Chapter 4
At about the age of sixty a reaction came over Laurier; first noticeable in less enthusiasm and more reticence at the Imperial Conferences. The French-Canadian who had lost a segment of his idolatrous following in Quebec because of clashes with the clergy and the sending of a contingent to the South African War, began to resist the cold machinations of the Chamberlain group. He began to see Empire, not as a commonwealth of democracies, but as domination from Downing Street. At home he was shrewd to observe that the Canada of his own domination was a complex of many "nationals," only a few of which were historically rooted in the Anglo-Saxon idea. He saw that the bigger half of this Canada was arising in the West, which he believed he had truly because politically created; and the West had but a slender minority of people to whom the Maple Leaf meant anything.
If the party which he also had recreated into a Laurier Liberal party was to continue dominating Canada until white-plumed Laurier had finished his work, it must be by a stronger leverage than Imperialism. He had managed to hold Quebec, which now thanks to himself and Lomer Gouin, was almost solidly Liberal. The prairie farmers he must not lose. And the grain growers were not keen about an England which bought their wheat at open world prices in competition with cheap wheat countries like Russia, and their cattle at prices dictated by the Argentine; when both cattle and wheat were cheapened to the producer by the long-haul railways which Laurier and the Tories had built.
And although the "Old Man" had scant knowledge of business, he had the wisdom of the serpent to translate the signs of the times; yet lacking somehow the vision to foresee that a play for the western vote by a measure of reciprocity would resolve itself into a boomerang at the polls. Laurier had a wonderful Canadian vision. In 1904 he refused a Liberal M.P. from the Pacific Federal interference in the Oriental problem, saying, "The day will come when we shall be glad of Japanese warships on our Pacific coast." Yet in 1912, in a letter to a friend, he gravely minimized the German menace. He understood America and Asia better than Europe. His vision was keener in power than in defeat.
And then the war, which in a few strokes finished the almost complete picture of Laurier. His support of the Government in going to the aid of Britain was at first a flash of the old generously impulsive Laurier who loved England. That love he never lost. He expressed it in the House down near to the end of the war. He loved England a thousand times better than some Englishmen do. For the Empire it is doubtful if he was ever profoundly enthusiastic except as he saw in it the glorious evolution of self-governing democracies such as Canada, his first love. He understood this country. It is not remarkable that he did. Any public man of Canada should. But Laurier's love for his own country was of an especially intense character, because it was for a long while so deeply romantic.
As he grew older the original veneration he had for England as the mother of democracy was more and more transferred to Canada as an experiment in that form of government. The more he won elections, the greater grew his passion for democracy and for interpreting his native land. The pity is that a man cannot go on winning and losing elections without suffering some damage to his clear love of country. The highest patriot is he who knows best how to lose himself and his election, all but his conscience and his cause, for the sake of the land he loves. Laurier did not remain till the end of his life the highest patriot. Weary as he is said to have been of public life as far back as 1905, he was lured into winning more elections by the adulation of his followers and his own love of swaying men as a master, until elections with him became a habit and the loss of one a tragedy.
And even the war which shook so many men's love of country to the depths--some of them over the precipice of profits, others to the passionate heights of sacrifice--did not obliterate in Laurier the fatal desire to win elections. One has almost to cease thinking to remember that Wilfrid Laurier did hope that an election would yet be held during the war that would return him to power. The failure of the Government in the war would be largely the fault of Quebec which he still in large measure controlled. He held that ace. And when the time came he would play it. The Premier wanted no advice from him. Laurier offered him none.
When the bilingual dispute was transferred to the Commons, Laurier took the only side consistent with his character and his career. He avowed his belief, as always, in Provincial rights, but he asked Ontario to use its strength with clemency. Even with an element of bitterness he did not lose his dignity. But the fine sparkle of the Laurier we all knew was gone. He was beset with complexities and contradictions. The one simple thing about him was his hope to finish his work by winning another election. In the debate on the Nickle motion for the abolition of any further king-made aristocracy in Canada, he was an acidulous old cynic, offering to go and burn his title in the market place if certain others would do likewise. Those photographs of Laurier in the Windsor Uniform, making him look like a refulgent relique of the court of Louis XIV. were no longer prized in the family album. Away with them!
Poor, splendid old man! Even in his crotchets and quavers he was charming. To the very last he could rise in the Commons and with a voice as thick as wool make members opposite fancy they were hearing great music.
In 1916 an artist painted a portrait of Laurier to hang in the Legislative halls of Quebec, where the sound of his magic voice had first been heard in parliamentary speech. The artist began to paint the Laurier of "the sunny ways." The old man corrected him. "No, if you please," he said gravely, "paint me as a ruler of men."
It was the Cardinal speaking; the man who had disciplined more Cabinet politicians than even Macdonald, the master of Cabinets; the old man who remembered the power of an earlier day.
Early in 1917 he was offered coalition by the Premier. He refused. Laurier knew that coalition meant conscription, and conscription meant dragooning Quebec.
It came home vividly to the old leader in Opposition, whatever it may have done had he been in power, that to advocate conscription would drive Quebec into the camp of Bourassa from which he and Lomer Gouin had between them managed to save a large majority of French-Canadians. The struggle of Bourassa to oust Laurier began with the Boer War. It was fated not to end until either leader or the other should quit. Before the war Bourassa was flamboyant and defiant. After it began he was openly and brazenly disloyal, when the doctrines he preached were inflammably acceptable to people uneducated to citizenship in so conglomerate a thing as Empire. The easiest thing in the world is for a high wind to sweep a prairie fire. The war and Bourassa together had the power to sweep Quebec, had Laurier and Gouin shown signs of yielding to the demand for conscription. I am told that Laurier personally believed in conscription but saw this terrible danger of disrupting the nation over Quebec. The war only had staved off the Irish question, a conference on which was in session when war was declared. Laurier dreaded the spectre of a second Ireland in Quebec. He knew all the forces and how they would operate. By his own methods, mistaken or otherwise, he had spent most of his life to achieve unity. He dreaded to see that unity imperilled. I think he would have been glad to see Quebec enlist as Ontario and other Provinces had done. That was impossible. Conscription was a menace in Quebec to the man who had failed to estimate the jack-boot menace in Germany, but who had not failed to oppose the idea that navalism in England was as bad as militarism anywhere.
No judgment of Laurier, when it comes to be adequately made by the historian, can fail to take account of this sentiment in an old leader to whom the unity of Canada had become an obsession far transcending his original passion for the solidarity of Empire.
The Winnipeg convention of 1917 was a piece of almost calculated cruelty on the part of men who should have known that the old chief's day was politically done. His party which for years he had penetrated with his personality was slipping into disunion. Vaguely he knew that the western wing of it was almost gone over to Radicalism such as he could not control. But in Ottawa there was an even more direct split. There, conscriptionist Liberals called the Convention for the purpose of proclaiming win-the-war independence of Laurier and considering Coalition on its merits. But the western Liberal machine captured it by a fluke. For a few days the old chief dreamed that the West had rallied to his standards. Then he awoke to the reality that even in the east he was head of a divided house.
The man who in 1916 had been painted as a ruler of men found in that summer of 1917 the Win-the-War Liberals deserting him, some of them with sobs. They loved him well. He was the old king. Conscription was now the issue. The Government had decided upon it late in 1916. In 1917 the Military Service Act was brought down in the House. Laurier knew at what it was most directly aimed--Quebec. He fell back on the ruse of invoking the Militia Act which called for defence only. There was no defence. He knew it. He moved for a Referendum, knowing that in the West, sore over the Wartime Elections Act, and in Quebec, and in the absence of the soldier vote it might carry by a majority sufficient to defeat the Government, to force an election and send him back to power. He was beaten. Conscription became the law. To enforce it came the Coalition. The election was held. The Liberals were again beaten--partly by men from their own ranks.
Still the old king hung on. He was now too old to let go. Even the Coalition might fail. Or the war might be ended And then----? The last fighting act of his life was to call the Ottawa Liberal Convention, of the men who had not abandoned his colours; the men for whom he was not still holding the open door. But a few months before he died here he was "up on his toes," as George Graham said of him, sending out battle calls for some election that must come now. The war was over; the army coming home. The Coalition's day was "done." Those stalwarts must return to the fold.
But most of them came not. There was still work for them to do, and surely no haste for an election.
What? No more elections for Laurier? Not one more chance, after all the waiting, for him to finish his work? Poor old infatuate! splendid even in his illusions. There was no work for Laurier to do now. There was no room for him to do it if there had been. There were few to follow him except in Quebec--for in his dotage he would not believe that the West had so forsaken him.
In a few months he was dead. And when dead, once again men forgot their political opinions and for a brief while somehow worshipped the memory of the man whose life was almost the coming true of a dream, whose work was never done, whose evening of life was a tragedy. And case-hardened politicians who had borne the burden and the heat of the day with Laurier, wept.
But the power of Laurier is not dead. In the long perspective of history the figure of this great Canadian, with his "sunny ways" and his bewildering Atlas load, will stand out vividly when many of his successors will be scarcely visible in the haze.
THE GRANDSON OF A PATRIOT
HON. WILLIAM LYON MACKENZIE KING
In December, 1913, there was a Literary Society dinner in the University of Toronto at which Sir Wilfrid Laurier was the guest of honour and speaker on "Democracy." My own seat at a table was next to a restless, thick-bodied, sparse-haired man who seemed younger than his years and to whom I had not been introduced. During the hour that Laurier spoke this man continued to lean over the table so as to catch a view of his fascinating face. He interested me almost as much as did the speaker. I had never sat beside such an irrepressible vitality. Like a bird to a succession of swinging boughs, he hung upon the golden utterances of his old chieftain and political mentor concerning a subject so poignantly dear to the experiences of one and the imagination of the other.
First impressions are sometimes reversed on closer acquaintance. I was uncomfortable beside Mackenzie King, but interested. On a latter occasion I was still more interested, and rather more uncomfortable. The early impression remained, that he had very little faculty of restraint--what scientists call inhibition.
That occasion will not soon fade from memory. Often I can hear in imagination a thousand students singing "Vive le roi! vive le compagnie!" before the fine old leader spoke, and that earnest, hectic disciple joining in. When I discovered who he was I ran back in fancy to the time when Mackenzie King was a student at that same university. At that time William Mulock was Vice-Chancellor and became keenly interested in the brilliant young student of economics with whose father he had attended law school. King entered the University the year that the chief author of the National Policy died. He graduated one year before Laurier became Premier, in the golden age of Liberalism triumphant, when "freer" trade was emerging as a symbol of that brand of democracy in opposition to free trade in a minority. How we have fallen upon evil days! Farmers' sons at college no longer regard free trade as the forerunner of political absorption by the United States, but as the vindication of the farmer as a group in government.
Mackenzie King is a man about whom nobody ever could have a lukewarm conviction. He is either cordially liked or disliked. More than most other men in public life he has become the victim of violent opinions. For this he is temperamentally responsible. People consistently decline to reason about him. They speak of him vehemently. His dominant note of character is rampant enthusiasm. King is always intensely in love with whatever interests him. His enthusiasms are not so much on the surface for many people, as underneath for causes--and for a few men. Gifted with an uncommon capacity for absorbing impressions and collecting data for research, he has made himself a sort of pathological study to other people. In mastering economics he has himself been enthralled by his own enthusiasm.
At the time of Laurier's speech on democracy King was peculiarly enthusiastic about John D. Rockefeller, Jr., head of the Rockefeller Foundation. But he had lost no jot of his fervent admiration for Laurier in Ottawa and was still passionately devoted--as he remains--to Sir William Mulock, his political godfather. Nobody has ever criticized him for his ardent discipleship to the two older Canadians. There is an old-fashioned spontaneity about this mutual regard much above the common commercial admiration of one man for another in business. Many have blamed King for his attachment to Rockefeller, and have used that connection to his detriment as Liberal leader.
In April, 1920, he was flatly accused of having been an absentee from Canada during the war, employed by the Rockefeller interests and so "entangled in the octopus" that as leader of the Liberal party he would become a menace to Canada. It was the old bogey of continentalism in a new setting, and it took Mackenzie King twelve pages of Hansard to make his defence in the House. The incident forms a hinge to a career which is worth a brief survey.
King was born in Berlin, Ontario, son of a subsequent lecturer in law at Osgoode Hall and of a daughter of William Lyon Mackenzie. At the University of Toronto he was one of the '95 group that included also Hamar Greenwood, Arthur Stringer, and the late Norman Duncan and James Tucker. There was a rebellion during that period in which there is no record of the grandson of a glorious rebel having taken part. At college he displayed a passion for pardonable egotism in which there were elements of a desire for public service. The Family Compact at Ottawa must have interested him. Liberalism, as understood by the Laurier group, was emerging from the disreputable mess known as continentalism, fathered by Goldwin Smith, who was beginning to be estimated for what he really was, a brilliant philosophical pamphleteer bent upon the obliteration of Canadian nationality.
After graduation King went for a brief term on the staff of the _Toronto Globe_. In that year the Liberals came into power. King was engaged by Sir William Mulock, Postmaster-General, to inquire into sweatshop methods in contracts for postoffice uniforms. No man could have done it better. He had a native appetite for that sort of investigation, and he was helping to establish the new Liberalism.
For the next four years King was out of the country. Had he followed the academic fashion of that period he would have been in training to become a citizen of the United States. Chicago University, built by John D. Rockefeller, attracted him first; Harvard next. He was still studying economics. No other Canadian had ever spent so much time and talent on this subject. At Harvard he became a Lecturer, and was sent to Europe to investigate economic conditions. While there he got a cable from the Postmaster-General of Canada, who had created the Department of Labour as an adjunct to the postal department, and established the _Labour Gazette_, and wanted a deputy who should edit the _Gazette_ and look after the details of the office. King courteously declined, saying that he could not accept until the expiry of his contract with Harvard. The salary of the Deputy-Minister of Labour was $2,500 under a man whom he tremendously admired, and as yet with no clear ambition to become a member of the House led by the man whom he was afterwards to worship, and to succeed.
There is no proof that Laurier took any uncommon interest at this time, as he afterwards did, in the Deputy-Minister of Labour, though he noticed that the young man was making a great success of his work. Much if not most of King's tuition in politics at this stage came from William Mulock, who as a member of the Commons in Opposition, had fathered the fair trade resolution in Convention and did much to convert the Liberal party from free to "freer" trade.
In the eight years up till 1908, by experience with conditions, King made himself master of the subject which was later to appear in his book, "Industry and Humanity." He was repeatedly made chairman of this or that mission, board, and commission at home or abroad, to get the true facts about labour, immigration and employment. By a sort of genius for conciliating groups, even when he antagonized individuals, he became for a time the world's most successful mediator in labour disputes. Industrial warfare had not as yet adopted the trench system. Direct action, the One Big Union, the sympathetic strike and collective bargaining were scarcely dreamed of, though anticipated in the philosophy of Karl Marx, as yet not transplanted to America. Socialism, as expressed by Henry George, whose "Progress and Poverty" was a classic in King's college days, was the most radical element with which the young Deputy had to deal. But the Government's policy of foreign labour nationals being gradually absorbed into labour unions made Canada, in proportion to population, a very difficult country in which to act as conciliator.
During his eight years as Deputy, King was made two offers, each of which illuminates the criticism that in the war he was only a nominal citizen of Canada. A group of Canadian employers, recognizing his success as a mediator, offered him $8,000 a year to act on their behalf with the heads of labour. Without consulting his chief, King declined the offer. He said that he preferred the $2,500 from the Labour Department, where he could be independent of either one side or the other. Later President Eliot, of Harvard, on the death of the man who occupied the chair of political economy, offered King the post, pointing out that his duties would keep him but six months a year in Boston. The salary was at least twice what he was getting in Ottawa. Again without consulting his chief, King declined, on the pretext that he had no desire to leave the useful work he was doing for the Ottawa Government to become a citizen, even of eminence, in the United States. During the same period he was asked to act as conciliator in a great mining strike in Colorado, when violence and murder were the law, and when the result of his action led to the enactment of a successful arbitration measure by the Government of Colorado.
All this was prior to King's election as member of the House of Commons. Eight years as Deputy in the Department of Labour, he stepped into the Commons and the Ministry of Labour with exceptional qualities to succeed. His record as Minister was the natural but uncommon sequel to his experience as Deputy. King was so long the one man whose whole time was spent in the effort to reconcile industry and humanity in Canada that it seems hard to recollect that he spent but three years as Minister. During that time, as well as before it, he became the ardent disciple of Laurier. While there was great advantage in having spent so many years as Deputy, it is a pity for the sake of the young leader's subsequent elevation that he did not come under the spell of the old chieftain as a candidate before Laurier had begun to grow cynical in office. In 1908 Laurier had been at least three years tired of public life when there was no man to succeed him, and when, as often as he expressed his weariness of trying to govern a nation so temperamentally difficult as Canada, he was tempted by the adulation of his supporters to try again, until winning elections for the sake of remaining in power became a habit.
Admiration such as King felt for Laurier made criticism impossible. He worshipped Laurier. In this he was not alone. Older men than King, among his colleagues, shared the same spell-binding sentiment. And there was no member of the Cabinet who grieved more than King at the defeat of Laurier in 1911.
Here begins the Standard Oil story. The _Montreal Gazette_, in a report of two speeches made at a certain club, published an accusation that King had "deserted Canada in her hour of crisis in search of Standard Oil millions."
As similar statements may be made during the election campaign, it is fair to know the facts. King was employed by the Rockefeller Foundation, not by Standard Oil. The connection is merely one of cause and effect. The Foundation spends on the wholesale betterment of humanity the multi-millions which Standard Oil accumulated from the people. The theory of justification here is that the people would have spent these millions foolishly, whereas the Foundation spends them well. There is some truth in the theory. King was engaged solely upon the industrial relations programme of the Foundation, with special reference later to industries of war, and with permission according to his own stipulation to conduct his researches in Ottawa from which in the ten years between 1911 and 1921 he has been absent only upon special occasions. He was in the unusual position of working in Canada and being paid in the United States, for researches of benefit to the cause of American industrial relations during the war. His book, Industry and Humanity, which is the literary form of those researches, was all written in Ottawa.