Octavius Milburn was not far beyond the facts when he said that the
Elgin Chamber of Commerce was practically solid this time against the
Liberal platform, though to what extent this state of things was due
to his personal influence might be a matter of opinion. Mr Milburn was
President of the Chamber of Commerce, and his name stood for one of
the most thriving of Elgin’s industries, but he was not a person of
influence except as it might be represented in a draft on the Bank of
British North America. He had never converted anybody to anything, and
never would, possibly because the governing principle of his life was
the terror of being converted to anything himself. If an important
nonentity is an imaginable thing, perhaps it would stand for Mr Milburn;
and he found it a more valuable combination than it may appear, since
his importance gave him position and opportunity, and his nonentity
saved him from their risks. Certainly he had not imposed his view upon
his fellow-members--they would have blown it off like a feather--yet
they found themselves much of his mind. Most of them were manufacturing
men of the Conservative party, whose factories had been nursed by high
duties upon the goods of outsiders, and few even of the Liberals among
them felt inclined to abandon this immediate safeguard for a benefit
more or less remote, and more or less disputable. John Murchison
thought otherwise, and put it in few words as usual. He said he was more
concerned to see big prices in British markets for Canadian crops than
he was to put big prices on ironware he couldn’t sell. He was more
afraid of hard times among the farmers of Canada than he was of
competition by the manufacturers of England. That is what he said when
he was asked if it didn’t go against the grain a little to have to
support a son who advocated low duties on British ranges; and when he
was not asked he said nothing, disliking the discount that was naturally
put upon his opinion. Parsons, of the Blanket Mills, bolted at the first
hint of the new policy and justified it by reminding people that he
always said he would if it ever looked like business.
“We give their woollen goods a pull of a third as it is,” he said,
“which is just a third more than I approve of. I don’t propose to vote
to make it any bigger--can’t afford it.”
He had some followers, but there were also some, like Young, of the
Plough Works, and Windle, who made bicycles, who announced that there
was no need to change their politics to defeat a measure that had no
existence, and never would have. What sickened them, they declared, was
to see young Murchison allowed to give it so much prominence as Liberal
doctrine. The party had been strong enough to hold South Fox for the
best part of the last twenty years on the old principles, and this
British boot-licking feature wasn’t going to do it any good. It was fool
politics in the opinion of Mr Young and Mr Windle.
Then remained the retail trades, the professions, and the farmers. Both
sides could leave out of their counsels the interests of the leisured
class, since the leisured class in Elgin consisted almost entirely of
persons who were too old to work, and therefore not influential. The
landed proprietors were the farmers, when they weren’t, alas! the banks.
As to the retail men, the prosperity of the stores of Main Street and
Market Street was bound up about equally with that of Fox County and
the Elgin factories. The lawyers and doctors, the odd surveyors and
engineers, were inclined, by their greater detachment, to theories and
prejudices, delightful luxuries where a certain rigidity of opinion
is dictated by considerations of bread and butter. They made a factor
debatable, but small. The farmers had everything to win, nothing to
lose. The prospect offered them more for what they had to sell, and less
for what they had to buy, and most of them were Liberals already; but
the rest had to be convinced, and a political change of heart in a bosom
of South Fox was as difficult as any other. Industrial, commercial,
professional, agricultural, Lorne Murchison scanned them all hopefully,
but Walter Winter felt them his garnered sheaves.
It will be imagined how Mr Winter, as a practical politician, rejoiced
in the aspect of things. The fundamental change, with its incalculable
chances to play upon, the opening of the gate to admit plain detriment
in the first instance for the sake of benefit, easily beclouded, in the
second, the effective arm, in the hands of a satirist, of sentiment in
politics--and if there was a weapon Mr Winter owned a weakness for it
was satire--the whole situation, as he often confessed, suited him
down to the ground. He professed himself, though no optimist under any
circumstances very well pleased. Only in one other place, he declared,
would he have preferred to conduct a campaign at the present moment on
the issue involved, though he would have to change his politics to do
it there, and that place was England. He cast an envious eye across
the ocean at the trenchant argument of the dear loaf; he had no such
straight road to the public stomach and grand arbitrator of the fate of
empires. If the Liberals in England failed to turn out the Government
over this business, they would lose in his eyes all the respect he ever
had for them, which wasn’t much, he acknowledged. When his opponents
twitted him with discrepancy here, since a bargain so bad for one side
could hardly fail to favour the other, he poured all his contempt on the
scheme as concocted by damned enthusiasts for the ruin of businessmen of
both countries. Such persons, Mr Winter said, if they could have their
way, would be happy and satisfied; but in his opinion neither England
nor the colonies could afford to please them as much as that. He
professed loud contempt for the opinions of the Conservative party
organs at Toronto, and stood boldly for his own views. That was what
would happen, he declared, in every manufacturing division in the
country, if the issue came to be fought in a general election. He was
against the scheme, root and branch.
Mr Winter was skilled, practised, and indefatigable. We need not follow
him in all his ways and works; a good many of his arguments, I fear,
must also escape us. The Elgin Mercury, if consulted, would produce
them in daily disclosure; so would the Clayfield Standard. One of these
offered a good deal of sympathy to Mayor Winter, the veteran of so many
good fights, in being asked to contest South Fox with an opponent who
had not so much as a village reeveship to his public credit. If the
Conservative candidate felt the damage to his dignity, however, he
concealed it.
In Elgin and Clayfield, where factory chimneys had also begun to point
the way to enterprise, Winter had a clear field. Official reports gave
him figures to prove the great and increasing prosperity of the country,
astonishing figures of capital coming in, of emigrants landing, of new
lands broken, new mineral regions exploited, new railways projected, of
stocks and shares normal safe, assured. He could ask the manufacturers
of Elgin to look no further than themselves, which they were quite
willing to do, for illustration of the plenty and the promise which
reigned in the land from one end to the other. He could tell them that
in their own Province more than one hundred new industries had been
established in the last year. He could ask them, and he did ask them,
whether this was a state of things to disturb with an inrush from
British looms and rolling mills, and they told him with applause that it
was not.
Country audiences were not open to arguments like these; they were
slow in the country, as the Mercury complained, to understand that
agricultural prospects were bound up with the prosperity of the towns
and cities; they had been especially slow in the country in England, as
the Express ironically pointed out, to understand it. So Winter and
his supporters asked the farmers of South Fox if they were prepared to
believe all they heard of the good will of England to the colonies, with
the flattering assumption that they were by no means prepared to believe
it. Was it a likely thing, Mr Winter inquired, that the people of Great
Britain were going to pay more for their flour and their bacon, their
butter and their cheese, than they had any need to do, simply out of a
desire to benefit countries which most of them had never seen, and never
would see? No, said Mr Winter, they might take it from him, that was not
the idea. But Mr Winter thought there was an idea, and that they and he
together would not have much trouble in deciphering it. He did not claim
to be longer-sighted in politics than any other man, but he thought the
present British idea was pretty plain. It was, in two words, to secure
the Canadian market for British goods, and a handsome contribution from
the Canadian taxpayer toward the expense of the British army and navy,
in return for the offer of favours to food supplies from Canada. But
this, as they all knew, was not the first time favours had been offered
by the British Government to food supplies from Canada. Just sixty years
ago the British Government had felt one of these spasms of benevolence
to Canada, and there were men sitting before him who could remember the
good will and the gratitude, the hope and the confidence, that greeted
Stanley’s bill of that year, which admitted Canadian wheat and flour at
a nominal duty. Some could remember, and those who could not remember
could read; how the farmers and the millers of Ontario took heart and
laid out capital, and how money was easy and enterprise was everywhere,
and how agricultural towns such as Elgin was at that time sent up
streets of shops to accommodate the trade that was to pour in under
the new and generous “preference” granted to the Dominion by the mother
country. And how long, Mr Winter demanded, swinging round in that
pivotal manner which seems assisted by thumbs in the armholes of the
waistcoat, how long did the golden illusion last? Precisely three
years. In precisely three years the British nation compelled the British
Government to adopt the Free Trade Act of ‘46. The wheat of the world
flowed into every port in England, and the hopes of Canada, especially
the hopes of Ontario, based then, as now, on “preferential” treatment,
were blasted to the root. Enterprise was laid flat, mortgages were
foreclosed, shops were left empty, the milling and forwarding interests
were temporarily ruined, and the Governor-General actually wrote to
the Secretary of State in England that things were so bad that not a
shilling could be raised on the credit of the Province.
Now Mr Winter did not blame the people of England for insisting on free
food. It was the policy that suited their interests, and they had just
as good a right to look after their interests, he conceded handsomely,
as anybody else. But he did blame the British Government for holding out
hopes, for making definite pledges, to a young and struggling nation,
which they must have known they would not be able to redeem. He blamed
their action then, and he would blame it now, if the opportunity were
given to them to repeat it, for the opportunity would pass and the
pledge would pass into the happy hunting ground of unrealizable
politics, but not--and Mr Winter asked his listeners to mark this very
carefully--not until Canada was committed to such relations of trade
and taxes with the Imperial Government as would require the most heroic
efforts--it might run to a war--to extricate herself from. In plain
words, Mr Winter assured his country audiences, Great Britain had sold
them before, and she would sell them again. He stood there before them
as loyal to British connection as any man. He addressed a public as
loyal to British connection as any public. BUT--once bitten twice shy.
Horace Williams might riddle such arguments from end to end in the next
day’s Express, but if there is a thing that we enjoy in the country, it
is having the dodges of Government shown up with ignominy, and Mr Winter
found his account in this historic parallel.
Nothing could have been more serious in public than his line of defence
against the danger that menaced, but in friendly ears Mr Winter derided
it as a practical possibility, like the Liberals, Young and Windle.
“It seems to me,” he said, talking to Octavius Milburn, “that the
important thing at present is the party attitude to the disposition
of Crown lands and to Government-made railways. As for this racket
of Wallingham’s, it has about as much in it as an empty bun-bag. He’s
running round taking a lot of satisfaction blowing it out just now, and
the swells over there are clapping like anything, but the first knock
will show that it’s just a bun-bag, with a hole in it.”
“Folks in the old country are solid on the buns, though,” said Milburn
as they parted, and Alfred Hesketh, who was walking with his host,
said--“It’s bound in the end to get down to that, isn’t it?”
Presently Hesketh came back to it.
“Quaint idea, that--describing Wallingham’s policy as a bun-bag,” he
said, and laughed. “Winter is an amusing fellow.”
“Wallingham’s policy won’t even be a bun-bag much longer,” said Milburn.
“It won’t be anything at all. Imperial union is very nice to talk about,
but when you come down to hard fact it’s Australia for the Australians,
Canada for the Canadians, Africa for the Africans, every time.”
“Each for himself, and devil take the hindmost,” said Hesketh; “and when
the hindmost is England, as our friend Murchison declares it will be--”
“So much the worse for England,” said Milburn, amiably. “But we should
all be sorry to see it and, for my part, I don’t believe such a thing
is at all likely. And you may be certain of one thing,” he continued,
impressively: “No flag but the Union Jack will ever wave over Canada.”
“Oh, I’m sure of that!” Hesketh responded. “Since I have heard more of
your side of the question I am quite convinced that loyalty to England
and complete commercial independence--I might say even commercial
antagonism--may exist together in the colonies. It seems paradoxical,
but it is true.”
Mr Hesketh had naturally been hearing a good deal more of Mr Milburn’s
side of the question, staying as he was under Mr Milburn’s hospitable
roof. It had taken the least persuasion in the world to induce him to
make the Milburns a visit. He found them delightful people. He described
them in his letters home as the most typically Canadian family he had
met, quite simple and unconventional, but thoroughly warm-hearted, and
touchingly devoted to far-away England. Politically he could not see eye
to eye with Mr Milburn, but he could quite perceive Mr Milburn’s grounds
for the view he held. One thing, he explained to his correspondents, you
learned at once by visiting the colonies, and that was to make allowance
for local conditions, both social and economic.
He and Mr Milburn had long serious discussions, staying behind in the
dining-room to have them after tea, when the ladies took their fancy
work into the drawing-room, and Dora’s light touch was heard upon the
piano. It may be supposed that Hesketh brought every argument forward
in favour of the great departure that had been conceived in England; he
certainly succeeded in interesting his host very deeply in the English
point of view. He had, however, to encounter one that was made in
Canada--it resided in Mr Milburn as a stone might reside in a bag
of wool. Mr Milburn wouldn’t say that this preference trade idea, if
practicable, might not work out for the benefit of the Empire as a
whole. That was a thing he didn’t pretend to know. But it wouldn’t
work out for his benefit that was a thing he did know. When a man was
confronted with a big political change the question he naturally asked
himself was, “Is it going to be worth my while?” and he acted on the
answer to that question. He was able to explain to Hesketh, by a variety
of facts and figures, of fascinating interest to the inquiring mind,
just how and where such a concern as the Milburn Boiler Company would be
“hit” by the new policy, after which he asked his guest fairly, “Now,
if you were in my shoes, would you see your way to voting for any such
thing?”
“If I were in your shoes,” said Hesketh, thoughtfully, “I can’t say I
would.”
On grounds of sentiment, Octavius assured him, they were absolutely
at one, but in practical matters a man had to proceed on business
principles. He went about at this time expressing great esteem for
Hesketh’s capacity to assimilate facts. His opportunity to assimilate
them was not curtailed by any further demand for his services in the
South Fox campaign. He was as willing as ever, he told Lorne Murchison,
to enlist under the flag, and not for the first time; but Murchison and
Farquharson, and that lot, while grateful for the offer, seemed never
quite able to avail themselves of it: the fact was all the dates were
pretty well taken up. No doubt, Hesketh acknowledged, the work could be
done best by men familiar with the local conditions, but he could not
avoid the conviction that this attitude toward proffered help was very
like dangerous trifling. Possibly these circumstances gave him an
added impartiality for Mr Milburn’s facts. As the winter advanced his
enthusiasm for the country increased with his intelligent appreciation
of the possibilities of the Elgin boiler. The Elgin boiler was his
object-lesson in the development of the colonies; he paid, several
visits to the works to study it, and several times he thanked Mr Milburn
for the opportunity of familiarizing himself with such an important and
promising branch of Canadian industry.
“It looks,” said Octavius one evening in early February, “as if the
Grits were getting a little anxious about South Fox--high time, too.
I see Cruickshank is down to speak at Clayfield on the seventh, and
Tellier is to be here for the big meeting at the opera house on the
eleventh.”
“Tellier is Minister of Public Works, isn’t he?” asked Hesketh.
“Yes--and Cruickshank is an ex-Minister,” replied Mr Milburn. “Looks
pretty shaky when they’ve got to take men like that away from their work
in the middle of the session.”
“I shall be glad,” remarked his daughter Dora, “when this horrid
election is over. It spoils everything.”
She spoke a little fretfully. The election and the matters it involved
did interfere a good deal with her interest in life. As an occupation
it absorbed Lorne Murchison even more completely than she occasionally
desired; and as a topic it took up a larger share of the attention of Mr
Alfred Hesketh than she thought either reasonable or pleasing. Between
politics and boilers Miss Milburn almost felt at times that the world
held a second place for her.