Many years ago an Irish poet visiting Canada and voyaging down the
Ottawa wrote a poem of which may people recall only the lines--
"Row, brothers, row, the stream runs fast,
The rapids are near, the daylight's past."
The Tom Moore about whom this article is sketched is not a poet. He
is, in fact, one of the prosiest public men in Canada. But we may
leave it to any of those who have known him during the past three years
when he has been President of the Trades and Labour Congress, if many
and many a time he has not felt some such sentiment as--
"Row, brothers, row, the stream runs fast,
The rapids are near, the daylight's past."
Since Mr. Charles Draper first became Secretary of that Congress he has
never known a period when so much was expected of a President by way of
limitless patience, statesmanship and self-control as has been shown by
Tom Moore. The rapids were always close to this man, and there were
rocks under the rapids. It took steady piloting by the captain to keep
the crew of the labour ship from getting holes in her bottom and going
down.
So far as one has been able to follow the career of Moore at the head
of the Congress, and as reported in the public press, he stands now and
always for adherence to the principle of Union in evolution. He
believes in labour getting ahead; but not by the method of upturning
everything that is established just to see what kinds of crawling
things there may be underneath.
When we reflect that Canada is not primarily an industrial so much as
an agricultural country, it is startling to remember that two years ago
it was the home of the only organized attempt ever made in America on a
scale of efficiency to establish something closely resembling a Soviet
government. The big Winnipeg Strike was a lurid menace to the
solidarity of labour in Canada. West of Winnipeg, once the Red River
Soviet had been set up, there was a chain of inflammable centres to
link up with the revolution. Calgary was the scene of one convention
which had sent a cable of sympathy to Moscow. British Columbia was
full of seething susceptible elements, regarded by some of the Reds
across the border as the real centre rather than Winnipeg, of the One
Big Union idea. The mines of Alberta were dominated by swaggering
foreigners who owed no allegiance to the British or any other flag
except the Red emblem. Long ago under the influence of the clergy and
the Archbishop of Montreal, Quebec had created a Canadian Labour
movement intended to cut Canadian labour away from the American
Federation. This was a phase of the Nationalism that had its
headquarters in Quebec, but had spread in various strange guises to
other parts of the country, when none of the clergy or intellectuals
behind the movement dreamed that the One Big Union insurgent against
the A.F.L. would be the most theatrical result. Once get the O.B.U.
idea rampant in Quebec with its scores of big industries and its
thousands of poorly educated workers, and the Red movement was due to
spread faster than the United Farmers' programme had ever done.
In the propagation of the Red programme Ontario, and especially
industrial Toronto, was regarded as the buffer state. But if the
Soviet had succeeded in Winnipeg and further West, then the whole
weight of that success marching upon Ontario, with Quebec bringing up
the eastern end, would form a sort of nutcracker device from which
Ontario would have had a hard time to escape.
This was the dazzling formula propounded at a time when every nation in
the world was in a state of ferment, and when the vast loose-jointed
nation known as Canada was in a condition of instability unknown since
it became a Confederation. The apostles of the Red programme had all
the advantages of being able to sling the paint on to the canvas of the
future without caring overmuch about the drawing. Men in large numbers
everywhere seemed ready to grasp at and embrace the unusual. People
who for years had been ground down by high prices for the commonest
necessities, considered seriously the question of the "salariat"
joining forces with organizing labour under a banner that might be red.
Civilization, physically shattered by the war and hysterically
stampeded by the doctrine of self-determination of peoples--a high form
of Bolshevism--stood ready to inquire whether the theories being tried
in Russia were not, after all, right, no matter what butchery might be
perpetrated in working them out.
Revolutionary ideas were everywhere.
Everything prepared the public mind.
A barrage of propaganda had been set up--and kept up.
Legitimate Trades Unionism itself in Britain had subscribed to The Aims
of Labour put forth by Arthur Henderson, who foreshadowed barricades
and bayonets in London streets if the proletariat did not get their
"rights".
Canada did not surely escape. We had the Winnipeg flare-up, which was
watched by legitimate labour across the border. The A.F.L. was
challenged for authority in this country. It came to the peculiar
pass, that in order to maintain the solidarity of Canada as constituted
by Government under the Old Flag, the legitimate leaders of labour had
to fall back upon the one continental organization which makes
brotherhoods, not across the seas, nor so much across Canada, but
across the border.
It was Ontario's opportunity; the steady old Province of some bigotry,
great industry, many labour unions, and more or less fixed ideas
regarding the function of Government. The office of Tom Moore is in
Ottawa. There the President of the Trades and Labour Congress is in
close touch with the Labour Department, with the _Labour Gazette_, with
the Government in Council. We shall never know just how much of the
steady conservatism of Moore at the first Congress following the
Winnipeg strike, as well as at other Congresses later, was developed
and held steady by association with Government.
But whether or no, even though it was nothing but loyalty to the
established brotherhoods of the A.F.L. or a deeper loyalty to his own
ideas of the case, the rock-steady influence of Tom Moore at the
conventions was the one biggest hope of the indirect action element
winning out. He was not opposed to Socialism. He has to work with
Socialists--of many sorts. The whole basic idea of the Federation of
Labour is a degree of Socialism. But it was the Marxian brand of
Socialism born in Germany and transplanted to Russia to which Moore was
opposed. He saw no field for this in Canada. He believed that Canada
had a right to freedom of action. At least if it came to a choice
between authority from the Gompers organization in the United States,
and the Lenine tyranny in Russia, the course was clear. Time and time
again he was bombarded and machine-gunned by the Red elements in
Congress and Convention. As often he solidly stood his ground, based
upon the older idea of labour getting its rights through negotiation
and later through the ballot.
"Row, brothers, row, the stream runs fast,
The rapids are near----"
But the daylight was not yet past for this Tom Moore. He could see
ahead.
"I have seen Moore," says a close observer of him for two years, "faced
by labour opponents in a number of Western cities. In all the howling
he has never lost his temper or his dignity."
It would have been so much easier for this man to lose his temper,
except that he knew it would be harder at the end when he had to face
his own steady rank and file accusing him of poor chieftainship. It
would have been so much easier to compromise with the preachers of
glittering formulae, except that in the settling up he would have to
justify himself to those who suspected him of defection.
Moore stuck to the commonplace business of wages and hours and
agreements. He had no head for the poetry of Utopias. He knew, as he
knows, that wages are the chief item of cost in all commodities, and
that no matter what form of capitalism you choose, whether embodied in
a Soviet or in a close corporation of dividends, wages of labour must
be paid. He knows that prices of living and of labour are almost
convertible. Amid all the howling and paeaning for a better day, for
the new life, for the heaven upon earth, for the glorification of the
proletariat, he could stand hard and fast by the common necessity of
sticking to an agreement and as fast as possible bettering conditions.
We have heard independent observers say that the Reds have always shown
a grasp of the new life, while the Trades Union men were crawling along
with the uninspired programme of wages and hours; that the Reds were
the sacrificing idealists and the Unionists the selfish Tories who
wanted nothing more than to slowly improve their condition. Well, the
logic of events seems to show that in the long run the Moores have the
gospel. One scarcely cares to think what might have happened in
Canadian industry and common living had Tom Moore given way to the Reds
who came at him from almost every quarter.
At the 1920 Congress Moore had the old-fashioned courage to ask the new
Premier of Canada, Arthur Meighen, to address the delegates. Of all
men, the man who prosecuted the leaders of the Winnipeg Strike was the
last to say anything to organized labour about milleniums or about
anything more Utopian than a common agreement between labour and
capital for the good of all. Moore had no fear. He believed that he
was right. Had he invited Mackenzie King he would have got a speech
with more in it about the philosophy of Industry and Humanity, and
perhaps more to the point in the practical study of the labour
question. By inviting the Premier, Moore paid respect to government.
Even Mr. Crerar might have made a more sympathetic speech. But in the
Moore philosophy there is no radical connection between Crerar and
Labour. In the organization of the Drury coalition between Labour and
the Farm he can see one way of getting the rights of each incorporated
into legislation.
But the Government is the final thing. Statesmanship is bigger than
programmes painted on the clouds. There's a vast deal to be done yet
in this country for the enfranchisement of labour in industry as it is
franchised in government. There are pig-headed Tories of industry who
will have to illustrate tombstones before some of the old spirit of
repression of labour will die out in the nation. But the die-hards are
fewer every year. Some wages had to come down to get everything else
down. But we believe also, as Moore probably does, that wages which
are the chief item of cost in all commodities ought to be as high as
production will stand and pay reasonable profits on investment; that
collective bargaining is sound as applied to individual industries, but
a form of bigoted tyranny when extended to the whole group or to the
sympathetic strike; and that the slogan, "Union is Strength", does not
mean levelling efficiency to the lowest common denominator.
The day may come in the recorded minutes of Trades and Labour
Congresses in Canada when a man of broader and more constructive vision
may be needed to build the brotherhood out into labour statesmanship.
But for the past few years, and for the few to come, Canadian labour
and common weal may well arise to thank Tom Moore, who, when the rapids
were near and the rocks were under the rapids, kept his craft rowing
into safe water. Tom Moore of Ireland was a poet. Tom Moore of Canada
is not. The play on the names is only an accident. The parallel
holds. May we never again need such a man in this country to be sure
that labour does not run us all on the rocks under the Red rapids.