The first we understand. The second involves the Empire. Aitken was--if
anything that could be labelled--a Tory. He had no trouble becoming a
Unionist. His success with Bonar Law made it possible in getting rid of
Asquith. He could call Carson "Edward". He could think as fast as Lloyd
George. It was a time for quick thinking--and action. He had opened all
the heavy doors in Montreal--and closed them upon all but those he wanted
inside. He tried the same thing in England. His audacity was inspired.
Something had to be done. Somebody must be the middleman. Aitken had an
uncanny faculty for sizing up situations; for manipulating men; for
interpreting ambition--because no man in England had an ambition
surpassing his own. He could play political chess and absorb superficial
culture at the same time. Books, plays, authors, artists, manners,
accent--all were grist to his mill. He was an astute actor. He could
assume a virtue; simulate anxiety; hover about closed doors on tiptoe;
speak in the awed whisper; in the event of a crisis peer tragically into
men's faces.
England knew she had taken a queer character to bosom; a child who was
growing up at Gargantuan speed, an _enfant terrible_ of sudden and
prodigious experience; a creature who could sit up o' nights and plot and
organize and cabal and next morning rub out the wrinkles at tennis,
amiable if he beat his opponent, growling and savage if beaten, ready for
a campaign in the afternoon, a speech in the evening and a conference at
midnight. Or he could plunge into polite arts, talk familiarly of
literature with duchesses, undergo a surgical operation to-day and sit up
for correspondence to-morrow. He has a brain whose recipe for complete
rest is "change of work"! Barring Lloyd George and De Valera, he has
perhaps the most unusual brain in Great Britain.
No Canadian, already a millionaire, had ever done these things. Not even
Gilbert Parker had so amazingly cultivated the accent. Greenwood,
diligent and talented, had been slow and determined. Aitken--opened the
heavy doors. As in Canada, he was at last able to close out all but
those who could play the game of the hour. This Canadian could not only
talk, but act, Empire; not merely ape, but superficially assimilate,
England; and he understood the United States--because he was
temperamentally something of an American.
His success on the surface is incomprehensible. The one key to it is his
persistent cultivation of Bonar Law, who in the Coalition was the great
prop to the Premier. Beaverbrook hugely admires Lloyd George. He
reverences Bonar Law. The Premier and himself had too many points,
though not characteristics, in common to become running mates.
Intimately congenial to the Unionist leader, Aitken was never allowed to
become indispensable to the Premier. His brief term as member of the War
Cabinet terminated almost suddenly. Was it voluntary? Or ambitious?
What did this Warwick want as reward more than the peerage which may have
been designed to chloroform an electric battery?
We are not told. Once during the second year of war he offered to raise
and equip and command a battalion from New Brunswick. His offer was not
accepted. He went to Sam Hughes. "Sam," he said, "I want a job in the
Canadian Army!"
He got it. Aitken's work as Eye Witness to the Canadian troops and the
publication of "Canada in Flanders" was the performance of a man who in
the great crisis of war had found a sudden and sincere interest in his
native land that he had never exhibited while he was a citizen of this
country. He showed a grasp of the human as well as the technical side of
war. A man who could so rediscover his own nation could surely do
something new in helping to co-ordinate the Empire. He has an
astonishing knowledge of great public men in all countries, a thorough
commercial knowledge of Europe and Asia, and--may we say a genius for a
sort of secret diplomacy? His war record demonstrates most of these
qualities. His Canadian War Memorials are a proof that he understands
how to make his own country useful to British artists.
What then did Beaverbrook expect as reward for his political services,
beyond a peerage and the sublime sense of having "done his duty" where he
saw it?
Governor-Generalship of Canada?
Ambassadorship to the United States?
Secretaryship of State for the "Colonies"?
Or the Chancellorship of the Exchequer?
There is really nothing else left for an ambition like this except the
Premiership of Great Britain. Brilliant, plotting, crafty and
phenomenal, this young man has still the spirit of the corsair. England
has not absorbed him. But there is a general election pending over
there. The Coalition is not on Gibraltar. Party cleavages are rife.
Labour, Liberals, Socialists, Syndicalists, Bolshevists and old-line
Unionists are all pitching camps about the Premier's Verdun. When the
battle really begins will Gen. Beaverbrook be in the citadel, or working
in a headquarters tent to merge any three of the common enemy into a
force that will haul down the Coalition flag?
"Why do you think Lloyd George will come back as powerfully as ever?" he
was asked here, after his admission that for the time being the Premier
was in the doldrums of unpopularity.
"Because--he always does!" was his cautious reply; in which one almost
detected the suspicion that he might not; and if so--what?
These are some of the unpredictables. Even the answer Beaverbrook
himself might give to-day might be challenged by his action of to-morrow.
But this man has always succeeded in finance when a country was
prosperous, and in politics when the nation was confronted by emergency.
He is still too ambitious to adjourn permanently to Leatherhead, Surrey;
too young to write his memoirs. England is a new world. And it may
be--unless he has already alienated his personality from his genius--that
one of its picturesque discoverers will be Lord Beaverbrook.
Meanwhile he remarks that most of his friends are in Canada. One misses
at least a fumbling guess, if in the days to come he will not value those
friends, whoever they may be, more than he ever did when he was making
millions here or merging politicians over there. Such a man seldom moves
his forces just for parade. As Aitken used this country to get himself
preferment in England on account of the Empire, so it may be suspected
that he has used England--not impossibly--to reclaim in this country
whatever credit he lost some time before he left it.
Meanwhile until the Government of Great Britain finds some better
function for this phenomenon, we recommend that he be made the official
economic investigator of the Empire. Up to the present this has been a
pastime for leisured travellers like Lord Southesk, Sir Charles Dilke,
and Rider Haggard. A man with Beaverbrook's ability to analyze economic
conditions and gain the confidence of men in high positions could be of
incalculable value in getting a thorough survey of the commercial and
political resources of a commonwealth which as yet nobody seems to
understand. After that the Government might well make him Viceroy of
India, where he might apply his talent for group-coalition to the great
problem of constitutional Home Rule.