits of Free Trade and its
effect upon the exchanges, he knows peculiarly well the danger of
unrestricted reciprocity in sentiment between Canada and the United
States.