Chapter 3

But the fervour of the Hughes programme prevented the Premier from taking stock of the nation. He permitted Hughes to treat Quebec as an automatic part of Canada at war--which it was not; and he failed to use even the Machiavellian energies of Bob Rogers in getting a line on the psychology of the West, supposed to be useful only in elections. Sir Robert had long known of the menace of Germany, and his Naval Aid Bill was one proof that he knew. But he did not understand the menace of disunited Canada. There never was in Ottawa any informing vision of Canada at war. Canada, in fact, was not at war. Political feuds were indeed forgotten; thanks to a noble-minded Premier that was natural enough. But had there been a national poet then big enough to translate into great verse the true spiritual state of Canada, he would have written with poignant sadness about Quebec; perhaps a few verses on the overwhelming British-born majority in the First Contingent. He would have explained that being a native son of Canada, whether you were English or French by extraction, did not of itself lead to enlistment in the ranks. The Premier should have known whether Sam Hughes was awarding patronage by making officers from the Conservative party or whether according to his own statement he was doing just the opposite. In fact it was the Premier's business to see that the Minister of War pursued neither policy.

But with the Hughes flares all about him it was hard for the Premier to see the nation; most of all Quebec. In this matter of the two Canadas, Sam Hughes saw his opportune duty and he did it. Sir Robert saw his and shrank from it, not weakly but blindly. Quebec should have been the instant objective of all the wisdom in Canada's Cabinet. Except for one or two grand battalions and a minority of broad-minded French-Canadians, Quebec was not at war, as part of united Canada. Banging the drum and blowing the bugle in Quebec was as wrong in strategy as to send Bob Rogers down to exorcise, as he did in 1915, the phantom of conscription. Sir Robert knew that even in civil times his Government was electorally ignored on the St. Lawrence. How much more in a time of unpopular war? Was it not clear that every hurrah for the Empire in Ontario, every fresh battalion mustered and drilled in Toronto, every troopship down the St. Lawrence, was a nail in the coffin of Quebec's potentiality in the war?

Yes, Sir Robert Borden knew that. He knew that Laurier was sulking like Cassius in his tent; that he was gnawing himself over the failure of his own predictions about the peace welfare of the world as well as for his own defeat in the election of 1911; that the man of the "sunny ways" was becoming a reactionary and a cynic, an old leader of great power, which he was willing to use to the utmost for the prosecution of the war had he been in office, but in opposition was manacled by a sense of futility against forces in Quebec which he understood and feared far more than did the Premier.

No doubt the Premier traversed all this, many a time and in great concern. And it may be that he saw so sharply into the sad hopelessness of it all that he decided not to ask Laurier for advice, or even suggestion. Such is lack of imagination.

Laurier had his day in the grand expansion of the country. Borden would have his, in the sacrifices and moral energies of the dark days to come. It was a greater thing to be Premier in war than ever it had been in peace. Canada was a greater land in action on the West front than ever she had been stringing railways, settling farms and building towns on the frontiers. The more Canada went to the front of her own free will, the greater she seemed abroad. The credit of this nation at war went up in London and Paris much faster than its investment credit had ever gone on the exchanges. The further one got from Ottawa the greater the country seemed. A Canadian Cabinet Minister meeting a British Minister in London could talk for an hour on the wonderful war character of this country. London was the centre of gravity of the west front, and of Canadian Ministers. The Premier spent almost half his time in or near London, whenever summoned, or whenever politic to go--to a place where the rancours of Ottawa were all buried in the grand cause. The Premier of Canada sometimes went to London when he would rather have stayed at home; more often when he felt that it was emotionally bigger to be Premier in London than in Ottawa. He was more honoured in war than Laurier had been in peace. He would have been a better Canadian had he stayed in Ottawa more. But there were many Canadians who were more concerned about how to help Foch and Lloyd George win the war in Europe than about how to knuckle down to common business at home. The trek to England and to Europe became a fad. The nations went world crazy. Premiers neglected to "saw wood." It was a matter for gratitude that they did not parade in khaki.

Premier Borden's lingering objection to Coalition here, even after it was established in London, did him no credit. He was displeased when the Chairman of the Imperial Munitions Board, back from a business conference in London, asked if the Premier had any objection to his stating the case for the need of Coalition at a public dinner. Of course the Chairman was out of order. But he was talking business, not politics.

The war was not going well. The British part of it was badly enough bedevilled by distance and differences of opinion between various Dominions without the distraction of party politics.

But for the great services of win-the-war Liberals the Military Service Act might have disrupted the Coalition even when it came. It was an extreme measure; much more hazardous here than in Britain--except for Ireland, of which we wanted no imitation in Quebec. There were times when Sir Robert longed for the wings of a dove. His offer of Coalition came at a time when he knew Laurier would refuse it. Conscription he carried out as a necessity. He never wanted it. No Premier of a free-will nation would. There were bigoted anti-Quebeckers who would have had compulsion from the first to show the French that Canada was greater than Quebec. But if Canada had sent conscripts in 1915 what would have become of the glory of the Canadian army? The argument that it was the best men who were killed, thereby robbing the nation of its flower, is thoroughly ignoble. Canada has never regretted that her best men died first, or that the Premier delayed conscription until it was inevitable. Canada does regret that the Government did not until too late, attempt to make any national register of the strength of this nation as had been done in England before conscription came as the final result. To have applied conscription before the United States went to war would have driven thousands of slackers across the border. Enough went as it was in the fear that conscription was coming.

The bilingual bungle in the Commons was even worse than the bad feeling over conscription. In this debate the angry French element in the House were a bad commentary on the still hopeful minority of broadminded French-Canadians who wanted to carry on the honour of Courcellette. The controversy over titles was no feather in the cap of the Premier, who made a bad fist of defending a practice the most glaring instance of which was the creation of hereditary titles in a democratic country.

Canada's "dark days" were fast coming. The resignation of Hughes was due before it came. The Premier's patience was scarcely any longer a virtue in this case, when four months after the declaration of war he had been compelled to make a diplomatic visit to Toronto's war camp in order to smooth out the troubles created by his "Chief of Staff."

From that time on to the end of his career we had the spectacle of a Premier overburdened and weary in his office, bewildered by the insistent advices of other men and sad over the failure of even conscription, in the face of such wastage, to get Canada's 5th Division into the field without weakening the four divisions we had. The Union Government was too heavy a load for so weary a man to carry. It had done its work, most of it well, some of it too late. The head of it was worn out. He was away much for his health, more for service in Europe, coming back to reconstruct his Cabinet, with the aid of Meighen, then away again. He had lost Hughes, Rogers, Crerar, Cochrane.

The strong men he had left, except Meighen, White and Foster, were Union Liberals.

Why did the Premier not himself resign? His work was done. His Union Government had finished the work which the nation gave it a mandate to do.

The answer must be in Sir Robert's own conviction that as a Premier of Canada he still had a great work to do in Europe in the settlement of peace. That work he did, some of it much more ably than much he had done at home. We had to read the headlines diligently to see where next Canada's mobile Premier would be needed in the adjustments of peace. More of the answer might be found in the doubt as to whether any man in Canada clearly knew what the Government's work, and therefore its mandate, would be. It was a time of upheavals when any nation with a Government carrying on its work constructively according to programme might have been glad to escape the further upheaval of a general election. But political parties have usually been profiteers in the emergency of a nation. Did the Premier fear that his resignation would force an election before the new party was ready? We are not told. Under pressure he called a caucus in 1919 to determine the programme of whatever party he had in the Union. The caucus determined nothing. Did he hope to carry on until the legal expiry of his term in 1922, thereby evening up with the Liberals who wanted to bring on an election in 1916?

This also we do not know. Sir Robert was a weary and baffled Premier. He did not know how to let go. Once even his faltering hand was off, who was to succeed him? There were three men to consider.

The man's work was done. He knew it. Much of it had been nobly done. He knew that the nation was sure of this. And he now understands that even with the failures and the weaknesses of his administration, both as Conservative and Unionist Premier, we cordially concede to this high mediocrity a place in our critical affairs only second to the credit that he gained in England and in Europe as the head of a nation that had gloriously fought and magnificently won--in the war.

Canada never had as great and noble a servant, who failed so conspicuously on personal grounds to be the nation's master. But there were elements in the patriotic servant-hood of R. L. Borden, higher than the political masteries of more brilliant men.

A POLITICAL SOLAR SYSTEM

RT. HON. SIR WILFRID LAURIER

Fifty years from now some Canadian Drinkwater, charmed by the eloquent perspectives of time, may write an "Abraham Lincoln" string of personal scenes from the lives of Wilfrid Laurier and John A. Macdonald. The narrative will thus begin in the very year that the story of Lincoln ends, and it will carry on down just fifty years in our national history to the time when Wilfrid Laurier, passionate student of the Civil War, reached the end of his climax in the affairs of Canada and the Empire. But the poet who does this must be inspired; because no young country at that period of time in the world had had two such remarkable men as contemporaries, and political foes, and lucky is the nation which at any period has such a man as Laurier.

Outwardly Laurier's political career was complex where Macdonald's was simple. John A. was as great a Canadian as Laurier; but in the simpler times in which he lived he had less cause to be puzzled by the web of fate and of political cross-currents at home and abroad, even though he was immensely more baffled by politicians and party emergencies.

Laurier swung in a great romantic orbit of political sentiment, vaster than that of any other statesman we ever had. For the fifteen years up till about 1906, he seemed like the greatest man ever born a citizen of Canada. Before that period he was a romance. After it he was a national hallucination. The last three years of his life he was a tragedy.

Yet the tragedy kept on smiling. Half a century of smiles. We never had a statesman who could smile so potently. Never one with such mellifluous music in his voice, such easy grace in his style, such a cardinal's hauteur when he wanted to be alone, and such a fascinating urbanity when he wanted to impress a company, a caucus or a crowd. The Romist whom Orangemen admired, the Frenchman who made an intellectual hobby of British democracy, the poetic statesman who read Dickens and re-read in two languages Uncle Tom's Cabin and sometimes played the flute, and the Premier of a bilingual country who had a passion for the study of the war which emancipated the negro, was the kaleidoscopic enigma of Canadian public life.

Laurier was nearly all things to all men. He was sometimes many things to himself. He idolized himself and laughed at himself. He venerated British institutions and passionately loved Quebec. He came to his flowering period in a party of Free Trade and went to seed in a party committed to a species of protection. He spoke English as fluently as Bach wrote fugues, and with more passion and beauty of utterance than any of our English-Canadian orators. One moment he could be as debonair as Beau Brummel, the next as forbidding and repellent as a modern Caesar. He was consistently the best-dressed public man in Canada. A misfitting coat to him was as grievous as a misplaced verb in a peroration. He superficially loved many things. Life was to him, even apart from politics, a gracious delight. He knew how to pose, to feign affability and to be sincere. With more culture Laurier would have been the most exquisite dilettante of his age. But he cared little for poetry in verse, not much for fine music, had small taste for _objets d'art_ or the precious in anything. His greatest affection was in his home, his greatest charm in fine manners, his master passion in speech, and in managing Cabinets to win elections for the party which to him meant a greater and more inspiring Canada. We have had better debaters; but never a man except himself who in the House could make a sort of grand music out of an apologetic oration on National Transcontinental grades.

A writer who at various periods of time was very intimate with Laurier thinks he was a man of deep emotions. This may be doubted. A man who talked so easily and was so exquisitely conscious of himself could scarcely be considered spiritually profound. Other men and events played upon him like the wind on an Aeolian harp. He was tremendously impressionable; and by turns grandly impressive. A personal friend relates how a man with some experience as a critic of drama--probably himself--went to see Laurier by request for a talk on the political situation; how Laurier invited him to a chair and immediately took one beside him an inch or two lower so that his own face was on a level with the visitor's; how for some minutes he sat feeling the power of this actor who tried to persuade him to run as a Liberal candidate, and when he rose again seemed taller and more aloof than ever.

That is acting. Some other man might have done the same thing and made no impression. Laurier could perform obvious tricks with a consummate grace. And he performed many. There never was a moment of his waking life when he could not have been lifted into a play. His movements, his words, his accent, his clothes, his facial lineaments were never commonplace, even when his motives often may have been. He was Debussy's Afternoon of a Faun; poetry and charm all the days of his life.

During the ridiculous deadlock on the Naval Aid Bill, when his supporters went so grotesquely far as to read the Bible to talk out the Bill, he was away from the House for a week, reported as quite ill, in reality having a very delicious time at home reading light literature. The day he came back the news of his coming was heralded to the Commons. The benches were packed. Not till they were all full, every Minister in his place, every page at attention and the House like a pent-up Sabbath congregation, did the then leader of the Opposition make his grand, swift entry, bowing with courtly dignity to the Speaker and taking his seat amid a claque from his supporters, in which even the Tories felt like joining.

Sir Wilfrid Laurier had the infallible knack of adjusting his makeup, not always himself--to any occasion from which he could extract profitable publicity, or upon which he could do some charming thing for somebody else. He is reputed once to have worn overalls among a gang of timber-jammers, but he felt rather ridiculous and soon took them off. Interviewed abed in his private car at a railway station by a political friend, he suddenly became conscious of his pyjamas and rolled back into the bedclothes with a smile. He was not happy in _deshabille_. Entertained at an arts luncheon in 1913, he made the most of a very Spartan meal, consented with much dignity to exchange his plate of cold beef for another man's cold mutton, listened with great gravity to a short programme of music, asked the names of the composers and the players and spent most of his brief speech denying that he was anything but a philistine in art, and pledging himself if ever he was Premier again to do more for Canadian art than had ever been done before. In conversation at a friend's house with a stranger he claimed that at college he was always a "lazy dog." Visited once by an agent who tried to sell him a phonograph, he consented to play the flute for a record; after listening to the record and being assured that it was a faithful replica of his own performance and asked if now he would not buy the machine, he answered gravely, "No, I think I will sell the flute." This story may be apocryphal, but it is delightfully true to character.

On one of the thousands of "occasions" in a career that was almost perpetual drama he was buttonholed in his office by an American reporter who, having been warned that the Premier of Canada never gave interviews, boasted that he would break the rule. After half an hour the American reporter came out to his confreres of the press gallery, sat down at a typewriter, lighted three or four cigarettes, nervously aware that he was being watched for the forthcoming article, and after spoiling a number of sheets and tearing them all up he confessed, "Well, boys, I thought I was pumping Laurier, but it's a cinch he spent most of my time pumping me."

To the Liberal press gallery men he was as much a captain as he was to his followers in the House. He gave them daily audience during the Session, very often in a group, and at such times he usually asked, "Well, boys, what's the news?" He wanted good news; and many a reporter tricked up the truth now and then to give it to him. Informed once that "Bob" Rogers had vehemently in his office denied any cabal in the Cabinet against the Premier he swiftly replied, with that splendid, satirical smile, "Well, the fact that Bob Rogers says there is none would convince me that there probably is."

Laurier was the kind of man to whom other people naturally happened. He was a human solar system in which many kinds of people wanted to gravitate, even to the ragged little girl on the prairie who picked him the wild flowers that he wore in his coat as far as she could see him on the train platform. He discovered early in life that he could interest other people much as some men find out they can juggle or sing. It was a fatal gift. Laurier was far too long in this country, much too interesting. Women in Ottawa could make delirious conversation out of how this man at 72 got into a taxi. He was more phenomenal to English than to French. He never cultivated Paris and would not have been at home there. At Imperial Conferences and Coronations he was an Imperial matinee idol in London. In Ontario he was regarded with much the same awe as the small boy views the long-haired medicine man. To the Quebecker he was the grand magic; until Bourassa came, irresistible, incomparable on stage. But Laurier had no great intensity; no Savonarola gift to sway a crowd; he just charmed them; when they came to remember his song--what was it? Earlier in life he was a sort of Ulysses, led by magic. He loved the _petit ville_ of Lin where he was born. But it was too small for him. He was lured into studies, to college, to the bilingual university McGill, to law, to discourse with learned Anglo-Saxons, to the study of British Government by democracy, to the translation of himself into English. The translation, which was almost a masterpiece, made him the first and perhaps the last French Premier of Canada, and in many respects the greatest Premier we ever had.

This alone was something. Speaking their own tongue, Laurier could impress the English. He could tour Ontario and feel grandly at home in the Liberal shires, among the men of the Maple Leaf. He could follow one of his two transcontinentals up the Saskatchewan, and to multitudes of many nations led from Europe by his own immigration policy conduct a Pentecost for the two new Provinces. He could fling magic over Manitoba, and on the Pacific he had power. But in Nova Scotia he could never equal the memory of Joseph Howe, a greater orator than Laurier.

What this man's sensations were as he studied himself in the art of politics may be compared to what an English Canadian of similar temperament would feel like if he could fling a spell over Quebec. Laurier made a second conquest of Canada. He took a great Cobden party from Edward Blake and made it almost protectionist, Imperial and his own. He grafted a sort of Liberalism on to polyglot nationalities. In about the same tenure of power he created a personal ascendancy the equal of Macdonald's, in a nation almost twice as big and much more complex. In ten years he changed the face of Canada as no Premier had ever done before or ever can do again. He was looked at in Imperial London as though he were the joint picturesque descendant of Wolfe and Montcalm, with a mandate to make Canadian Liberalism an instrument of Empire, a bi-racial Government a final proof of the eternal wisdom of the British North America Act, and a measure of reciprocity a safeguard of Anglo-American entente.

So the son of the village surveyor from the tin-spired parish of St. Lin had made himself very nearly monarch of all he surveyed, with the notion that his right there was none to dispute. Sprung from the most backward province in Confederation, he pushed Canada forward with hectic speed, not counting the cost, nor caring what the end might be, so long as he died Premier of a prosperous nation and therefore happy.