Chapter 20

The Immigration Minister should be our leading sociologist. He should be able to diagnose communities. He might easily begin upon Ottawa. What a study a cross section of the Smart Set would be, especially upon the arrival of a new king at Rideau Hall! There's nothing in other democracies quite like that. Washington has a White House, but the inmate is merely an elected servant of the State. Rideau Hall is an endowment, a gift of the gods. The 30,000 people of greater and lesser degree in Ottawa who normally or abnormally live by the Civil Service are profoundly affected by the arrival, sojourn and departure of the Governor-General. They are vitally influenced and entertained by the Parliamentary restaurant, even without the bar. The social show provided by Ministers' and members' wives and their visiting friends is itself a subtle study in the art of getting on in the new world, which is at the root of all immigration. Bridge for money and dining out with your friend's wife are within the reach of any ambitious immigrant. The Smart Set in Ottawa is an exotic colony all by itself. Montreal and Toronto and Winnipeg can merely copy it. Some of the farmers have their eye on the Set; no, not to abolish it. Women must have their share in the Government. Petticoats and politics are affinities. Farmers are no more necessarily immune from what is said to have corrupted the Roman Empire than Tories or Grits. Farmers in fact, as Mr. Calder knows, are not the hope of the world; neither are lawyers nor manufacturers.

Suppose we ask the Sphinx about this. Listen in imagination to this once Liberal, as with an astounding burst of candour he says:

"My friend, your description of my make-up may be as right or as foolish as anybody feels disposed to think. None of it bothers me. What does bother me is the law of compensation. Agree with me that the manufacturer had his drastic innings with Canadian governments; that tariffs and protected industries are the result; that lawyers--yes, I'm a lawyer--have had a big day in our affairs because they had the talent for schemes and speeches. Admit that and conclude--that the very human farmer thinks his turn is coming, and rather soon. But--somebody who was never educated as a Tory has got to help the National-Liberal-Conservative Government to get an even chance to administer this nation after the upheavals of war. Somebody who moves silently while others are talking their tongues loose may be needed to manipulate----"

Before the Sphinx could complete his statement of the case he was politely asked if he would care to inter his talents in the Canadian Senate, and he suavely answered that such a thing might be a good way to solve the conundrum, even though it would make a thoroughly stupid last act in the play.

A TRUE VOICE OF LABOUR

MR. TOM MOORE

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.

A MAN WITHOUT A PUBLIC

SIR WILLIAM MACKENZIE

A few years ago, before Stefansson reported on the blond Eskimos, the first Eskimo movie ever taken was shown in Toronto to a small audience who waited an hour for the film, which did not begin until a thick, grizzly man with shrewish, penetrating eyes came in with his party.

"Sir William Mackenzie, late as usual," whispered one. "He never arrives on time at a public function, often sleeps at a play, and sometimes when his family invite musicians to his home he plays bridge in a distant room so as not to hear the music."

"Oh, yes," nudged the other; "but Sir William, you see, owns this film. It was taken by his own exploration party."

"Oh! Then the last scene will probably be Eskimos laying railway ties."

"Oh, no. Digging up mineral deposits. Iron--Sh!"

It was a wonderful film full of epical energy and primitive beauty; picturing one of the few kinds of people in Canada that Mackenzie had never been able to link up to civilization. The room was hung with costumes, curios and weapons of these folk, all of which were afterwards presented to the Royal Ontario Museum by Sir William, who was never enormously interested in ethnology. And that exploration of the far North was the last act in the complicated drama of William Mackenzie's great discoveries in Canada.

A study of Mackenzie is useful under the head:

WHAT DID YOU--NOT--DO TO WIN THE WAR?

He was appointed in 1915 on an "Economic Commission" which seems to have practised a rigid economy on what it did for the country, because it was never heard of again. However, it was No. 1A of the 46 war-time commissions, and because Mackenzie was a member it should have a memorial.

There is one man in Germany something like William Mackenzie, who makes money almost by magic out of utilities and buys up concerns in other countries with money which he made in his own. His name is Hugo Stinnes. Mackenzie is a bigger man and a higher type than Stinnes; but each man regards his country as a commercial asset to be developed; each is a wizard of a species of applied finance. For years Mackenzie was of speculative interest in Canada to people who had never even seen his photograph. He was the man who had a second headquarters in Ottawa and a branch office in every provincial legislature except Prince Edward Island. We almost had Provincial Premiers lullabying to their Cabinets:

"Hush ye, hush ye, do not fret ye, The Black Douglas shall not get ye."

Mackenzie seemed to arise about twenty-five years ago from some magic mountain and to stride down upon the plains with the momentum of a Goth army. He was a contractor who became for ten years a demigod. Sometimes before the war when people saw him on the street they paused to watch him walking as though a black bear had suddenly wandered down from Muskoka.

"By Jove! Mackenzie's back again."

"And is that William Mackenzie?"

"Did you never see him before?"

"No, sir, I never saw him before."

"Well, take a good look. He's just going to lunch. That man brought back sixty million dollars this time from Threadneedle Street. A gang of reporters met him at Montreal to get the good news---more money for Canada. Great game! He got forty millions a year ago or so."

"Who's that benign man with him?"

"That's a Provincial Premier. His province wants more railways and the Government has to guarantee more bonds----"

"Oh, then he sells bonds with Provinces for security?"

"That's the big idea. Why, what's wrong with it?"

"Oh, I guess it's all right."

"Of course it is. Railways can't be built out of earnings of lines built last year. Traffic's too thin; has to be developed. Mackenzie's building lines for a real population Canada, my boy, is a terrific country to railroad. The C.P.R. got land and cash grants. Mackenzie takes Government-guaranteed bonds. The whole country is on the same road. We import people on to homestead land and we have to borrow money to set the people up so that they'll become real Canadians----"

"Yes, especially at election time. But tell me--who finally owns these railroads?"

"Well, you've got me. Nobody has figured that out yet. Everything is too new. All I know is that Governments are behind Mackenzie, and the people elect the Governments, and the people want the roads, and if they don't get 'em the Government probably goes out. Anyhow I take off my hat to Sir William Mackenzie as a great man."

Nine-tenths of Canada used to think that Mackenzie was a great man. The more he borrowed in England on Government-guaranteed bonds, and the more he invested in Mexico and South America, and the greater number of street railways, power plants, transmission lines, ore mountains, new towns, smelters, docks, ships, whale fisheries, coal mines and land companies that he and his able partner Mann were able to octopize, the greater the country thought both these men were--and especially Mackenzie.

Toronto Board of Trade once gave a dinner to these men to celebrate the fact that by the building of the new line to Sudbury at a cost of about fifteen millions, Toronto was at last actually located on a Mackenzie road and had a right to be made the headquarters of the system. A deer in some places could have jumped from that line to the new line of the C.P.R. built at the same time--and about the same cost. There was no farmer in Ottawa to prevent the C.P.R. from getting a charter to double-track this line. It was the same year that Mackenzie inaugurated the Canadian Northern line of steamships, the two Royals, and for lack of tidewater was compelled to dock them at Montreal under the shadow of the C.P.R., who of course did not join in the civic welcome. And in the same year people were talking--as they are now again--about Toronto and Port Arthur becoming ocean ports. The wonder was that Mackenzie did not see to it. But he was fairly busy, tying Halifax to Vancouver by the Yellowhead Pass, and giving Provincial Cabinets new ideas about government.

Without a doubt William Mackenzie had a mandate from this country to do a great work--and he overdid it. Bankers and other financiers agreed that he had found new ways of investing creative money. Scarcely a teacher of geography but admitted that Mackenzie was changing the map of this country so fast that a new one became necessary every three years. New towns sprang up at the rate of a mile a day of new railway built by Mackenzie. Every new town became a monument to this man's faith in the future of Canada. Even the old city of Montreal, preserve of the C.P.R., lent its mountain to Mackenzie for a tunnel and a "Model City" on the hinter side.

There was always money to be had. A map of Canada in Mackenzie's satchel when he went to England to see money lenders seemed under his talk as big as the whole British Empire. It was not common Empire patriotism to refuse either the money or the guarantees for the bonds. The whole of Canada backed Mackenzie's notes. It was he, not Sir Thomas White, who invented the principle of Victory Loans whereby the nation becomes your banker. Between building a new line and operating a line built last year, there was no system of accounting that could audit his books. The centipede became so vast and complex that no banker could begin to understand it. Mackenzie never made the effort. He was developing Canada.

The Saskatchewan valley was the one great trunk Eldorado, the greatest discovery of natural resources ever made in Canada. The settlers in that valley wanted more people, the people wanted the railways, the Government needed the voters, and Mackenzie wanted settlers, people, voters, Government and all. If a Government was obstreperous, Mackenzie might lend a heavy hand to help turn it out at the next election. It was not proper for a Government to obstruct him. He was the over-man.

In no other nation has there ever been a man who could play such a prodigious and prodigal game with the resources of the whole country. Mackenzie mobilized the nation before the war. Millions of people in Canada used to regard him as a sort of magnified Daniel Drew--the father of Wall Street and watered stock and corrupt-contract railways. But Mackenzie was a broader man than Drew, with a much higher sense of honour. Drew admitted that he was a wonderful Methodist, that he had been a profiteer of the Civil War, and that he had starved a railway of rails so that it killed a large number of people in an accident. Mackenzie was no Methodist; and he never was a profiteer from any emergency of the people. He wanted Canada to prosper. All his profits must come from greater wealth in Canada, which he did much to produce.

Mackenzie had more faith in Canada than most of the politicians had. He wanted a great Canada, chief Dominion in a great Empire, The best way to conserve a nation's wealth, he said once, is to develop its resources. We never had such a developer. He never was a born railwayman, any more than he was a pure financier. He was a colossal exploiter of national resources by means of borrowed money. In the era before Mackenzie we had Clergue at the Soo. Clergue was a pigmy forerunner of Mackenzie. What Clergue did in Algoma the other man aimed to do for the whole country, And he almost did it.

Asked once why he gave so much leeway to men like Mackenzie and Mann, Sir Wilfrid Laurier is reported to have said: