Chapter 7
All this was meat and drink to E. C. Drury, who came to voting age with the solemn conviction that though the fathers had worked hard, the sons were not prosperous. They paid too much for what they had to buy and got too little for what they had to sell; a fate which seems to overtake most of us in varying degree. With stagnant local towns the markets for perishable products declined. In the open markets of the world, reached by long railway and steamship hauls, the Canadian farmer's staple products were in competition with nations of cheap labour. Across the lake a nation of twelve times our population was retaliating against our protective tariffs by duties on Canadian grain, cattle and hogs. The Tory party and the Canadian Pacific and the Bank of Montreal and the Canadian Manufacturers' Association were becoming British at the expense of the Canadian farmer. At the back of all the gods of things as they are and ought not to be, stood the damnable, desolating tariff that fattened the town and starved the farmer in order to bloat the banks and the manufacturer and the railways--under the cloak of patriotism! Heaven deliver us! Was it not a Tory manufacturer of stoves who said in Toronto that he would build a tariff "as high as Hainan's gallows?" Was it not a Tory President of the C.P.R. who said he would have a tariff as high as a Chinese wall to keep out the Yankees? Was it not the President of a great Canadian bank who deserted the Liberal party when it sought to enact a measure of reciprocity?
On all hands Mr. Drury could see the evidence of a master conspiracy against the farmer, who was to become the helot of civilization. He could see it in his own barn as he reckoned the cost of his machinery, and over against that the price of what he had in the bins of his granary and on the hoof outside. That thousands of farmers voted and talked Conservative proved the astonishing power of heredity. That all farmers did not become Liberals and make the Liberal party a solid rural party proved that even a man's depleted pocket cannot compete with the traditions of his family. Drury looked to Laurier to emancipate the farmer. In vain. Laurier created more farmers, thousands of them in the West; but he only enslaved them with the voters' lists; the very party over which Drury had almost wept with joy when at the age of eighteen he had felt them like the armies of Israel sweeping out the scoundrels of the National Policy.
Thus his hope was no longer in Laurier, who knew nothing about the farmer, nor dreamed that in the very West which he had put on the political map with his prosperity of imported people and borrowed money, there was arising a race that would repudiate him and his. Drury had a weather eye on the West. There were farms in Simcoe county now worked by old men whose sons had gone to that Promised Land. In the constant drift of the hired man and the farmer's son to the town and the city for shorter hours, higher wages and more amusement, he saw the fluidity of labour, the first evidence that there was some common ground between the farmer and the labour class. Working in his own fields, driving his own teams, operating his own machinery, this capitalistic labour-unionist of the soil said to himself that the farmers of Canada were entitled not merely to representation in Parliament, but to the organization of a class interest that should take hold of the country's economic horns and turn it on to the right road.
In the lonely furrow of the farm a man often thinks out conclusions that are gloriously right in themselves, but in the chequered and cynical experiences of men in office tragically impossible. Mr. Drury was no stranger to Ottawa. He had been there on deputations; and on tariff commissions; and each time he came back he had a stronger determination to go there some day as the voice of the more or less united farmer against the tariff that had sterilized the Liberals.
Drury was a rural Liberal. He saw in the reciprocity campaign of 1911 some glimmer of hope that Liberalism might succeed without a revolution. The election settled that. From then on to the war the philosopher of Crown Hill bent himself to the deeper study of the one force that now seemed to him to be left capable of breaking the nation's bondage. He no longer had the fervent desire to see a new town grow among the farms that he had when he was a youth. Every bigger town, unless it had industries that could widen the farmer's low-cost market, was a mitigated menace. Every foundry and implement works and furniture factory and boot industry making goods more or less from imported material, considerably with imported labour, and selling to the consumer at a normal price plus the duty, roused in Mr. Drury as much hostility as a natively kind and Christian character would permit.
And at last he saw the predicted slump begin to come in the year 1913, when the boomster dodged the boomerang of inflated and speculative values; when east and west the farmers, crimped by high railway rates and cost of materials, machinery and labour, ceased to be the backbone of Canadian buying.
And then the War.
Whatever may be traced to the normal development of this Ontario Cincinnatus, it was the War which made Drury. But for the war he would have bided his time to be elected to Ottawa on a straight tariff issue. The war, backed by the man's religion and his tariff theology, drove him to the Premiership of Ontario.
There were times during the war when, if Mr. Drury was as honest with himself as he is about government, he must have reflected that the Canadian farmer was getting pretty well paid back in part of one generation for the wrongs and adversities suffered by generations ago. Pork at $20 per cwt., oats at $1.50 a bushel, wheat fixed by the Government at $2.40 to keep it from bulling to more than $3--none of these could have been economically justified by Mr. Drury except as an act of compensating Providence. The farmer of all people as a class benefited most, when he was driven to the worst labour hardship he ever had by the terrific prices paid for war work, which robbed him of hired help almost at any price. The higher the price and the scarcer the help, the more the Government clamoured for production. The Ontario farmer responded to the call. He was no more a patriot to do it than a man was to buy Victory Bonds. He was simply a profitee (we leave off the r).
And this was the first call of the war to which the farmers as a class made a hearty response. No doubt most farmers were better servants of the nation in the furrow than in the trench. But the time came when they had to leave the furrows. On top of the Government's most frantic call for more production by the farmer came the Military Service Act, which refused to exempt him. The call to the plough-handle came before the election of 1917. The call to the bayonet came afterwards in a crisis unforeseen at the time of the election. Drury himself had been defeated as a conscriptionist Liberal candidate in 1917. No farmer could be in khaki and overalls at the same time. There was no reason given for the drastic change of face except the message from the front that more men were urgently needed or the West front was doomed. It was not even reckoned that a farmer conscripted after seed-time in 1918 could not possibly be of use in the trenches till long after the time when the fate of the West front would have been settled anyway.
Hence the ire of the agriculturist, driven now to become an agrarian. The Ontario farmer made no distinction between the Unionist Government that had conscripted the farmer, and the Ontario Conservative Government which supported Ottawa. The farmer made up his mind wherever possible to defeat both the old line candidates.
Premier Drury was the chief result. He never would have been offered the post but for the cleavage caused by the war. The U.F.O. were not unanimous, and Drury was not anxious. He had his eye on Ottawa. But there was nobody else who could unite the group with labour. Drury had himself been the first president of the U.F.O. and secretary of the Canadian Council of Agriculture; he was a thinker, something of a scholar, a futurist, and a good deal of a radical; and he could speak well.
He picked a Cabinet mainly of farmers. He occupied more time drafting his Cabinet than most farmers take to harvest a crop. He was in a hurry, but he wanted nobody to suspect it. He said little; wisely. There was no occasion. He had no mandate from the people. He wanted sure-enough colleagues. The men he chose were all novices. The old line critics watched him with affected contempt. They said Agriculture and Labour never could mix. Drury went along. No Cabinet had ever been so prayerfully hand-picked. Labour must not get the idea that it was merely being sopped for the support of twelve men in a House majority of one. There must be concession; common aims understood, even ahead of experience, when there was as yet no common policy.
Mr. Drury had been only a few hours sworn Premier of Ontario when he was summarily turned out--not, however, from Office. In company with a farmer author friend who had been given the freedom of a certain small but desirable Club and who wanted to show Mr. Drury one place where he could have a quiet time of an evening, he went to have dinner. As neither of the gentlemen was known to the housekeeping department a member of the Club--a well-known newspaperman--was asked to inquire their identity. The result was that the Premier of Ontario and his friend left the Club, without dinner.
The next day the newspaperman looked over the shoulder of his editor-chief in office and said,
"Who is the important-looking man in the photograph?"
The answer came, "Hon. E. C. Drury, Premier of Ontario."
"Great Scott!" he said huskily, "that's the man I turned out of the Club last night."
Drury had the sense of humour to regard the matter as a joke on both the newspaperman and himself.
The opening of the new Legislature was a spectacle. Dignitaries and judges, professors and generals stood about the farmers--led by the farmer-in-chief, morning-coated, carefully groomed, plainly nervous but sustained by the dignity of it all. His voice was firm; his manner that of a very circumspect bridegroom. The old smug strut and case-hardened pomp of legislature inaugurals was lacking. An undercurrent of deep sincerity stayed many a tremorous hand. Drury was the least nervous of all. I imagine that in the morning he had sung to himself some good old fortifying hymn, like "Rock of Ages."
Since that day the Premier has learned that practical politics is a game that taxes all a man's technique in Christianity. Autocratic Hydro and Mackenzie the loosening octopus; New Ontario preaching up the old plaint of secession; better roads and prodigal Mr. Biggs; what to do with Education that Cody had not started to do; how to stave off commissions on reform of the school system; the constant queues of moral reformers; the new menace of the movies and the censorship farce; the timber stealers; disconcerting Dewart and redundant Ferguson; returned soldiers and khaki members; the Reds and the plain clothes men; blustering Morrison, and the tyrannical U.F.O.----
Until the Premier, plain, homespun gentleman that he is, longed for Friday evening and the Crown Hill farm and the quiet little church in the village, because one week at his desk took more out of him than a month in overalls. And then to relieve his surcharged soul he made that speech at Milverton in which he boldly proclaimed that he was going to head, not a mere group called the U.F.O., but a People's Party. For this "broadening out" speech he got clods thrown at him by Morrison, and Burnaby put rails on the road to upset the Premier's buggy, and the _Farmers' Sun_ tried to change the wheels on his rig so that he would not be able to get home. Worse than any the _Onlooker_, that virile organ of no advertising and of the Meighen Government, said:
"The U.F.O. chose this man and dragged him out of his rural obscurity. In common gratitude he should have stuck to their colours. He should have given fair warning of a change of heart, and indeed we think he ought to have resigned. When a man joins a political party he agrees to subordinate his ambitions and activities to the common good of that party, and failing to do so honour demands that he should leave it."
In spite of the fact that the Premier of Ontario twice made an appointment by request from the writer of this for the purpose of getting a statement for the press as to what he meant to do about this whole business of "broadening out," twice failed to keep the appointment and later came out with the Milverton pronunciamento, we have no hesitation in pointing out that:
Mr. Drury was not in rural obscurity. The U.F.O. had no colours which Mr. Drury had not helped to paint, for he was the first President the U.F.O. ever had. He had no change of heart, because when he made an unstable coalition of the U.F.O. and the Labour party he entered into a pact and covenant which the U.F.O. had never considered; he had already "broadened out" to drive Labour and Agriculture as a team and had pretty well succeeded in doing it. Mr. Drury did not join a political party. The U.F.O. was not a real party because it went into the election of 1919 without a leader, and in order to get its platform translated into party it had to have Mr. Drury or somebody like him. And if Mr. Drury should resign from the head of the two groups which he alone has made into the semblance of a party, he would be recommended by Mr. Crerar to let his guardian take him to a lunatic asylum.
Drury has done much better than his critics expected he would do. He has been bold enough to keep Adam Beck from being the unelected Premier of Ontario, which is more than Sir William Hearst ever could do. He has made Government cost more than it ever did, though it is only reasonable bookkeeping to believe that part of the cost was incurred by a Government over which he had no control. He has begun to build public highways which being originally a farmer's job should have been done well, but up to the present has been on a smaller scale as bad a case of wasting the public money as the railways of Canada ever perpetrated. The cost of administration being a matter of either experience or graft, it is probable that the Coalition will cut down the cost when they get more experience. The Chippewa Canal is one glaring instance of high labour cost which a Farmer Premier with Labour colleagues did not presume to regulate. If anybody knows what a day's work is it should be the farmer; but the farmer in this case was not absolutely free to express his opinions, because he depends upon Labour for his voting majority in the House.
In the matter of referendum Mr. Drury has been an advocate instead of a judge. He and his--notably the church-ridden Mr. Raney, who does not even smoke--are a dry lot. They wanted Ontario to be bone dry and therefore preferred to have the people vote either foolishly for the iniquitous O.T.A. or fanatically for absolute prohibition. Mr. Drury should have taken the spark plug out of his Methodist car long enough to reflect that what keeps a man contented is going to keep him from stirring up trouble. If the Government of enlightened and moral Ontario had brought in a measure to create a referendum on the alternative of prohibition _vs._ effective government control of reasonable liquors, it might have less cause to be panicky over Bolshevism.
The legislation to exempt from taxation houses costing less than a certain amount looks like a pretty straight play for the Labour vote, and the propagation of a semi-Bolshevistic principle that unless checked somewhere will exempt the many at the expense of the few.
But before Mr. Drury has the chance to be truly elected by the people of Ontario to carry on his People's Party, he hopes perhaps that he may have a chance to be called to Ottawa. It is freely rumoured that Mr. Crerar has no intention of taking the Premiership which the liberated people of Canada are going to bestow upon him by virtue of one more group-coalition. In which case he may invite Mr. Drury, who has given a sparring exhibition of being a Premier, to succeed him. Then we shall have the undemocratic farce of an appointive Premier all over again--for the third time in three years. And then--well, we shudder to think what is going to become of Mr. Drury's hitherto unimpeachable Christianity and of the economic welfare of a country which has as much right to modern factories as the bush farmer ever had to saw-mills.
EZEKIEL AT A LEDGER
RT. HON. SIR GEORGE FOSTER
Sir George Foster is a genius. The world forgives much to geniuses, because it lives by them. Canada has tolerated a great deal in Foster for the very good reason that no man except Laurier has for so long a period without interruption seemed so picturesquely necessary to our public affairs.
In his own temperamental way Sir George somewhat compensates Canada for never having produced a Milton or a Bach. One of his best speeches might be made into blank verse or set to a fugue. He illuminates life. Decade by decade he comes prancing down the vistas of our politics with a vitality that is perfectly amazing. And when some obituarist writes his epitaph, "Foster Mortuus Est," he promptly rubs it out and writes, "Resurgam!"
The first allusion I ever heard made to Sir George Foster was in 1889, on a Sunday School excursion when a Grit lawyer superintendent spoke with admiring deprecation of the then famous divorce case; adding, as might be expected of a righteous Grit, that it was a pity so eminent an advocate of prohibition should have so compromised, perhaps ruined, his political career.
Well, the compromise has lasted a long time and the ruin seems to be long overdue. Public sentiment over both temperance and divorce has somewhat shifted. In 1889, when virtue shuddered over marrying divorced women, drunkards were being made by hundreds in any town under the very nose of the church. In 1921 when Parliament moves to popularize divorce, public sentiment not only abolishes the bar, but votes bone dry on the eve of an artificial millennium.
A man who for some years has wanted the Ministry of Trade made the remark in a magazine article that if he had Sir George Foster in his employ as a salesman he would have him discharged for incompetence. That man forgets that a genius is not born to sell goods. There were times in the war when less genius and more business in Trade and Commerce would have been better for Canada. Foster was almost seventy when the war began; a pretty old man to act as the chief business manager for a nation at war. His department was the economic backbone of the Administration. The nearer Canada got to total conscription of resources, the more Foster's work should have towered into the blue. Trade and troops were the life of the nation. Hughes, White, Borden, Rowell, Meighen, were all shoved into greater eminence by the work they did in the war; Foster was no bigger or more potent a figure in war work or any other kind of work when peace was signed than he was in 1914.
He never was a great executive even at his portfolio under Macdonald in the early '80's. He has always been a prophet. Public speech is his besetting passion. He could rise anywhere and translate logic and economics into ethical emotion. No man in Canada felt the war more intensely. But Trade was not a matter of emotion; or of oratorical periods; or the right hand descending upon the left. It was a matter of urgent and colossal business.
In 1916, talking to the war budget, he declaimed against patronage. He had done the same thing in 1910 just as ably when he was the pot calling the kettle black.
"I hope," he said, "that in the white light of the present struggle the two parties will agree to do away with the evil."
But the "white light" was more intent on doing away with the parties themselves.
In the same speech:
"When the trenches call for munitions and supplies, when the blood of the country is oozing from its veins in the struggle to preserve its ideals and its liberties, when those who are at home are contributing with generous self-sacrifice and without murmur or repining, I say that to me as a member of the Government, to you as supporters of the Government, and to you, gentlemen opposite, as a part of the great body which represents the people of this Dominion, the call comes to cut off every unnecessary expenditure, to refuse every improper demand. It is our business to administer the funds of the people with perfect economy, and to devote ourselves to the one sole purpose of prosecuting this war to a successful and final conclusion."
Again, he spoke like a prophet when he riddled the blind optimism of the prosperity pack. At that time Canada had a favouring balance of $200,000,000 just two years after a heavy ledger against us.
"The Optimist speaks of the unexampled prosperity that is to follow the war. I would like to think so, but I can't. The prediction of a Montreal newspaper that Canada will have from twelve to fifteen million inhabitants within three years after the war is a mischievous exaggeration. The first trying period of readjustment will come immediately after the actual fighting ceases and an armistice is declared."
Ezekiel was profoundly right up till the last prophecy. The Minister of Trade, with all his great ability to analyze trade, had not mastered economics. Neither had the President of a great Canadian bank when he said before the armistice, that merchants with empty shelves and able to buy cheap goods would be in luck. It was a bad time for prophets.
However, for a man who aimed at so many nails, Sir George had a good average of hitting. But while he was talking so much, and in Europe so long, the biggest-business administration of which he was the chief went along on its own more or less mechanical momentum. By 1917 Canada had a total export trade of more than half a billion; with a possible yearly munition order of 500 millions--no thanks to the Minister of Trade. No nation in the world exported so much from so few people. No Ministry of Trade had such a record. Sir George knew exactly what it all meant. He was used to analytical surveys. But one fails to remember that at any period he issued from his office, the trade centre of the Dominion, any statements that shewed him to be more than a puzzled commentator on the riddle of trade, usually between speeches and journeys. Sir George never did have executive patience for the mastery of detail. In this case he did not even convince the people that he had sized up the great general outlines, so fascinating because so profoundly unusual.
In June, 1916, Sir George issued in his weekly Trade Bulletin a resounding Call To Action for a business conference at Ottawa of all parties interested for the purpose of pulling the country's industries and organizations into one big _ensemble_ for getting back to peace. That "Call" was published in one paper illustrated by a picture of Sir George--in the climax of a speech. A few months later a political writer was in Ottawa, and when he came back he wrote an article about the Foster Conference. The following extract shows what he thought of it:
In Ottawa, last week, I met a big bear of a Canadian westerner. He had just arrived from Toronto. He was all smiles, all energy and enthusiasm, and he was looking for the Minister of Trade and Commerce, Sir George E. Foster.