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Title: The Canadian Scene. Sketches : Political and Historical.
Author: Charlesworth, Hector Willoughby (1872-1945)
Date of first publication: 1927
Place and date of edition used as base for this ebook:
   Toronto: Macmillan, 1927 (First Edition)
Date first posted: 29 September 2008
Date last updated: 12 October 2008
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #176

This ebook was produced by: Dr Mark Bear Akrigg




  THE CANADIAN SCENE

  _Sketches : Political and Historical_


  BY

  HECTOR CHARLESWORTH
  Author of "Candid Chronicles"




  TORONTO: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY OF
  CANADA LIMITED, AT ST. MARTIN'S HOUSE
  1927




  COPYRIGHT, CANADA, 1927
  BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY OF CANADA LIMITED

  _Printed in Canada_




  TO MY CHILDREN

  CONSTANCE CHARLOTTE CHARLESWORTH, M.A.
  AND
  LIONEL VICTOR CHARLESWORTH




FOREWORD


In the main the following sketches are reprints of articles
which the author has written for different periodicals at
various times within the past ten years. A majority of them
first appeared in Toronto _Saturday Night_ under the title
"Reflections", which gives a clue to the moods in which they
were written. It will be obvious to the reader that the
author has drawn heavily on the ever-growing mass of
Canadian biographical lore. In most instances the originals
have been augmented and re-arranged. Two of the longer
chapters were written for United States readers unfamiliar
with the Canadian scene. The article on "Civil War Spy
Operations" was originally contributed to the _New York
Evening Post_, at a time when all America was excited over
German spy operations in America; that on "The University of
Toronto" was written for Henry Ford's weekly, _The Dearborn
Independent_, which desired to acquaint its readers with
certain unique factors in the organization of this Canadian
seat of learning.

For the most part the purpose of the writer has been to
acquaint Canadians born in this century, like those to whom
the book is dedicated, with certain romantic phases of the
development of their native land. Perhaps a few of their
elders who recall some of the eminent men mentioned in these
pages will meet with facts of which they have been unaware.

H. C.




CONTENTS

THE CORRESPONDENCE OF SIR JOHN A. MACDONALD

ROBERT B. ANGUS, A CANADIAN PATRIARCH

GEORGE STEPHEN'S BATTLE FOR A TRANSCONTINENTAL RAILROAD

A NOTE ON LORD STRATHCONA

STEPHEN A. DOUGLAS, PIONEER OF WESTERN DEVELOPMENT

"THE GREAT COMPANY": A SCOTTISH EPIC

CANADIAN HISTORICAL ORATORY

LAURIER AND HIS BIOGRAPHERS

BUCHAN'S "LORD MINTO"

TWO CANADIAN MEMOIRISTS

A PIONEER CANADIAN CARTOONIST

PAUL KANE: INTERPRETER OF THE ABORIGINES

THE POWERS OF THE ATTORNEY-GENERAL

THE PERMANENCE OF PATRONAGE

SIR ALLAN MACNAB'S GRANDDAUGHTER

FRANKLIN K. LANE'S LETTERS

CIVIL WAR SPY OPERATIONS IN CANADA

LINCOLN AND CANADA: A FOOTNOTE TO HISTORY

WALT WHITMAN IN CANADA: MARGINALIA

THE HYDRO-ELECTRIC PIONEERS OF ONTARIO

THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO




THE CANADIAN SCENE




THE CORRESPONDENCE OF SIR JOHN A. MACDONALD


How far does a nation succeed in really knowing its public
men? No Canadian leader lived on more intimate terms with
his countrymen than Sir John A. Macdonald, whose image grows
vaster with the passing years. Yet I fancy some of his
surviving friends learned much they did not know of him when
_Correspondence of Sir John A. Macdonald, 1840-1891_,
edited by Sir Joseph Pope, was published in 1921. The volume
necessarily presupposes a running acquaintance with Canadian
history, and its great importance lies in its illumination
of the characters of the leading men who helped to shape the
destinies of Canada as a unified Dominion, and of the
vexatious problems with which they had to deal. Not even Sir
Joseph's _Life_ leaves such an ineffaceable impression of
the intellectual power, political wisdom, and steadfast
patriotism of Sir John Macdonald, as do the many
confidential communications that here are brought to light.
The union in him of political genius, with patience and
tolerance, are unmistakably revealed. Though other men had
also the vision of a great and unified Dominion, one cannot
but feel that only by his tact, vigilance, and fixed aims
was Confederation first rendered possible and later extended
and made permanent.

The number of those who knew Sir John and participated in
his battles is daily diminishing. For millions of Canadians
he is but a legendary figure: the theme of comic stories;
the arch-embodiment of political cunning; and at times the
subject of oratorical rhetoric. From the pages of this
_Correspondence_ the real man emerges; he looms larger than
any oratory could picture him; more kindly and human than
any anecdote could typify him. The several portraits give a
sense of his unique personality; noble brow, sensitive
mouth, eyes and features that are alert, humorous and wise.

Personally, I saw Sir John but once, and it was the glimpse
of a moment. On a summer day less than a year before his
death, as I stood on a street corner in Toronto, a covered
coup drove by; and there, framed as in a portrait gallery,
was Sir John. It was a perfectly toned picture; for the sun
falling through the opposite window lighted the figure and
profile. He was smartly attired with grey top hat and grey
frock coat, leaning forward with his chin resting on strong
and sinewy hands that gripped a cane,--apparently in deep
reverie. It was a picture Zorn or Sargent might have desired
to paint; and my recollection of it is ineffaceable. And in
that glimpse the great leader gave one a sense of detachment
from his fellows, almost of isolation.

As I read these letters I find in them that same atmosphere
of intellectual detachment. Despite his great personal
popularity and countless acquaintances, the man who desired
so many and such great things for his country, who found it
so hard to get things done, who was so constantly beset by
the quarrels and envies of others, reveals himself, as it
were, in "splendid isolation".

While the letters of Sir John himself are many, those from
other distinguished men to himself are more numerous still;
though Sir Joseph Pope says they represent but one per cent
of the material at his disposal. "Harry, my boy," once
observed Sir John to Colonel H. R. Smith, the late
Sergeant-at-arms of the House of Commons, "Never write a
letter if you can help it, and never destroy one." If what I
have heard from old politicians is true, the first named
precept was the echo of bitter experience. Sir John did
occasionally write letters that he could have wished
unwritten, and friends were sometimes put to considerable
difficulty in recovering them. Nevertheless he, for the most
part, avoided unnecessary correspondence, and abstained from
epistolary controversy. Many of the letters he received were
apparently "answered" by the simple process of putting them
in the filing cabinet. When he did write, his style was
witty, sage, and clear.

One fact that cannot fail to impress the reader is the
elaborate means Sir John employed to keep himself informed
of what was going on above or below the surface, that might
affect the fortunes of his country and of his
administration. While he encouraged a spirit of partizan
devotion in his followers, he was not himself a bitter
partizan. His letters reveal a keen sense of the
deficiencies of some of his own associates and an
appreciation of the abilities of opponents. Yet there is a
pervading kindliness in his communications, even when he had
reason for annoyance, which bespeaks a fine spirit. The
reason some of the "Grits" hated him so much was not because
he defeated them so often, but because he laughed at them.
That was hard to bear. But he had much to bear from them;
for these pages show that no form of libel was deemed too
base to be circulated against him for political reasons. He
had only to give his assent to some plan, and, no matter how
deeply in the interest of Canada, a horde of traducers was
immediately busy trying to wreck it. The _Globe_, under the
regime of George Brown, seems to have been a sore offender
in this respect; and its articles circulated in the West did
not a little to provoke the first Riel rebellion. But Sir
John Macdonald as a rule had so much information up his
sleeve that he was usually prepared to confute his enemies.

A very interesting phase of this correspondence is the
evidence it presents of the elaborate use Sir John made of
the press. There are many letters to editors, giving them
friendly tips on matters of policy; and even cautions
against extreme partizanship. He held that he could be best
supported by fair statement, rather than one-sided argument.
When, in the late sixties, he resolved to make Sir Francis
Hincks, who had been abroad for years as governor of the
Windward Islands, Finance Minister, he realized that he
would be in hot water with the old Tories. Hincks during his
earlier residence in Canada had been a strong Reformer, and
consequently Sir John devised an educational campaign in the
press to make the appointment acceptable to his own party.
Again we find him cautioning a friendly journalist to
withhold comment on a public question until George Brown in
the _Globe_ had committed himself in the way he hoped he
would. On one occasion he drew up a skeleton editorial for
the _Mail_ and asked its editor, the late Martin J.
Griffin, to develop it. It was a severe criticism of his own
supporters because some of them were importuning him for
judgeships and senatorships. In it he laid down the dictum
that judges should not be appointed on the ground of
political service, and that it was improper for a lawyer to
urge his own appointment. He also held that appointments to
the Senate were a matter of such grave consequence that mere
party expediency should not prevail. Most of these precepts
have since been honoured rather in the breach than the
observance.

It is quite clear that Sir John liked working below the
surface; but his diplomacy was far from malevolent. He
sought to keep in touch with the best thinkers of the
country, and, like his friend Sir Charles Tupper, enjoyed
especially happy relations with certain of the Roman
Catholic clergy. The correspondence shows that he actively
used his influence through the Marquis of Salisbury and the
Duke of Norfolk to secure the Cardinal's hat for Mgr.
Taschereau, the first Canadian Prince of the Church. Among
the bitterest of his letters are those of 1887 censuring C.
W. Bunting, editor of the _Mail_, for alienating the Roman
Catholic vote. His tolerance was not shared by Goldwin
Smith, his close and intimate friend in the seventies. In
one letter, "the Oxford Professor" says the name of priest
is perfidy. Goldwin Smith's letters to Sir John are
peculiarly interesting. He even then believed that the
destiny of Canada lay in union with the United States; but
in 1878 he strongly supported Protection with his pen and on
the platform. He was particularly indignant because the
_Globe_ intimated that his advocacy was due to a desire to
foment differences between Canada and free-trade Great
Britain. Goldwin Smith at that time seems to have thought
that the only way Canada could strengthen herself to meet
the United States on equal terms was by Protection.

There were matters which Sir John deemed more important than
the policy of protection. One was, to use his own words,
"making Canadian confederation from gristle into bones". He
worked early and late for his nursling, by diplomacy, by
reconciling quarrels and jealousies, by the use of
patronage, and by open argument. The other was the necessary
complement of Confederation, the linking up of Canada by a
chain of railways from the Atlantic to the Pacific. He must
have been a happy man, when, on September 14, 1880, after
ten years of negotiation, contracts were signed for the
construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway. In reality his
troubles were just beginning; but nevertheless the railroad
was finished long before May 1, 1891, the date set for its
completion. The initial acts of the great drama of the
opening up of the Canadian West give an epical character to
these letters. It was a sore struggle for Sir John; but he
had strong helpers in his most intimate friends; in Sir John
Rose, a great English banker, born in Canada, who had once
been a member of his cabinet; in Sir Charles Tupper, a man
less tactful than he but of equal vision; and later in
George Stephen (Lord Mountstephen) and Donald A. Smith (Lord
Strathcona). The drama began with the acquirement of the
western territories from the Hudson's Bay Company. It was a
deal consummated in London; and interrupted by the first
Riel rebellion. Sir John's fear was that this defiance by
Riel's "republic" would be treated as an Imperial matter and
that "some overwashed Englishman" would be sent out to spoil
everything. He was badly served by bungling subordinates;
but finally, by force of will and continuous diplomacy, he
got things settled in his own way, and despite carping
opposition, railroad construction proceeded. Sir John in one
letter emphasized his conviction that the United States
coveted the Canadian West. In 1884, when the C.P.R. was
nearing completion, rumours of Riel's activities were again
to the fore. A Toronto promoter named Pew planned to have
Riel declare the West an independent territory, and then
sell it to the United States for two million dollars, half a
million dollars more than Canada had paid for it fifteen
years previously. Sir John induced Erastus Wiman to pose as
sympathetic, and get full details of the plan. Pew claimed
that Edward Blake and Sir Richard Cartwright were with him
in the deal, but this Sir John rightly refused to believe,
and it stamped the whole scheme as fantastic in his eyes.

Riel's second rising in March, 1885, came at a very unhappy
moment for the C.P.R. project. Five million dollars was
needed for its completion, but some of Sir John's
colleagues, including Sir Mackenzie Bowell, refused to
countenance the loan. The tone of Sir Charles Tupper's
letters from England clearly indicated a desire to come over
and physically chastise them into submission. The loyalty of
two men of no eloquence but much wisdom, Sir Frank Smith and
Hon. John Henry Pope, saved the day. Now it is almost
incredible to think in 1885 the C.P.R. nearly went into
liquidation for the lack of five million dollars to complete
it. But how real was the danger is shown by the note of
bitterness and almost grief in the letters of George
Stephen. In this episode the greatness of Sir John, in
comparison with opponents and colleagues, proved paramount.
Opposition was ever but a spur to his valour.




ROBERT B. ANGUS, A CANADIAN PATRIARCH


It is to be feared that comparatively few Canadians realized
that in the death of the late R. B. Angus, of Montreal, on
September 17th, 1922, the most important surviving
historical figure in Canada had passed away. Perhaps it was
because, unlike some of his old friends, he had refused
titles. Nevertheless, of all Canadians alive on the day
before his death, his was the name most conspicuously
written in the history of Canada's physical expansion and
economic development. Moreover it was a name linked in some
slight degree with the early development of the American
Northwest also. He was the last survivor of the group which
conceived and carried out the project of the Canadian
Pacific Railway, and he had personally participated in
episodes when the fate of Canada as an ocean-to-ocean
dominion hung in the balance. It was a group that included
men of affairs like James J. Hill, of Minnesota, Lord
Strathcona, Lord Mountstephen, Sir William Van Horne, Duncan
McIntyre; and statesmen like Sir John A. Macdonald, Sir
Charles Tupper, Hon. John Henry Pope, and Sir Frank Smith.
R. B. Angus was indeed the last leaf on a mighty tree, but
for many years he had lived such a quiet life in his own
social circle in Montreal, that the younger generation of
Canadians was largely unaware of him. Yet he was the
patriarch of Canadian finance, and his name appears in all
narratives of Canada's formative years--a silent figure it
is true, but obviously one of singular potency.

Patriarchal in years--he was born in 1831--patriarchal in
historic experience, he was also marvellously patriarchal in
appearance. A year before his death I met in Montreal a
portrait painter of international renown, who stated that he
was visiting that city for the purpose of painting the
portrait of Mr. Angus. "Well, you certainly have an ideal
subject," I remarked; "it would be a poor dauber who could
not make something impressive with a model like that." "He
is too ideal," said the painter, "so wonderfully picturesque
that it is hard to make the kind of strong individual
character study we fellows delight in. The real task comes
when you paint a man of achievement who doesn't look the
part. Mr. Angus looks the part so completely that it robs a
painter of his chance for subtleties." From others I have
heard of the tranquillity of his character, which left
little scope for anecdotage, though he was a lively
companion in the days of his youth, and amazingly vital in
mind even in extreme old age.

His place in the life-stories of Lord Strathcona, Lord
Mountstephen and James J. Hill recalls with singular fitness
Milton's line "He also serves who only stands and waits."
His was the unruffled figure among the group of men who
lived triple lives in the troubled years when a
transcontinental railroad was being pressed through despite
foes and obstacles. The _Correspondence of Sir John A.
Macdonald_ shows how often Lord Mountstephen was in despair
and gave vent to his emotions on paper. There were also
times during the construction era when the prospect of
sabotage and bloodshed was plainly present in the mind of
Van Horne. The quarrels of Donald Smith (Lord Strathcona)
often left tangles to be straightened out. Midway during the
years of trial, Duncan McIntyre, a Montreal capitalist, who
was one of the pioneer directors, withdrew from all
participation in the management; James J. Hill had still
earlier acquired what is colloquially known as "cold feet"
and turned his attention to the construction of the Great
Northern Railroad. Angus, who, more than the others, had
been the personal associate of Hill, was the man who said
nothing but hung on.

Identification with the development of the West had marked
the career of Mr. Angus from the early years of his arrival
in Canada. He came in 1857, a Scottish bank-clerk of 26, to
enter the service of the Bank of Montreal. Those were
troubled years in Canadian finance when the Bank was
fighting for the retention of its privileges as government
financial agent and was at war with the business men of
Upper Canada. Its general manager, afterward Senator E. H.
King, whom he was to succeed within little more than a
decade, was known in his day as "The Napoleon of Finance",
though strongly imbued with "rule or ruin" ideas. But good
fortune soon took young Mr. Angus away from Canadian strife
to witness a more tragic conflict. In 1861, the year of the
outbreak of the American civil war, he was sent as agent of
the Bank to Chicago, Illinois, the state where the issues
had been fought out on the stump in the Lincoln-Douglas
debates, and the city which had witnessed the baptism of
Lincoln as a national figure.

For a new-comer from the motherland, Chicago in 1861 was an
ideal spot at which to learn of the importance of the
prairies and imbibe Stephen A. Douglas's gospel of
transcontinental railways as the secret of America's future
greatness. Later Mr. Angus served his bank at New York
during the war period, returned to Montreal to become local
manager, and rose to the post of General Manager in 1869,
the year in which the strife among Canadian banks was
finally settled by the financial legislation of Sir Francis
Hincks. At that time he was probably the only Canadian
banker of eminence who had an inkling of what prairie
railroad development meant.

The real father of a Pacific railroad on Canadian soil and
of Western development generally, was of course Sir John A.
Macdonald, who pledged his career and the life of his party
to its accomplishment. In 1873, he was defeated on a
political scandal arising from his proposals--clear evidence
that Canada as then constituted was more or less indifferent
as to the main project. To that defeat, Donald Smith, the
member for Selkirk, Manitoba, had contributed the casting
vote. But inasmuch as the entrance of British Columbia to
Confederation had been obtained by a pledge that the road
would be constructed, the project could not be allowed to
die without incurring a risk, amounting to certainty, that
the coast province and probably the prairies as well, would
become United States territory. In the mid-seventies the
problem of securing men to finance and build such a line
seemed insuperable, and it is here that Angus and his
friends come into the story.

Donald Smith, chief factor of the Hudson's Bay Company, had
been keen for Western railroad development, both
east-and-west and north-and-south, and had succeeded in
securing the construction of a government line from Fort
Garry (Winnipeg) to the Minnesota boundary. He and Hill, who
lived at St. Paul, had earlier become mutually interested in
a steamboat company with vessels plying on the Red River.
Along the Red River valley lay uncompleted sections of the
much-looted St. Paul and Pacific Railroad, which had gone
bankrupt in 1873. Its bondholders lived in Holland. It
occurred to Smith and Hill (says Sir William Van Horne's
narrative) that they might do something for the country and
also for themselves by getting control of this property.
They needed a financier, and Smith suggested his cousin,
George Stephen, who had become President of the Bank of
Montreal. In 1876 occurred a failure of a steel company in
Illinois. This involved the Chicago branch of the Bank in a
heavy loss and necessitated a journey to Chicago by the
President, Mr. Stephen, and the General Manager, Mr. Angus.
The law's delays gave them a week of idleness and they
tossed a coin as to whether they would use it in a trip to
St. Louis or one to St. Paul. The coin favoured St. Paul,
whereat Stephen remarked, "I am rather glad of that; it will
give us a chance to see the railroad Smith has talked
about." That toss of the coin made history.

The outcome of the visit was the purchase of the bonds of
the St. Paul and Pacific from the Dutch bond-holders, and,
ultimately, to the formation among the new owners of a
syndicate to construct the Canadian Pacific Railroad.
Stephen had never seen the prairies before, but was deeply
impressed with their potential fertility, although in
Minnesota the settlers had recently been driven out by a
plague of locusts. An association was immediately formed,
consisting of George Stephen, Donald A. Smith, James J.
Hill, Richard B. Angus, John S. Kennedy (the New York
representative of the Amsterdam bond-holders), and Norman W.
Kittson, Smith's agent at St. Paul. The immediate plan
involved not only the completion of the St. Paul and
Pacific, now called the St. Paul, Minneapolis and Manitoba
Railroad, but acquirement by lease of the Canadian
Government Railroad from Winnipeg to the boundary. This
latter plan met with some opposition, including that of Sir
John Macdonald, Leader of the Opposition at Ottawa and still
smarting with recollections of Smith's defection in 1873. A
still more formidable hazard was a proposal, which for a
time found favour with the Prime Minister, Hon. Alexander
Mackenzie, to sidetrack Winnipeg altogether and run a line
from Lake Superior to the Pacific Ocean by the Dawson Route,
north of Lake Winnipeg. Smith valiantly fought this plan
which would have left his railroad without a terminal of
value; and the return of Sir John Macdonald to power in
September, 1878, greatly clarified the situation.

The Montreal capital involved in the Minnesota enterprise
necessitated the presence of a man on the spot, and early in
1879 Mr. Angus retired from the service of the Bank of
Montreal, and became General Manager of the St. Paul,
Minneapolis and Manitoba Railroad. This enterprise became
the parent of two transcontinental railroads--the Great
Northern completed to Puget Sound in 1893, and the Canadian
Pacific completed to Vancouver several years earlier.
Undoubtedly the most momentous step of Mr. Angus's life was
taken when, in October, 1880, he, with others, signed the
contract to build and operate a railroad from Lake Nipissing
to the Pacific. The other signatories were Stephen,
McIntyre, Hill, and representatives of three banking firms,
John S. Kennedy, New York; Morton, Rose & Co., of London;
and Kohn Reinach & Co., of Paris. As it turned out the
support of these three banking houses proved a broken reed.
The real factors in the construction of the road were the
Bank of Montreal and the Macdonald Government. A great
_coup_, as it turned out, was the securing of the services
of the Illinois railroader, W. C. Van Horne, with whom Angus
came in contact while the latter was General Superintendent
of the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railroad, then the
longest system in the United States--about 5,000 miles in
all. It was Angus who closed the negotiations with Van Horne
and who engaged many of the other early officials of the new
road. During the next six years they were to go through many
trials together, and more than once Stephen and Angus were
face to face with ruin owing to the difficulty of raising
capital.

These difficulties are illustrated by a story in Skelton's
_Life of Laurier_, which the author obtained from Van Horne
himself. Late in the winter of 1883, Stephen, Angus,
McIntyre, Van Horne, and the C.P.R. solicitor, J. J. C.
Abbott, paid a midnight visit to Macdonald at Earnscliffe,
Ottawa, to convince him of their desperate necessities. Sir
John told them they might as well ask for the planet Jupiter
as for another loan, in view of the prevailing political
agitation against the C.P.R. Dejected and silent, the group
drove back to town to await the early train to Montreal, and
took shelter in the old Bank of Montreal cottage near the
station. Here they found Hon. John Henry Pope, acting
Minister of Railways, reading and smoking with a "night cap"
of potent Scottish brew at his elbow. Pope listened to their
story and departed with the words "Wait till I get back!"
Toward three o'clock he returned with an impassive face and
took another drink before he broke silence. Then he said:
"Well, boys, he'll do it. Stay over till to-morrow. The day
the Canadian Pacific busts, the Conservative party busts the
day after."

Thus a receivership was averted, not for the first or the
last time--and with it the ruin not only of Stephen and
Angus, but of most of their friends. Yet despite an
experience in middle age of the anxieties that kill, the
tough Scottish fibre of Donald Smith, Stephen, and Angus
carried each of them through to the hour of triumph, and
beyond it to ripe old age; Strathcona to 94, Mount Stephen
to 92, and Angus to 91.




GEORGE STEPHEN'S BATTLE FOR A TRANSCONTINENTAL RAILROAD


Lord Mountstephen, who passed away in England on November
30th, 1921, played a part in the history of Canada which is
perhaps not so much appreciated by the younger generation as
it should be. While his career was not so romantic as that
of his cousin, Lord Strathcona, who, as it were, emerged out
of untrodden wilderness to become a great international
figure, his powerful mind was even more instrumental in
forcing through to completion the Canadian Pacific Railroad,
and bringing the vast areas of the Northwest into
settlement, production, and civilization. All the secrets
revealed in the books of memoirs and correspondence, which
are now so rapidly augmenting the materials for Canadian
history, help to show the enormous services which George
Stephen, as he was originally known, rendered to his adopted
country in the years of his vigour.

Even though the greater part of his life was spent first as
a financier in Montreal and later as a peer living in
wealthy retirement in England, his career did not lack
romance. He was born at Forres, a village in Banffshire,
Scotland, in 1829, the son of a poor carpenter, and as a lad
was a shepherd boy on the hills of his native shire. At the
age of twenty-one (1850) he came to Montreal to enter the
business of an uncle, William Stephen, who was well
established as a cloth merchant. A "gillie" more astute and
able has never come to any land. A few years later we find
him in control of the Stephen business, and holding an
important position as a manufacturer of woollens. At the
same time he was investing in the stock of the Bank of
Montreal, of which he ultimately became President (1876). In
the later sixties he was already the confidential friend and
adviser of Sir John Macdonald and the leading statesmen and
capitalists of the Confederation era; and even at that time
was seized with a vision of the great possibilities of the
Canadian Northwest. This interest was no doubt aroused by
his relationship to Donald Smith (afterwards Lord
Strathcona) who had come out as an employee of the Hudson's
Bay Company in 1838 and in thirty years had risen to the
post of chief resident commissioner of that great
organization. George Stephen's subsequent investments in the
St. Paul and Pacific Railway (later known as the St. Paul
and Manitoba Railway), out of which grew the Northern
Pacific, and which at the time was the sole railroad route
to the Canadian West, show his sure belief in the future of
the prairies. His close association in that enterprise with
a native of Canada, the late James J. Hill, who later built
the Northern Pacific Railroad, is also a matter of common
knowledge, and his ultimate fame as the chief driving force
in the construction of the C.P.R. arose directly from his
participation in the St. Paul enterprise.

A large, and probably the most important, part of the
_Correspondence of Sir John A. Macdonald_ is composed of
the letters which passed between the Prime Minister and the
Montreal financier from 1869 to 1891, when Sir John died--a
period when both were bending all their energies to the
development of the West and the linking of the Pacific with
the Atlantic. These letters reveal how great a part Stephen
played in that epic. After the purchase of the Northwest
Territories from the Hudson's Bay Company in 1869, it will
be remembered that a very serious crisis arose. The
half-breeds of the Red River, led by Louis Riel, armed
themselves to resist the new regime, and declared an
independent republic with headquarters at Fort Garry. In
this crisis, Sir John Macdonald turned to George Stephen,
"as a Protestant, unconnected with office, and known to be
an independent man of business, who might be exceedingly
useful," and desired him to accompany certain influential
French Canadians to Fort Garry on a mission of conciliation.
Stephen's business obligations would not permit him to
undertake the journey, but instead he sent his cousin,
Donald A. Smith, as one better fitted to undertake the task.
Stephen at that time was on friendly terms with Colonel
Garnet Wolseley, afterward one of the greatest generals of
modern times. He desired that the colonel should accompany
Smith, but Sir John vetoed the proposal in these words:
"Smith goes to carry the olive branch, and were it known at
Red River that he was accompanied by an officer high in rank
in military service, he would be looked upon as having the
olive branch in one hand and a revolver in the other. We
must not make any indications of even thinking of a military
force until peaceable means have been exhausted. Should
these miserable half-breeds not disband, they must be put
down, and then, so far as I can influence matters, I shall
be very glad to give Colonel Wolseley the chance of glory
and the risk of the scalping knife."

This was in December, 1869, and it will be recalled that
later it did become necessary to despatch Wolseley, but the
mere rumour of his coming was sufficient to end the
existence of Riel's republic. The sending of Smith at
Stephen's suggestion was the beginning of a relation between
Sir John and the two Scottish cousins, which was later to
have developments of inestimable importance. The friendship
between Sir John and Donald Smith was broken by a savage
quarrel in 1873, but subsequently, after years had elapsed,
Stephen became the medium of reconciliation.

Throughout the seventies Sir John Macdonald and Sir Charles
Tupper were very active in trying to get a company formed to
build the Pacific railroad that had been promised British
Columbia as a condition of her entry into Confederation.
Several schemes were put forward but proved abortive. One of
them, in which Sir Hugh Allan was interested, led to the
piffling "Pacific Scandal", which, in combination with hard
times, defeated the Macdonald government in 1873. As Leader
of the Opposition, Sir John hammered away at the plan, and
when he returned to power in 1878 he was firmly resolved to
build the railroad. At last he secured the friendly interest
of Stephen who already had railway interests in Manitoba as
above noted, and in 1880 the latter became instrumental in
founding the syndicate which undertook to construct an
all-Canadian route to the Pacific.

The contract was signed on September 14th, 1880, and
although neither Stephen's nor Donald Smith's name appeared
in the document, they ultimately took it over and financed
it. The signatories on behalf of the Government were Sir
John Macdonald, Sir Charles Tupper, Hon. John Henry Pope,
and Sir David Macpherson. The signers for the syndicate were
Duncan McIntyre, afterwards vice-president of the road,
Morton, Rose & Co., bankers, of London, and Kohn, Reinach &
Co., a firm of German bankers. Sir John Rose, the London
banker, was a Canadian and a close and trusted friend of
both Sir John and George Stephen. Subsequently Stephen
became the first President of the Canadian Pacific Railway
thus inaugurated, and continued in that post until 1888. The
original terms of the contract were that the road should be
completed by 1891, but long ere then the task had been
accomplished largely through the energies of Stephen, Donald
Smith, and the great practical railroader, William Van
Horne.

Judged by hindsight, the terms offered by the Government to
the syndicate seem exceedingly generous, but they were not
so regarded in that day by capital; and the task of carrying
out the contract proved nerve-racking not only for the
Government, but for Stephen as chief financial mind of the
group. There were times when he gave up hope of ever putting
through the project. These distresses and fears find an echo
throughout the correspondence. It was a case of enemies
abroad and "sedition" at home. Sir John again and again in
his letters states his positive conviction that the United
States coveted the Canadian West if they could acquire it on
easy terms; and a vigilant Opposition headed by Edward Blake
was urging the abandonment of the whole enterprise. They did
very nearly succeed in killing it. Such opposition naturally
affected the status of the C P.R. in the money markets of
the world; and it is a matter of common knowledge that
Stephen and Smith, who succeeded in placing the Bank of
Montreal, of which the former was President, back of the
enterprise, were deemed guilty of having plunged its
resources in the reckless gamble. Sir John Macdonald on the
other hand, who was in honour bound to support to the limit
the men who had risked so much for his pet project, was
embarrassed by timorous elements in his own cabinet and his
own caucus. When the money-markets failed him, Stephen had
to turn to the Government for loans, and for the Prime
Minister it was sometimes like pulling teeth to get them
authorized by his cabinet. He had to remind the impatient
Stephen to read Charles Reade's novel, _Put Yourself in His
Place_, but, though there were "spats", mutual confidence
helped to solve all difficulties.

One plan, that worried Sir John and others a great deal, was
put forward by James J. Hill and the Northern Pacific
interests to make connections with Northern Ontario and
Quebec via Sault Ste. Marie, by acquiring certain Quebec
railway charters. They succeeded in interesting Hon J. A.
Chapleau, an eminent French-Canadian politician, and it
looked for a time, in 1881, as though Quebec might be swung
into line against the Canadian Pacific project. Later, when
matters became better advanced, the young government of
Manitoba placed many obstacles in the way of the C.P.R. and
proposed some ruinous railway projects of its own, which had
to be nipped in the bud at the sources of financial supply.
Sir John Macdonald's grasp of the extra-territorial
possibilities of the C.P.R. and his belief in their future
development were prophetic. As early as 1884 we find him
writing to Stephen on the advisability of making a deal with
Japan for a steamship line and also with regard to securing
the British subsidy for a mail service to Hong Kong. This
was a year when the Government with great difficulty had
forced through a loan of $20,000,000 to the company.

Sometimes there were moments of elation in those anxious
years, as when Stephen was able to announce that Major
Rogers had found an easy and practicable pass through the
Selkirks, and thus quieted a fear that this range of
mountains, lying between the Rockies and the Coast Range,
could not be penetrated by rail. In August, 1884, Stephen's
heart was gladdened by the following telegram from Hon.
Alexander Mackenzie, the former leader of the Liberal party,
who evidently did not sympathize with the tactics of his
successor, Blake: "Mount Stephen, B.C. I heartily
congratulate you on the wonderful work accomplished. Our
trip exceedingly pleasant."

The then newly named mountain must remain a monument to Lord
Mountstephen greater than any that could be erected by the
hands of man.

But the darkest days for the C.P.R. were yet to come. In the
spring of 1885 the second Riel Rebellion broke out, and the
Government's western administration was seriously
discredited. When Sir David Macpherson had been appointed
Minister of the Interior, Sir Charles Tupper had written to
Sir John from London, saying that the appointment was
excellent if only Macpherson could be induced to regard the
West as something more than an annex to Chestnut Park,
Toronto, his beautiful private domain. Tupper's fears were
in part justified by the events of 1885. It was just at this
critical period that the C.P.R. was in bitter need of five
million dollars to pay wages and complete construction. It
could raise them from only one source--the Government.
Members of the cabinet like Sir Mackenzie Bowell and Sir
Hector Langevin were opposed to any further advances, and
Stephen despondently believed that the road must go into the
hands of a receiver. Officers of the C.P.R. in those days
have seen him in tears at the thought of the ruin of his
hopes and the financial disaster in which his friends would
be involved. In a letter written on March 26th, 1885, he
asked Sir John to put the Government's refusal in writing,
"so as to relieve me personally of the possible charge of
having acted with undue haste." He added: "I need not repeat
how sorry I am that this should be the result of all our
efforts to give Canada a railway to the Pacific Ocean. But I
am supported by the conviction that I have done all that
could be done to obtain it."

Sir John was busy day and night seeking to save the life of
the company and avoid the necessity of a receivership, and
two steadfast friends in the cabinet, Sir Frank Smith and
Hon. J. H. Pope, were helping; but the political delays were
maddening to Stephen, waiting daily for relief like a
general in a beleaguered fortress. On April 15th he wrote:
"It is impossible for me to continue this struggle for
existence any longer. The delay in dealing with the C.P.R.
matter, whatever may be the necessity for it, has finished
me, and rendered me utterly unfit for further work, and if
it is continued, must eventuate in the destruction of the
Company."

On April 16th he forwarded a code telegram from Van Horne
which read: "Have no means of paying wages; pay car can't be
sent out; and unless we get immediate relief we must stop.
Please inform Premier and Finance Minister. Do not be
surprised, or blame me, if an immediate and most serious
catastrophe occurs."

Faced with the possibility of a destructive rising of
navvies in addition to the other troubles in the Northwest,
the timorous members of the cabinet yielded, and the loan of
five millions was granted. Truly it may be said that Canada
as a Dominion was saved. But there was still to be met
venomous opposition in the House of Commons from politicians
who had no faith in the West or the C.P.R., and some of whom
were probably quite willing that the United States should
have the prairies. In June, 1885, we find Stephen writing to
Sir John: "I have read Blake's speech, and without
exception, it is the _meanest_ thing of the kind that has
ever come under my notice. It is an ill-conditioned,
vindictive effort to discredit the Company, without the
remotest possibility of benefiting anybody, politically or
otherwise.... I am so furious with Blake that I cannot at
the moment write coherently about him or his speech. What a
miserable creature he must be.... I hope you will express
the scorn and contempt which I am sure you must feel for
both him and his speech."

But that was not Sir John Macdonald's way. He was just as
determined as Stephen, but less given to expressing his
inner convictions, and so the C.P.R. was saved. Stephen had
earned the baronetcy which came to him on the completion of
the line years ahead of schedule; also his peerage, which
came later. But there were several "spats" with Sir John
before the latter passed away in 1891; one particularly
about an entry into Halifax, which the Government, as
proprietors of the Intercolonial Railroad, refused to
countenance. Sometimes Stephen wrote that he was haunted by
a fear that good relations between the Government and the
Company might not continue, and that such a"family quarrel"
might prove disastrous for Canada. But he never ceased to
give the most emphatic expression to his admiration for Sir
John as the real creator of the C.P.R., without whose
steadfast aid its construction could never have been
accomplished. In 1890 he wrote Sir John reminding him of the
tenth birthday of the project, to which the great statesman
sent this reply:

"What a change that event has made in this Canada of ours.
And to think that not until next year was it expected that
the infant prodigy would arrive at maturity!

"Your health is now fully recovered from the strain that the
vast responsibility thrown upon you in nursing the railway
entailed. Mine is very fair, but I feel the weight of 76
years greatly. We can both console ourselves for all the
worry we have gone through, by the reflection that we have
done great good to our adopted country, and to the great
Empire of which it forms a part.... You personally have had
an enormous amount of strain, responsibility, and worry, but
the enterprise has been a success from the beginning."

Thus in a few words did Sir John tell the whole story, with
the shadow of death approaching. The work of Stephen was
done. He had won his fight but was destined to live on for
three decades and to die of old age in a country place,
Brocket Hall, Hertfordshire, which had been the home of two
Prime Ministers of Great Britain, Lord Melbourne and Lord
Palmerston--a strangely prolonged and quiet end for the
shepherd lad of the Banffshire hills whom fortune had made
one of the doughtiest of Britain's empire builders.




A NOTE ON LORD STRATHCONA


In scanning the career of Lord Strathcona, who died in
January, 1914, it is but natural that the fact which, at the
time of his passing, seemed to excite the interest of the
world at large was the enormous fortune that he accumulated,
and the munificent use that he made of it. But apart from
his high position in world-finance, his life had other
aspects of more romantic interest. Other men have risen from
humble beginnings to almost unlimited financial power, but
few have evinced the taste for public affairs, and have
taken the hearty enjoyment in public service, that
characterized Strathcona. The great capitalist, as a rule,
shuns political life, and interests himself in public
affairs only when the conservation of his own interests and
the stability of the nation's credit are at stake. But
Strathcona, or Donald Smith as he was known in his humble
beginning, was different. He embodied in the _nth_ degree
the eternal Scotsman--particularly the Scotsman of the
Highland strain--without whom the British Empire as we know
it to-day would have been impossible. In every part of the
world the extension of British influence has largely been
the work of men such as himself, some of whom have risen to
enormous wealth and influence, some of whom have died poor,
but all of whom have displayed great executive capacity,
combined with a high order of imagination, which
characterizes the Highland Scotsman in his finest
development.

The debt that Canada owes to Scotland has been eloquently
recorded by many writers, and similar obligations exist not
alone in Canada but in Australia, New Zealand, and all the
overseas Dominions. The same is true of many countries not
under the British flag. Throughout the United States,
throughout South America, throughout the seven seas, the
"Highland brigade" have been the couriers of Empire--of
British influence. In common with the other branches of the
British people, they have won eminence in the pioneer work
of the explorer, the soldier, and the sailor; but, in the
task of developing, holding, and extending the territory and
the advantages so gained, they have played the paramount
part. It was as the Highland Scotsman, par excellence--the
man uniting executive genius with a great creative
imagination, that Lord Strathcona acted a predominant role
in the drama of Canadian development. That he was wily in
attaining his own ends and unremitting in his pursuit of
them will hardly be denied. The expansive delight that he
took in the power that was his was also eminently
characteristic of his breed.

On this continent it is the custom, when a man has made a
great fortune, to endeavour to find for him beginnings of a
squalid character--to exaggerate the poverty in which he was
reared. Some years ago, when the late Charles W. Fairbanks
was aspiring to Presidential nomination in the United
States, he felt himself so handicapped by the lack of a log
cabin in his ancestry that he invented one. It was,
therefore, to be expected that fabulous accounts of the
distressful conditions under which Strathcona was born
should get into print. One American newspaper of high
standing even said that at his birth his mother had not
sufficient clothing for her new-born bairn, a tale
associated with the birth of Lincoln.

Such was not the type of youths that the Hudson's Bay
Company sent to Canada in the early years of the nineteenth
century to conserve its vast interests. They were soundly
educated young men, with a knowledge of accounts, and with
the executive capacity to govern the trading posts to which
they were assigned; they were also intrepid men with the
roving impulse upon them, who felt, as no race has felt
quite so keenly as the Highland Scotsman, the "call of the
wild". Lord Strathcona was himself authority for the
statement that before he entered the service of "the Great
Company" he had contemplated the study of law. It is
possible that if he had not been inspired by the career of
his mother's brother, John Stewart, a fur trader, who with
Simon Fraser had helped to explore the Fraser River in 1808,
he might have remained at home and distinguished himself
as a Writer to the Signet. His own addresses show that from
the time he was sent to Labrador as a youth of eighteen in
1838, he grasped the possibilities of Canada as a whole. It
was his happy lot to play a great part in the development of
a wilderness into a wealthy, commercially aggressive and
aspiring nation, and there is no doubt that to the outside
world he was the living symbol of Canadian development.

It was his grasp of affairs that found him, while yet under
fifty, at the head of the Hudson's Bay Company, though a man
as yet unknown to fame in the outer world. The great events
of the sixties, out of which was born the Dominion of
Canada, brought him to the fore as a national figure. These
involved the acquirement of the vast territories hitherto
governed by the factors of the Hudson's Bay Company, who
were at once traders and law-givers. In the negotiations for
the transfer he necessarily played an important part. The
people of the scantily populated West did not welcome the
change. Open rebellion was the result in Manitoba, and the
Company did not escape the charge of having connived at
Riel's attempt to establish an independent nation on the
prairies. It was Donald Smith, the Company's chief factor,
who stepped in when Hon. William Macdougall, Colonel de
Salaberry and others had failed, and paved the way for a
bloodless settlement, and who was deputed by Colonel Garnet
Wolseley to restore civil order at Fort Garry. The
discretion that the experienced fur-trader showed in
handling the French-Canadian half-breed facilitated in a
large degree the project of peacefully uniting Canada from
ocean to ocean. This was one of the many important steps
leading up to the final consummation whereby the West was
linked to the East literally by bands of steel.

From that day forward the name of Donald Smith was
definitely linked with every episode in the development of
the Canadian West. He applied himself to the great problem
of transportation, and to his financial influence, which his
cousin George Stephen (afterward Lord Mountstephen)
persuaded him to exert, was due the fact that a project
which many of the ablest men in this country regarded as a
fantastic dream, became a living reality. To Macdonald and
Tupper, who made the Canadian Pacific Railway a political
possibility, and to Strathcona, Stephen and their friends,
who staked their all to make it a financial possibility,
Canada owes its existence as a cohesive nation.

Yet the early years of Strathcona's political career, which
began when he was fifty, could not have been very happy.
From 1870 he was one of the small contingent which
represented Manitoba in the House of Commons at Ottawa, and,
as has been pointed out, it showed an exceptional quality in
a financier that he was willing to accept the cares of
public life under such conditions. He was the butt for
constant attack. He was accused constantly of being member
for the Hudson's Bay Company rather than the representative
of his constituents. Men like Dr. Schultz, afterwards
Governor of Manitoba, did not hesitate to accuse him of
sedition. He recognized no considerations of party loyalty,
and stood above and beyond party--in a sense "monarch of all
he surveyed". It is not recorded that he ever openly
quarrelled with anybody, but Macdonald and Tupper assuredly
quarrelled with him, and he had to withstand bitter
castigation from their lips.

By those who were on the inside of politics he was generally
credited with being the man chiefly responsible for the
defeat of Sir John Macdonald's ministry in 1873, and he gave
his support to Hon. Alexander Mackenzie during the brief
regime of the latter as Prime Minister of Canada.
Unquestionably he inspired in Mackenzie a vaster conception
of the possibilities of the Dominion than was held by the
other leaders of his party. Donald Smith's breach with the
Conservative party was healed on its return to power in
1878, through the mediation of Sir Charles Tupper, who, in
common with him, desired above all things the completion of
the Canadian Pacific Railway. Undoubtedly he bitterly
resented his defeat in 1880 at the hands of the electors of
Winnipeg, whom he rightly thought he had served well. It is
doubtful whether he ever had much affection for Winnipeg
afterward, but retirement from political life enabled him to
pursue his great aim of pressing the C.P.R. forward to
completion. His taste for political life, however, was shown
when he re-entered Parliament in 1887 as member for Montreal
West, and he came forward as a candidate for the
Conservative party at a time when many believed that its
fortunes were declining. The shift of 1896, whereby he
succeeded his friend Sir Charles Tupper as Canadian High
Commissioner at London, when the latter became leader of the
Conservative party, was happier in the outcome for himself
than for Sir Charles; and, moreover, was extremely fortunate
in its results for the Dominion of Canada.

Among the many striking elements of Lord Strathcona's
character not the least was the fact that he loved money,
not for itself, but for what he could do with it. He was one
of those rare beings who could, so to speak, breed money,
but it was probably the consciousness that money was power
that constituted its appeal for him. No man in any country
was more princely in his gifts to all charitable, artistic,
and educational objects, or more inspired by a sense of
patriotism in the bestowal of them. Colossal as was his
individuality in many of its aspects, he was nevertheless
profoundly human, and dowered with Scottish cunning. He was
typical of the unique race from which he sprang, and also of
the great land in which he wrought his amazing career. That
career is interwoven with the history of the formative
period of the greater Canada, and his place in our annals is
"fixed as the northern star." It is not only doubtful
whether we shall look upon his like again, but whether the
changing conditions of this country will in future afford
equal scope for another genius of his type. The personality
of no Canadian who has since represented this country
abroad, has possessed in anything like an equal degree, the
glamour of romance. And this glamour has been perpetuated in
death, for the ambitious Scottish youth who began his career
in the wilds of Labrador lies entombed in the Pantheon of
Britain's greatness, Westminster Abbey.




STEPHEN A. DOUGLAS, PIONEER OF
WESTERN DEVELOPMENT


One of the most maligned men in American political history
is Stephen A. Douglas, of Illinois. Of recent years the
votaries of the Lincoln cult have deemed it wisdom to exalt
their idol by dispraising the orator who was at one time his
political rival. This was far from being the view of Lincoln
himself, who, in the national crisis which followed his
inauguration in 1861, at once turned to Douglas for aid and
counsel. In the opprobrium which has been visited on Douglas
for his failure to appreciate the paramount importance of
the slavery issue, his enormous services to the development
of this continent (which had reactions in Canada) have been
forgotten. One American writer of something approaching
genius, Edgar Lee Masters, has sought to do justice to
Douglas in a novel, _Children of the Market Place_, which,
despite certain structural defects, is a most praiseworthy
attempt at historical romance. Mr. Masters is a Kansas
lawyer, of middle age, who has been dabbling in verse since
1898. The publication of _The Spoon River Anthology_ in
1915, though it caused a sensation, failed to give him
literary status, because of reckless violations of taste
which marred its studies of character. _Domesday Book_,
published in the latter part of 1920, awakened critics to
the compass of his talent, for in scale and intellectual
analysis it approximated to Browning's _The Ring and the
Book_, on which it was obviously modelled. A later volume
of verse, _The Open Sea_, revealed in him a poet with a
real message. His prose work, _Children of the Market
Place_, considered as a novel, is a weak performance, for
though some of the material is extraordinarily
romantic--like the incidental episode of the octoroon girl
Zoe, who disappeared and became a noted singer--it is
scantily and abruptly treated. Clearly Mr. Masters is not a
born romancer, but rather a historical critic, using the
form of fiction as a makeshift vehicle for the presentation
of his ideas as an analyst of American history.

Nevertheless, _Children of the Market Place_ is, for
serious readers, profoundly interesting--more deeply
fascinating than most novels by narrators of greater skill.
Its survey of the troubled currents of American politics in
the three decades rounded by the years 1835 and 1865 is
remarkable in its detailed analysis. They were perhaps the
most momentous years in the history of the United States. In
the thirties, the anti-slavery party, whose activities
culminated in the Civil War, first began to show signs of
its coming strength; but readers of to-day casually familiar
with the outcome of the conflict do not realize the
illimitable ramifications of the slavery question, or the
causes which brought it to a head. Nor do they understand
how intimately the whole controversy was bound up with
another great question, that of Western annexation and
settlement. The thirty years between 1835 and 1865 were not
merely a historical epoch in the slavery controversy, but
they were the period of the construction of railways that
revolutionized travel, of the start of immigration on a
large scale, of the development of manufacturing
industries--of many things that have had their fruition in
the North America that we know to-day. To show the
multiplicity of the issues, Mr. Masters chooses as the
protagonist of his tale the great but forgotten leader,
Stephen A. Douglas, who had his hand in all these
developments. The widespread interest in all that relates to
Lincoln has kept alive the name of Douglas, but many know of
him only as Lincoln's opponent, and nothing of his many
achievements as a statesman. Yet Douglas was justly
acclaimed as an apostle of progress at a time when his
colleague at the bar of Illinois was utterly unknown. A
sturdy fighter, he was a good loser--every inch a man--for
he died reconciled to "the rail-splitter," and an active
agent in promoting Union policies. His end took place at
Chicago on June 3rd, 1861, six weeks before the real
fighting of the Civil War began at Bull Run.

_Children of the Market Place_ takes its name from the
institution of slavery; and throughout the book there is a
suggestion of the sinister effect that the introduction of
negro slavery into the British colonies of North America has
had on the history of the United States; and especially on
the careers of political leaders in the mid-nineteenth
century. It wrecked the political career of Douglas and made
Lincoln a martyr. The book consists of the supposed memoirs
of one James Miles, of Chicago, an Englishman by birth, born
on the day of the battle of Waterloo, in 1815. The
suppositious date of the narrative is 1900, when nearly all
the friends of his youth and middle age are dead. Miles,
educated at Eton, is an undergraduate at Oxford in 1833 when
he learns that his father, who had long since settled in
America, has died leaving him five thousand acres of virgin
land in the newly settled state of Illinois. Thither he goes
to claim his inheritance, and with wonderful verisimilitude
Mr. Masters tells of the journey--the hectic life of lower
New York in 1833; the long trip to Buffalo by the Erie
Canal; the lake passage to the rough outpost of Chicago, at
a time when Cincinnati, with its 30,000 inhabitants, was the
only important city of the West. Into the hot and fever
smitten interior of Illinois, Miles travels and is stricken
with typhoid _en route_. He is succoured by an ardent
youngster from New England, who has come West intent on
making his fortune--the future Governor of the State,
Stephen A. Douglas. Thus begins a life-long friendship; for
Miles, wealthy in land to begin with, prospers exceedingly,
becomes the financial backer of Douglas in his upward climb,
and identifies himself with his political fortunes to the
very end. They go to Chicago together, and Miles writes as
the eye-witness of the growth of that great city; but when
we leave him in 1900 he is a poor and lonely old man. His
fortune has vanished in the financial crises of the
seventies. In fact Mr. Masters has made the narrative of
Miles as much like a true book of recollections as a
fictional work could possibly be. The descriptions of the
many early political conventions which Miles is supposed to
have attended with Douglas; the pictures of the crude life
in the early days of settlement in the middle West; the
candid sketches of men and issues, seem actually the
writing of a man who has lived through them all.

It is absurd to suppose that so great a cataclysm as the war
between the North and the South was a flare-up of a few
years incubation. Those who have read Daniel Webster's
speech against Hayne delivered in 1829 are aware that even
then ill-feeling between the two sections was acute, and the
abolitionist movement only served to increase the cleavage.
This was the political situation that developed as the years
progressed. The South, whose prosperity was based on cotton,
of which it regarded negro slavery an indispensable adjunct,
had in the early years of the nineteenth century attained to
political dominance, which it desired to retain. Cotton had
its rivals in iron and coal, which gave birth to the
manufacturing industries of the North. Slave labour was
valueless either for mining or manufacture, and the steady
growth of industrial prosperity in New England, New York,
and Pennsylvania, meant the growth of a greater power to
challenge the political supremacy of the South. In the
twenties came the great era of Western settlement, beginning
in Ohio and Michigan and spreading on to Illinois.

When Douglas arrived in Illinois in 1833, he was already an
orator, crammed with facts and infatuated with the idea of
material progress, despite his tender years. He was but
twenty, a diminutive lad with an immense head. He at once
foresaw that in time the West must be the adjudicator and
referee between the North and South. Presently the North and
South saw it too.

The South, strongly organized for its own interest, and
religiously holding to the idea of slavery as an economic
necessity justified by Holy Scripture, was determined that
the West should be slave territory, and as each new state
was admitted, efforts were made to enforce this policy. The
North was convinced that slavery was an economic mistake
long before it came to regard it as morally wrong, but in
the forties the abolitionist party made progress, and by the
mid-fifties there was a considerable body of religious
conviction to back the anti-slavery tendencies which marked
Northern policy. The idea of the "inevitable conflict", as
Lincoln called it, had taken hold of men's minds. Yet in a
general sense the negro was a good deal of a political
football until the verge of war had been reached, and has
remained so to this day.

Now the part that Douglas played in all this controversy is
very interesting. He had dreams of material progress for the
United States, which made him impatient of the whole slavery
controversy. He was the first American Imperialist; and the
dimensions of his dreams were not destined to be achieved.
His career in Illinois in his early years, and later as a
Senator at Washington, was a continued series of political
successes. By 1850, when he was but thirty-seven, he was
regarded as the real head of the Democratic party, the
ablest speaker, and the most far-visioned statesman in the
Republic. On all occasions he advocated the forcible
annexation of Canada and Cuba. His vision was of a great and
wealthy republic extending from the Gulf of Mexico to the
Arctic Ocean. He admired and boasted of the Anglo-Saxon
spirit of progress, but he denounced Great Britain in and
out of season as the chief obstacle to his plans on this
continent. He hated the old Whig party because he regarded
them as monarchists in disguise, and more intent on the
material prosperity of New England than on the growth of the
Union--his god. He did great service by his pioneer advocacy
of railroads. He was the first important advocate of
trans-continental railroads, and founded the Illinois
Central Railroad to connect the North and South. In other
pages of this book will be found evidence that the Illinois
Central, on which two great Canadian railroad chieftains,
Sir William Van Horne and Lord Shaughnessy, were trained,
was in some degree the ancestor of the Canadian Pacific
Railroad. The zeal of Douglas for education was also
intense, and the University of Chicago owed its inception to
him.

Douglas was a strong advocate of the Mexican War of 1845,
and among the most important pages of Mr. Masters's book are
those which describe the heroic episodes of that forgotten
conflict and emphasize the importance of the results--for it
gave the United States not only Texas, New Mexico, and
California, but all the states intervening between them and
the old Oregon territory. Of the Clayton-Bulwer treaty which
fixed Canada's western boundary line, Douglas was a bitter
opponent, because he wished to drive Britain out of North
America. In studying the Imperial aspects of Douglas's
career, the injustice that is habitually done to the
Canadians of sixty years ago, and to the English political
leaders who were sympathetic with the South in the civil
war, becomes apparent. How could they be very sympathetic
toward the North, many of whose political leaders, taking
their cue from Douglas, believed in rounding out the
Republic by the forcible annexation of Canada? Had victory
over the South come easily, there is little doubt that the
attempt would have been made!

It is easy to understand how a materialist like Douglas (as
Mr. Masters candidly admits him to have been) was bitterly
opposed to those, slave-holders and abolitionists alike, who
insisted on making slavery the paramount issue. He was the
inventor of the policy of "squatter sovereignty"--that is,
the settlers of the new territories should decide for
themselves whether slavery should prevail. He was
economically opposed to slavery, but had relatives and
friends who were slave holders; so he said, "Let the South
keep her slaves; let the North exclude slaves; let the
Western states do as they please; unity and expansion above
all things!" But his policies pleased few; the South
considered that it had been robbed of the fruits of victory
when it failed to impose slavery on the new territories
acquired by the Mexican war; the North, of which the newly
formed Republican party was the voice, was strong for
Federal authority and could not tolerate "squatter
sovereignty". His compromise policies wrecked the Democratic
party; and the way for Lincoln's victory in 1860 was paved
by that disruption. Douglas, the candidate of the Northern
Democratic compromisers, though he polled nearly 1,400,000
votes, obtained only 12 votes in the electoral college. His
dream was over, and he was but forty-eight years old.

Yet he was no Achilles who sulked in his tent. At the first
cry of secession he sprang to the side of Lincoln, his
rival, and at the President's request used his great
oratorical powers to rally the border states and the
Northwest to the cause of the Union. His campaign was
interrupted by his death in June, 1861. When lying stricken
and unconscious in his hotel at Chicago, watchers caught the
words: "Telegraph to the President and let the column move
on." "Stand for the Union." "The West, this great" ... Then
death! The famous orator still addressing an imaginary
audience. Mr. Masters has done well to vindicate his memory.




"THE GREAT COMPANY": A SCOTTISH EPIC


To anyone who, like the present writer, is a Canadian in
several generations, such an event as that which occurred in
May, 1920, when the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of
the foundation of "The Company of Adventurers of England
trading in Hudson's Bay" was celebrated at Winnipeg, roused
all the instincts of romance that lurk in the corners of
most men's minds. Romance radiates in the original title,
long ago prosaically abbreviated into "Hudson's Bay
Company." The spirit of romance turned to the practical uses
of trade and Imperial development has been the motive power
of its organization. The fund of material that the annals of
the "Great Company" provides for the writer of either
history or fiction is bewildering. Mainly, these annals are
an Iliad dealing with the exploits of great and enterprising
leaders and explorers; treasure hunters in the larger sense,
who sought to penetrate and gain knowledge of uncharted
wildernesses, and to possess themselves of the riches there
held in store. Originally entitled "Adventurers of England",
the story of the Company is for the most part made up of
biographies of "Adventurers of Scotland".

We must not forget that the man who conceived the idea of
founding such a company was Pierre Esprit Radisson, a
Frenchman, born in Paris, some say in 1620 (which would make
1920 his tercentenary) though in old age he claimed to have
been born in 1636. Radisson settled at Three Rivers, Quebec,
in 1651, and in 1661 had the honour of being the first white
man to penetrate beyond Lake Superior to Lake Winnipeg.
Possibilities of the fur trade that he discerned on this
journey led him to attempt to found a company in France, and
failing there, to carry his scheme to London. Thus, though
the Hudson's Bay route to the West was established by the
Company after its formation, the germ of western development
came to life through the channels of approach that we use
to-day. Though Radisson was the forerunner, the story of the
Hudson's Bay Company and of subsequent western development
is, in the main, a Scottish epic, illustrating the major
part Scottish genius has played in the growth of the British
Empire.

In other countries there is just now much discussion about
the British Empire. Voluble individuals present in many
quarters a conception of the empire as a great conspiracy
framed by Tudor statesmen to dominate the world, and
steadily carried forward in accordance with a fixed plan.
Some individuals of inherently parochial mind, with the cant
phrases "distinctive nationality" and "self determination"
on their lips, have never risen to the Scotsman's conception
of what the genesis and growth of the British Empire
signify. It is really the work of English mariners and
Scottish landsmen, imbued with an irresistible impulse
toward adventure, an inborn and unconquerable determination
to break through the confines of insularity. This impulse
can be discerned at work in the history of the Hudson's Bay
Company for at least 150 years, and when we read the history
of other parts of the British Empire, we find that the same
impulses and the same Scottish capacity for creating
prosperity and evolving sound government have been at work.

The Hudson's Bay Company when at the apex of its power,
prior to the acquirement of its rights over the Northwest
Territories by the Government of Canada, was a great trust,
embracing not only the original company of adventurers, but
offshoots which had become rivals, like the old Nor'west
Company (of which the famous explorer, Sir Alexander
Mackenzie, was the head) and the "little company" of fur
traders, known for business purposes as the "XY Company". In
the first two decades of the nineteenth century the
rivalries of these two companies produced a condition akin
to civil war in the Red River settlement, and contention as
bitter, if less sanguinary, on the marts of Montreal. The
complexion of all three companies, if not in ownership, in
the personnel which carried out policies, was
predominatingly Scottish. In the first fifty years of
British rule in Canada we had, therefore, plentiful evidence
of that ruthlessness which goes with the spirit of
adventure.

Rev. George Bryce, LL.D., founder of Manitoba College, who
has written several volumes on the Hudson's Bay Company and
allied subjects, even tries to prove that the organization
was Scottish in its very inception, by claiming for Scotland
its first governor, Prince Rupert, of the Rhine Palatine,
and heir presumptive to the throne of Bohemia. Prince
Rupert's mother was a Stuart, the daughter of James the
First of England and Sixth of Scotland, although his father
was a Bavarian. It is assuredly true that Scotsmen of the
seventeenth century regarded the prince as one of their own,
and a contingent of them went voluntarily to fight on behalf
of his father in Bohemia. Rupert, who was a graduate of
Oxford and a politician of Liberal ideas, gave Charles the
First advice that, if it had been accepted would, perhaps,
have saved him both his head and his crown by enabling him
to retain the friendship of the Presbyterian party.
Strangely enough, his fame has been preserved chiefly in
this land which he never saw, through his connection with
the Company of English Adventurers. To those who collect old
prints he is also immortal as the man who introduced the
beautiful art of mezzotint engraving. In England it attained
a beauty and richness never equalled elsewhere, and he
himself was a skilled practitioner of the craft, as his
"Head of John the Baptist" proves.

In the Highlands of Scotland, James, Duke of York, the
second governor of the Hudson's Bay Company, and afterwards
King James the Second, was regarded as lawful sovereign long
after the English had driven him from his throne; though
before that event John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, the
greatest of all British soldiers, had succeeded him as
governor of the company. William of Orange was not supposed
to be very friendly to the corporation, and this, perhaps,
helped to fix a sort of sentimental tradition between it and
the "King over the water", which influenced the many
Scotsmen who took service in the Canadian wilderness after
the rebellion of 1745. The Highland officials, who continued
to flock to the service of the Company for a century after
the defeat of the Stuart cause at Culloden, made it what it
was and also manned the staffs of the rival organization
which sprang up.

The first man who may be said to have realized to the full
the mission of the Company was the Earl of Selkirk, who, at
the dawn of the nineteenth century, acquired a controlling
interest in its stock for the express purpose of colonizing
the Red River Valley in what is now known as Manitoba.
Earlier he had promoted similar enterprises in Upper Canada
and Prince Edward Island. Though his Red River colony ended
in disaster and tragedy, owing not merely to the ruthless
methods of the Nor'west Company, but to the belief that
agriculture and fur-trading were incompatible interests,
Selkirk had great prophetic and Imperial inspiration.

The real greatness of the Hudson's Bay Company dates from
the amalgamation of all interests, which came into effect in
1821, with Sir George Simpson as governor of the northern
department. Simpson, the illegitimate scion of a Scottish
house, had the singular good fortune to be suddenly promoted
from a minor factorship at an obscure post in Athabasca to
real empiry. As Governor-in-Chief of Rupert's Land and
general superintendent of the Company's affairs in North
America, he ruled with wisdom and firmness a domain
extending from Labrador beyond the Rockies to Vancouver
Island and Alaska (held under lease from Russia). The
holding of British Columbia as part of the British domain
may be attributed to the ability of his friend and
colleague, Sir James Douglas, a native of British Guiana,
but of the same clan as Lord Selkirk.

The sympathetic connection between the Hudson's Bay Company
and railroad development in Canada cannot be overlooked.
Anyone who has read the life story of its great governor,
Lord Strathcona, whose career in Canada began in a trading
post in Labrador, knows of its intimate connection with the
construction of the C.P.R. Less well known is the fact that
Sir Edward Watkin, the promoter of the Grand Trunk Railroad,
and a man of marvellously progressive spirit, was also
prominent in the councils of the great Company, and had much
to do with shaping its later policies. Him, at least,
England may claim as her own, and he it was who negotiated
the sale of the North-west Territories to the young Dominion
of Canada, in furtherance of his dream of a transcontinental
railroad.

It is to the Hudson's Bay Company that we owe the beginnings
of thought as to game preservation on this continent, for
its factors tried to induce the Indians not to kill animals
recklessly and to look to the future. Necessarily, a company
whose chief interest lay in fur-trading could not be
expected to be very zealous in promoting settlement, and
when, in 1869, the cession of the major portion of its
lands, and all its political rights, to the young Canadian
federation was effected, it was high time that a new system
was adopted. But, as Lord Strathcona has said, "Whatever may
have been the faults of the Company, history will record
that it explored a vast territory, prepared the way for its
settlement and colonization, fulfilled an important part in
the history of Canada, had not a little to do with the
consolidation of the Dominion and with the development of
the western country, and that its work was for the advantage
of the Empire as a whole." Lord Strathcona to the day of his
death believed that the future of the Empire would be
decided on the plains of the Canadian West.

So much for the political and economic phases. Let us not
forget the romance of it all. For my own part I absorbed it
in early childhood, for some of my forebears were men and
women of the outposts, and had handed down tales of
adventure in the Northwest in the days when George III was
King, and Selkirk was promoting his great experiment. Apart
from the historians, the best annalist of outpost life is
Robert Michael Ballantyne, 1825-1894, a servant of the
company from 1841 (when he was sixteen) until 1847.
Ballantyne related his experiences in a series of boy's
books that are, or should be, immortal: _Dog Crusoe_, _The
Young Fur Traders_, _The World of Ice_, _Ungava_, and
others. The school-boys of 1860 loved those books; so did
those boys of 1885; so, I am sure, do those of to-day when
they lay hands on them. Nor can I forget one haunting short
story for adults by Duncan Campbell Scott, which turned on
the practice of the old-time factors of subscribing for the
_Glasgow Herald_, and when the issues arrived in bulk,
months later, taking up and reading one copy a day in proper
sequence, as though it were the current number of a
newspaper published that morning. By so cheating themselves
as to time did the men of the outposts beguile their
loneliness. "Thus," some will say, "the casuistry of the
Scottish mind reveals itself." But in such transcripts of
fact do we realize the sacrifices from which empiry is born.




CANADIAN HISTORICAL ORATORY


A few years ago George H. Locke, M.A., Public Librarian of
the City of Toronto, made a most valuable contribution to
the study of Canadian political history in his anthology of
historical orations, _Builders of the Canadian
Commonwealth_, with a luminous introduction by A. H. U.
Colquhoun, LL.D. Dr. Locke conceived the idea of elucidating
many epochal events of Canada's evolution during the past
hundred years by reprinting the speeches of public men whose
duty it was to grapple with the problems of that evolution
as they arose. In a volume of little more than three hundred
pages, he has presented a mine of unfamiliar material of
importance to all who are interested in the political ideas
which have shaped the destinies of this country. As Dr.
Colquhoun says: "Strange as it may sound, Dr. Locke has
gathered together much information and enlightenment not
actually accessible to the average Canadian, and for whom in
most cases it is a locked door of knowledge, ... that will
be found to produce, in time, far-reaching effects in study
and in comprehension of the past."

The reprinted speeches are accompanied by lucid and
impartial condensed biographies of the public men who made
them, which give perspective to their utterances. As Dr.
Colquhoun says: "To read the following pages is to gain some
idea of the mental powers, the earnest sincerity, and the
eloquence of these Canadian leaders whose voices we shall
hear no more. To hear and to read are two vastly different
things. As the great French critic declared, there is as
much eloquence in the tone of the voice, in the eyes, and in
the air of a speaker as in the choice of words." That, of
course, is a circumstance that cuts both ways. While it may
be difficult to recapture from the printed text the
magnetism exercised by Sir John Macdonald, or the gentle
glow that exhaled from the personality of Sir Wilfrid
Laurier, it is quite possible that some of these speeches
read better than they sounded. But in any event, it must
evoke pride in those who are Canadians bred in the bone, to
realize, through the critical eyes of posterity, the
intellectual power and vision of the men whose words are
here reprinted.

Dr. Locke's processes of research were exhaustive, but also
carefully selective; and it must have been with regret that
at times he found himself rejecting speeches of real
interest and potency. Allowing full recognition of the fine
service he has rendered, I should like to have seen at least
one deliverance on the subject of the Pacific railway
project, which really did so much to make Canada what she is
today. Controversy forty years ago brought forth many such
utterances, but it is a paradoxical fact that most of the
best oratory was of a pessimistic order. Only in one speech
(by Sir Robert Falconer) do we really gain an inkling of
what the West has meant in the evolution of the Canada of
today. Nor does this volume, which deals largely with the
birth of Confederation, seem to me complete, lacking one of
the speeches of the late Hon. Alexander Morris, a man who
played a great part in educating the public mind on the
subject, as he did later in awakening the East to the
potentialities of the West. In Hon. Antoine Aim Dorion's
oration in opposition to Confederation, there is an allusion
to a speech made in 1852 by a very able and far-seeing
statesman, Sir Allan MacNab of Hamilton, Ont., Prime
Minister of United Canada, advocating "representation by
population", the cry which more than anything else led to
Upper Canada's support of Confederation. I do not know
whether the speeches of MacNab were preserved, but he was a
very able man, and may truly be described as a "builder of
the Canadian Commonwealth", entitled to remembrance.

In the main, these orations show how steadfastly Canadian
public men have clung to the idea of British connection. At
times this sentiment had to be cultivated under very
difficult conditions. How much Sir John Macdonald left
unsaid in his consistent defence of the principle during
times of stress is apparent from a quotation in a speech by
Hon. Newton W. Rowell, the last chapter of the volume, which
shows that Lord Lyons, British Ambassador to Washington
during the "Trent Affair" of the sixties, and his immediate
successor, Lord Clarendon, both favoured finding some
honourable way of dissolving all connection between England
and her North American colonies. There are clear indications
in the official life of Benjamin Disraeli, that he, Tory
Imperialist though he was, held similar views. It may be
accepted as the general view of British statesmen and
diplomats of the mid-Victorian period. In an Imperial sense
they were less enlightened than their predecessors of the
eighteenth century, who, though defeated in the War of the
Revolution, were intent on preserving a heritage for the
British race and for British institutions on the North
American continent. I would not for one moment suggest that
British diplomats like Lord Lyons and Lord Clarendon ever
deliberately thought of sacrificing our interests as they
conceived them, but British support of Canada was, in their
eyes, a matter of honour rather than of interest. And it was
this fact that sometimes made the task of Canadian
statesmen, zealous for the continuance of British
connection, doubly difficult.

It is tolerably clear that in 1865 there was in Britain no
Imperial statesman of vision equal to that of Sir John
Macdonald as he revealed himself in his speech introducing
the Act of Confederation before the Legislature of United
Canada. He dwelt not only on the advantages to this country
but to Great Britain of the proposed arrangement. He
declared that the whole colonial system was in a state of
transition, and continued: "Instead of looking upon us as a
merely dependent colony, England will have in us a friendly
nation--a subordinate but still a powerful people--to stand
by her in North America in peace or in war. The people of
Australia will be such another subordinate nation. And
England will have this advantage, if her colonies progress
under the new colonial system, as I believe they will, that,
though at war with all the rest of the world, she will be
able to look to the subordinate nations in alliance with
her, and owning allegiance to the same sovereign, who will
assist in enabling her to meet the whole world in arms."
Fifty years later the prophetic sense of Macdonald was
verified on the battlefields of France and Flanders.

There were times when, in support of his ideal, Sir John had
to deal with a restive public opinion. Edward Blake's famous
"Aurora Speech", delivered in North York in 1874, which
charged that Canada's interests had been deliberately
sacrificed by the Motherland, was indicative of popular
opinion. It will be noted, however, that Blake was careful
to assert that the monarchical government of England was a
truer application of real republican principles than that of
the United States; but he claimed that the government of
Canada was a truer application of these principles than
either. In this speech Blake seemed opposed to all large
combinations, national or imperial. He declared that the
United States was too large to be well-governed; and for
this reason was emphatically opposed to annexation; but, on
the other hand, he seemed dissatisfied with the existing
Imperial relation.

The popular sentiment which created this mood in Blake
largely arose from the Geneva Award, which pledged Britain
to the payment of the "Alabama Claims" and ignored the
Fenian Raid claims justly due to Canada, if the "Alabama
Claims" were tenable. It was a case of epochal character
because it initiated the principle of arbitration in
international disputes, but unquestionably it fomented
anti-British sentiment in Canada. One of the most remarkable
utterances of Macdonald's whole career was made in the House
of Commons in 1872 when he defended the Treaty. In view of
the circumstances, it is certainly the most courageous
speech recorded in Dr. Locke's anthology. To a public in an
antagonistic frame of mind he expounded the British point of
view; and thus, as was his habit, (though the reverse was
charged against him) set his moral convictions above
expediency. He told his hearers that England's sacrifices
had been made in the interest of peace, and therefore, in
the interest of Canada. He did not hesitate to say that
Canada's geographical position was a strategical weakness to
England in disputes with the United States. "England has got
the supremacy of the sea," he said, "she is impregnable at
every point but one, and that point is Canada; and if
England does call upon us to make a financial sacrifice,
does find it for the good of the Empire that we, England's
first colony, should sacrifice something, I say that we
would be unworthy of our proud position if we were not
prepared to do so. I hope to live to see the day, and if I
do not, that my son may be spared to see Canada a powerful
auxiliary to the Empire; not, as now, a cause of anxiety and
a source of danger." Another hope destined to be fulfilled;
but where is the political chieftain to-day who dare talk so
candidly to the public?

Adherence to British connection at all hazards was not the
exclusive political property of Macdonald. It is sounded in
the speeches of many others both French and English. It was
the traditional policy of the country, the creed even of
William Lyon Mackenzie in his less tumultuous moments. In a
speech attacking the reigning powers in Upper Canada, which
he delivered in 1834, Mackenzie (though later, when half mad
with ingrowing desire for power, he raised the flag of
revolt) scouted the very idea of independence, and
proclaimed the advantage of living "under the wing of an
old, a rich and powerful nation, able and willing to protect
and encourage our trade and agriculture." "Who," he asked,
"would protect Canada's foreign trade; who guard our immense
frontiers; who guarantee to us free navigation of the St.
Lawrence, but England?"

Of many speeches covering the period of 1840-1865, the
fiasco of the Act of Union of 1841, which brought with it
not only responsible government, but also the deadlock which
resulted in Confederation, is the theme. An address by Hon.
Robert Baldwin shows that the bureaucracy did not take
kindly to the new system; but as many are aware, the
breaking point arose through the provision whereby the
Provinces of Upper and Lower Canada had a legislative
representation precisely equal. In the era of early railroad
development, with magnificent virgin soil available to
settlers, the population of Upper Canada soon began to
outstrip that of Lower Canada, but political representation
remained static. In 1859 we find Sir Oliver Mowat
demonstrating conclusively the failure of the Legislative
Union devised by Lord Durham; and a few years later
Macdonald, D'Arcy McGee, George Brown, Tupper, Cartier, and
Cartwright, pressing Confederation on the people as the
solution of the difficulties of all the British North
American colonies.

In the main, Confederation has proven so successful that
Canadians of to-day have forgotten that some influential
leaders opposed it. The speech of the Quebec "Rouge" leader,
Dorion, in opposition to Macdonald and Brown during the
parliamentary session of 1865 is a reminder that it had its
critics. Dorion feared Confederation as a scheme to swamp
French-Canadian influence, and was especially alarmed
because the inclusion of the maritime provinces ensured
English-speaking preponderance. He also feared that an
appointed Senate would be an instrument of tyranny.
Singularly enough, the Orange leader in Ontario, John
Hilliard Cameron, whose name does not figure in this book,
opposed Confederation as a menace to Protestant ascendancy.
Perhaps the most cogent and practical address on the great
general issues involved is that of Sir George Etienne
Cartier, in which he makes dust of these objections. For
sheer exalted eloquence the palm must be given to Laurier's
speech in the House of Commons in 1891, on the passing of
Macdonald, then two days dead. The later orations in the
book show how amply the hopes of that statesman and his
contemporaries as to Canada's future have been fulfilled.
Laurier, in his speech on August 9th, 1914, when Canada was
about to enter the war, gave the most eloquent expression to
that fulfilment; and Borden, Meighen, and Rowell, in
utterances delivered seven years later, revealed the
sacrifice and glory it involved. These final utterances give
completeness to a volume unique in form and value.




SIR WILFRID LAURIER AND HIS BIOGRAPHERS


Biographical and documentary material with regard to the
career of Sir Wilfrid Laurier, Prime Minister of Canada from
1896 to 1911, is probably more complete than in the case of
any other Canadian public man. A few years after his
accession to power, Sir John Willison wrote a history of Sir
Wilfrid Laurier and the Liberal Party with the acknowledged
collaboration of an able journalist, John S. Maclean, which
is remarkably informative as to the origins and growth of
Liberalism in Quebec. In 1926 Sir John added chapters
covering the later years of Sir Wilfrid's life. After the
statesman's death on February 17, 1919, the late Peter
McArthur compiled a short volume containing many obituary
tributes and much interesting anecdotage. An old friend and
supporter, John W. Dafoe, has also published a most
interesting little book on Laurier's career.

During his lifetime, Sir Wilfrid had already taken the
precaution of selecting an Horatio to absent him from
felicity awhile and tell his story, in the person of
Professor Oscar Douglas Skelton, then of Queen's University
and afterward adviser to the Canadian Department of State.
Professor Skelton was placed in possession of many intimate
papers which give his book unique interest. Professor
Skelton's opus in two volumes was completed in less than
three years, and despite the speed of its execution the
_Life and Letters of Sir Wilfrid Laurier_ is a remarkably
fine and authoritative performance. Though its two volumes
embrace something like a thousand pages, and the task of
sifting materials must have been enormous, it bears no
evidence of haste or slipshod methods. Its style is lucid
and limpid; and though Professor Skelton does not disguise
his warm sympathy with Laurier and the opinions and motives
which governed most of his actions, nothing that meets one's
eye in these volumes would justify the charge of
misrepresentation or partizanship. Obviously he had the aim
of preserving judicial impartiality without diminishing the
exalted fame of the subject of his pen. Authors of political
_Lives_ too frequently reduce the importance for posterity
of a statesman's victories by belittling his opponents.
Professor Skelton, in addition to his other literary
virtues, possesses sufficient intellectual detachment to
avoid this error. When he does adopt the note of criticism,
it is as frequently applied to Laurier's Liberal allies as
to his Conservative opponents.

Letters from Sir Wilfrid's pen were not numerous after he
became a national figure, because his natural caution led
him to prefer the spoken word in his communications.
Nevertheless, no point of importance has been left obscure;
for Laurier was not a man given to devious ways and his
public actions were "sun-clear". Thus Professor Skelton is
able to say that his pages "are given to the public with the
hope that they may provide his countrymen with the material
for a fuller understanding of one who was not only a moving
orator, a skilled parliamentarian, a courageous party
leader, and a faithful servant of his country, but who was
the finest and simplest gentleman, the noblest and most
unselfish man, it has ever been my good fortune to know."

A very interesting article could be based on Professor
Skelton's footnotes, chiefly consisting of intimate personal
expressions from the pen of Sir Wilfrid, which help to
illustrate his character and attitude. Professor Skelton
does not confine himself to a dry record of Laurier's
comings and goings, but gives able character sketches of the
men who were from time to time his associates. His summary
of Hon. J. Israel Tarte's career would be an especially
tempting subject for an article. His account of the C.P.R.'s
financial troubles, furnished him by the late Sir William
Van Horne, is alive with dramatic interest. One really
sensational document, Edward Farrer's confidential report on
an abortive bribery conspiracy hatched in Montreal in 1904,
sees the light of day for the first time. It is an
extraordinary example of the fatuity of intriguing
politicians; and incidentally, Sir Robert Borden, of whom
Professor Skelton speaks in terms of very high respect,
played an honourable part.

In a short essay it is necessary to confine oneself to the
career of Laurier as it was known to the people of Canada
after he became a national figure, through his selection as
leader of the Liberal party, on the retirement of Hon.
Edward Blake in the summer of 1887. His early history and
what he stood for in the politics of his native province
were already revealed in the able first volume of Willison's
_History of Sir Wilfrid Laurier and the Liberal Party_; but
Professor Skelton's earlier chapters are almost equally
illuminative of the "Rouge" tradition which Laurier
represented. It can hardly be denied that the Liberal
tradition of Quebec is finer, and rests on a stronger
foundation, than the Liberal tradition of Ontario. It was
more courageous because it combated a dominant church and
sought to strengthen a subservient state. Liberal thought in
Quebec meant something more than a querulous jealousy of the
leaders of civilization and progress, which was what
Liberalism too frequently signified in Ontario, until
Laurier lent the party the graces of his fine mind and
personality. It produced from time to time some very able
men, but these naturally gravitated to the Conservative
party. It professed a holiness which it clearly did not
practice; and in the days of George Brown it fanned the
fires of racial hatred whenever it got an opportunity. In
short, Ontario Liberalism up to 1887, when Laurier became
leader, was very largely a congerie of those forces in the
community which were "agin' the government" willy-nilly; and
it required all the efforts of a staunch and wily old
temperamental Tory like Sir Oliver Mowat to keep the lid on
these dissident elements. Edward Blake, Laurier's
predecessor, was never at ease with them. The early
chieftain, William Lyon Mackenzie, a riotous and malignant
person, was more truly representative of its rank and file
than either Mowat or Blake ever was. Mowat was quite willing
to let Liberals manufacture grievances against the
Government at Ottawa, while he was perfecting a very
elaborate system of patronage and privilege in the
provincial administration.

That Laurier, who if not patrician by birth, was patrician
in appearance, bearing and thought,--a Liberal of the type
of Lafayette in France, and the second Lord Grey in
England,--should have attained the leadership of Ontario
Liberalism, and have held it for a longer period and with a
greater measure of success than any other man is a
remarkable episode in Canada's political history. His party,
and probably no other party, will ever know a leader
possessing such complete domination over the imagination and
respect of so large a percentage of Canadians as did Laurier
in 1905. Strangely enough he was among the first to realize
that that prestige was disintegrating. There is one letter
written early in 1909, more than two years before his fall
in 1911, which clearly indicates his belief that the days of
his victories were over. Such prescience is extraordinarily
rare among political leaders; and this small document
completely refutes an old charge that Sir Wilfrid was
obsessed by a belief in his own omnipotence.

Another fact which Professor Skelton makes clear is that the
leadership was entirely unsought by Laurier. Strangely
enough it was the fate of the sanguinary mystic, Louis Riel,
author of two risings in the Northwest Territories, which
brought about his elevation. It is unquestionable that from
boyhood the unity of the French and English speaking races
had been Laurier's aim, and the tenets of British Liberalism
of the older Whig school his political ideal. The problem of
whether Riel should be hanged, which arose after the
half-breed rising of 1885, was one of the most difficult
that any Canadian government has had to face. The rising had
been undoubtedly encouraged by the wobbling and neglect of
Sir David McPherson as Minister of the Interior. But that
did not alter the fact that Riel was a menace to the West,
as evidenced by the fact that the Roman Catholic clergymen
of Saskatchewan, almost to a man, favoured his execution.
Laurier had the positive conviction that Riel was insane;
and that the half-breeds had grievances which justified them
taking up arms, since the Government would listen to no
argument but force. In truth the Government was too busy
over C.P.R. problems to give heed to much else. When the
question of hanging Riel arose, all the fires of racial
hatred were set alight in both of the central provinces of
Canada, and both sides went too far. The moderation and high
idealism of Laurier's speeches in the House of Commons
revealed his powers, and by moderate men everywhere he was
recognized as a leader of superior rank.

Riel's execution cleared the air; and though the Macdonald
government's action was upheld by a large majority in
Parliament and later sustained at the polls in February,
1887, there was a reaction in favour of the Frenchman who
had spoken in tones of moderation. After that defeat Blake
was determined to retire from the leadership, and he had so
isolated himself from his English-speaking followers that
there was no diffidence about accepting his resignation.
Obviously he was unfitted for politics by temperament; and
was especially handicapped by his austere indifference to
associates and followers. But when the question of naming a
successor arose there was no one in Ontario to take his
place. Finally Blake's own advice was sought and he gave it
emphatically:--"There is only one possible choice--Laurier."

The advice came as a surprise, even to Laurier. Professor
Skelton says that he had no thought of succeeding to the
leadership, and was genuinely averse to accepting the task.
"On personal grounds he preferred the quiet life he had been
leading, the practice of his profession, the constant
browsing in the parliamentary library, the daily warm and
pleasant communion with chosen friends, the occasional
jousting. On party grounds he doubted, even more than his
Ontario friends, the wisdom of choosing a man who was too
good a Catholic to suit Ontario and not submissive enough to
suit Quebec. If Blake must retire, he was convinced that Sir
Richard Cartwright was the man to succeed."

The reasons which led Ontario Liberals to choose him were
that Laurier was deemed the man best able to make inroads on
Sir John Macdonald's strong personal following in Quebec,
which even the Riel affair had not shattered permanently,
and because they could not unite under the irascible
Cartwright. In Laurier's first campaign as leader, at the
general elections of February, 1891, he made an
astonishingly good showing. Despite the prestige of the
dying Sir John, the latter had a majority of but one in
Ontario and Quebec lumped together; and his government was
saved by the support of the maritime provinces and the West.
If some of Laurier's Ontario followers had not dallied with
annexation, and thus given a sinister colour to the
reciprocity movement, he would probably have carried the
day. With the death of Sir John, four months later, the
linch-pin came out of the Conservative party and the victory
of 1896 was inevitable, even though the Manitoba School
Question had not arisen to give Laurier an opportunity to
express those lofty sentiments in favour of unity and
moderation which always marked his thought and oratory.

Within five years he had united the forces of Ontario
Liberalism and had given it a distinctly improved tone. In
1897, after he had returned from attendance at Queen
Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, where he had been recognized as
a great Imperial figure, it is no exaggeration to say that
he had all Canada at his feet. One has been candid in
speaking of the short-comings of Ontario Liberalism, but
candour compels the admission that the Conservative party
also had a horde of undesirable camp-followers,--bigots,
agitators, and vulgar grafters. With singular adroitness
these had been herded into the Liberal camp in 1896. The
more corrupt of them stayed with the party that had the
loaves and fishes to bestow. But all could not be rewarded,
and the convinced elements of bigotry soon drifted from
allegiance to a Roman Catholic leader. This feeling steadily
grew; but, on the other hand, Laurier steadily gained
prestige among the more enlightened classes of Ontario, and,
through his choice of able lieutenants, had firmly
entrenched himself in the maritime provinces. It was not
until after the elections of 1904, when moral decadence
attacked his own cabinet, and charges of "wine, women and
graft" assumed serious proportions, that the tide commenced
to turn. Professor Skelton tells of Laurier's almost
pathetic missionary efforts to reform associates who were
sapping the confidence of the better elements of the
community. He even imposed pledges on some of them, which
were not kept. Then came the fatal return to reciprocity and
his fall in 1911. The business elements in the community,
that had given him tacit or open support for fifteen years,
were estranged and alarmed at the thought of fiscal changes;
and the secret and open forces of bigotry were at work.
Professor Skelton makes the open charge that Sir Clifford
Sifton organized the latter sinister element against his
former leader. Sir Wilfrid died in the belief that he was
defeated, not by reciprocity, but because of his religious
faith,--a bitter thought for an apostle of unity.

It cannot be denied, in justice, that Sir Wilfrid's moderate
imperialism and his pro-British sentiments had done
something to weaken him in Quebec with the class that
corresponds to the Ontario fanatic. Until Canada becomes
civilized enough to eliminate creed prejudice, there will
always be something gross and disheartening about her
politics. The defeat of 1911 was, however, a blessing in
disguise. The war was unforeseen, and it is probable that an
attempt to grapple with its problems would have carried off
Laurier, never a strong man physically, early in the
conflict. As it was, he never seemed really to grasp the
tremendous issues involved. But Professor Skelton makes it
clear that the charge of indifference levelled against him
was false, root and branch; and that his objection to
conscription was due to the tenacity with which he clung to
the dream of his youth, national unity. Even national unity,
noble and desirable though it be, must on all occasions
submit to the pressure of war necessity. The natural
timidity of old age no doubt influenced his attitude, and in
opposing conscription he certainly did not discern the
political consequences in the world at large of creating an
impression that the British Empire was wavering. But, though
the fame once so radiant had been overcast by war, Professor
Skelton's book enables even opponents to understand
Laurier's essential nobility of mind.

Laurier's end came as he would have desired it, if we are to
credit the words of the men who knew him well. He had long
ago expressed the hope that he would not survive the passing
of his mental and physical vigour; and it is well known to
his intimates that after 1911 he had become weary of
political strife. It is probable that, if he had consulted
his own wishes solely, he would have gone into honoured
retirement at that time. But partyism, a hard master, kept
him in harness until the last. And if it were possible for
him to know what has been said of him since his death, he
would be happy in the thought that his fine qualities were
understood by supporter and opponent alike--were recognized
throughout America and beyond the seas. In his case, it is
not necessary to invoke the rule that Plutarch ascribes to
Solon: "_De mortuis nil nisi bonum._" Sir Wilfrid was not
one of whom any reasonable man would speak evil, however he
might differ with his political views. That he was not more
infallible than many other political leaders, emphasizes his
humanity. Even the bitterness engendered by the emotional
excitement of the Great War had flickered out before he
passed away, three months after the Armistice.

The position which he achieved was the triumph of a great
personality, combined with the highest order of political
talent. Unquestionably, he was in his prime a great orator,
whose speeches swayed audiences not by demagogic or
sectional appeals, but by their persuasive eloquence and
moderation. He sounded the note of philosophic wisdom; and
approached controversial issues with a sense of detachment
that was as marked as his humane warmth and splendid
imagery. The impression that he made on the statesmen of
Great Britain after he became Prime Minister of Canada did
more than anything else to remove that condescending
attitude toward "colonials" which prevailed in Downing
Street as late as 1895--and in so doing he did not for an
instant compromise his ardent Canadianism.

I do not know whether he originated the phrase, "Canada is a
hard country to govern", but it was one that was not
infrequently on his lips. The possibilities of friction in a
country, divided not merely by race and language, but by
reactionary and democratic social and religious
organizations, are immense, and this country has never
lacked a plenitude of secondary politicians of both races
who are willing to exploit them. But while Sir Wilfrid, as a
keen politician and titular head of a party--whose aim, as
that of all political parties must be, was office--could not
refuse any votes that came to his mill, his voice was always
raised to still prejudice.

It may be truly said of Laurier that his life was, for the
most part, a warfare against parish politics, not only in
his own province, but elsewhere. Lord Minto's diaries reveal
that the mind of the Prime Minister was in a state of
intermittent exasperation against parochialism, and that he
despaired of its ever being eliminated from Canadian
politics. He began his political career as a "Rouge",
opposed to reaction. His education had been exceptional.
Though his lineage dated from the very earliest days of
French occupation in this country, and he was born in a
small settlement, he came of scholarly stock, and had
learned English from a Scottish resident of St. Lin. His
training was crowned by a course at the famous
Scottish-Canadian University of McGill, and he was more
familiar with the English classics than most of Canada's
political agitators for the English language, one and
indivisible.

A parochial dispute brought about his defeat at the hands of
the Quebec hierarchy in 1877, when he sought election for
Arthabaskaville as a member of the Mackenzie administration.
It was the good fortune of Canada that the urban
constituency of Quebec East at once took him to its bosom,
and ever afterward returned him by handsome majorities.
Though in 1877 he had been but a few years in politics, and
was still in his thirties, Laurier was recognized as the
real Liberal leader of the Province of Quebec, whose talents
overshadowed those of any man of his race, save perhaps
those of the Conservative leader, Chapleau. When he assumed
the Dominion leadership in 1887, his party was out-of-hand.
Many were grasping at straws; certain leaders whose
imaginations were inflamed by the stories of large fortunes
made out of politics in the United States, were secret or
open advocates of annexation. It was some years before
Laurier could set his house in order, and he undoubtedly
saved his party from disappearance by driving home the
conviction to the public mind that he stood firmly for
British connection.

Unless Canada had been persuaded on this point, he could not
have achieved his great victory in 1896. In his own Province
of Quebec, the efforts of the hierarchy to destroy him on
the Manitoba school issue were paralyzed by a circumstance
of which the rest of Canada knew little. Times had been
hard, and the _habitants_ were incensed against the burden
of ecclesiastical tithes. Nevertheless, Laurier had, in
1877, felt the ecclesiastical claws, and proceeded very
cautiously until he was assured that he had the bulk of the
Canadian community at his back in opposition to coercion in
the West. He never craved warfare with the French bishops,
whose power he well understood, and it was his last quarrel
with them. They themselves learned in 1896 the folly of
pursuing crude dictatorial tactics.

The fifteen years of Sir Wilfrid's Premiership were the
happiest that Canadian Confederation has known. In office,
he proved himself the reverse of that most tedious of all
human beings, the fiscal doctrinaire, and dealt with
economic conditions as he found them from the standpoint of
that enlightened opportunism, which fixes the tariff to meet
the general needs of all classes and gives assurance of
stability. They were years of trade expansion and
prosperity; and Canada found herself in a position of
augmented influence not merely in the Empire, but in the
world at large. Of these conditions, Sir Wilfrid, as Prime
Minister, reaped the logical benefit. It was only when he
yielded to the restless spirits within his own party and
attempted to interfere with the economic _status quo_, by
the effecting of the Reciprocity Pact of 1911, that disaster
came. Professor Skelton says that the unrest to which Sir
Wilfrid yielded was largely provoked by muck-raking articles
denouncing capital, which were then popular in the cheaper
United States magazines. It is said that Sir Wilfrid, who
was engrossed with other matters when the reciprocity
negotiations were in progress, was alarmed when he learned
of the length to which members of his Government had gone in
committing him to the Pact, and had originally intended that
the whole question should be threshed out in Parliament
before the proposals were signed. In reality a much more
important error, the only one of serious consequences in his
regime, was when he was induced to overrule his own Minister
of Railways and extend the National Transcontinental Railway
east of Fort William. The end of that quarrel with the Hon.
Andrew Blair is not yet. Professor Skelton says that Laurier
himself was alive to the danger of excessive railroad
building, and tried without success to effect a community of
interest between the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway and the
Canadian Northern Railway, which would have averted the
present colossal railroad debt.

His regime was marked by one signal act which did more than
anything else to influence Canada's future position in the
Empire. That was the decision to render assistance to Great
Britain in the South African war in 1899. It was only
arrived at after careful deliberation, and roused enemies in
Quebec who have ever since been active. But the superb
assistance rendered by Canada to the cause of the Allies in
the late war was the logical outcome of the stand Sir
Wilfrid took on that issue. The merits or demerits in detail
of his naval policy it is not necessary to discuss. Suffice
it to say, that in spirit they expressed the same principle
of co-partnership with the motherland as a world power.

As has been said, it was Laurier's good fortune that it did
not fall to his lot, as a man of seventy-three, to guide the
destinies of Canada after the great war broke out in 1914.
He was always of frail physique, and as a young man had to
give up the practice of law and live in the country to
regain his health. Even after he became Prime Minister,
there was a time in 1900 when he was so ill in England that
some of his associates assumed that he would never return to
his native land, and endeavoured to part the garment of
leadership among them. To have been confronted with the
problem of guiding Canada through the war-period at his
advanced years, would undoubtedly have brought about his
death sooner than it came. Even as it was, most of us, in
looking back, must realize that too much was expected of an
aged leader, who, though his bearing was deceptive, was to
some extent living in the past.

To have struggled, even with incomplete results, for
national unity; to have earned the love and respect of
countless Canadians who cared nothing for his political
opinions; to have won recognition as one of the greatest
orators of his time in any country; to have set the star of
Canada higher in the world's estimation than it had ever
shone before; to have been honoured in other lands as no
Canadian had been prior to his advent to power; to have
presided successfully over the destinies of his country
during its emergence from adolescence to manhood--these are
no small achievements for a French-Canadian boy, born in an
obscure settlement in a day when Canada was but a poor and
struggling colony. And that is the sum of Sir Wilfrid
Laurier's achievement.




BUCHAN'S "LORD MINTO"


_Lord Minto_, by John Buchan, is an illustration of what a
writer of energy and brilliance with a profound sense of
human values, can do with material that in ordinary hands
would be tedious and prosy. We know how the genius of R. L.
Stevenson absolutely failed him when he attempted to write a
book on the Samoan controversy. But John Buchan's analytic
style, a sober eloquence of phrase, and experience of life
make every page of this narrative of old political
controversies fascinating. As one closes its pages, one
realizes that in his lifetime Canadians did not realize how
big a man in mind, judgment, and heart, Lord Minto really
was. An uncomfortable feeling of lack of penetration came to
some of us a decade or more ago when he died. His record as
Governor-General of India in a very difficult period showed
that vigour and breadth of his character and mind had been
unappreciated, while he dwelt among us.

Mr. Buchan's pages offer us an explanation why his light was
to some extent hidden under a bushel during the period (Nov.
1898 to Nov. 1904) that he was Governor-General. He was by
heredity a Whig and a stern Constitutionalist. No man who
has ever held the Vice-Regal office at Ottawa had quite so
full a sense of the obligation to remain behind the scenes
in all matters of political controversy. Many people may
have thought him a "rubber stamp", but Mr. Buchan's
narrative presents facts which show him to have been the
reverse; and Sir Wilfrid Laurier himself left it on record
that he found him "pretty stiff" at times. Fortunately for
the future historian, Lord Minto left copious materials upon
which to base a critical biography. During most of his life,
he kept a diary in which he recorded his impressions of
everything and everybody. His motive for doing so was
interesting: he thought it a good means of improving and
developing a literary style. While in Canada he also wrote
interesting and revealing letters to his younger brothers,
all able public men.

It is understood that Mr. Buchan undertook the task from
sentimental reasons. The Earls of Minto are the chiefs of
the ancient Border clan of Elliot; and Mr. Buchan is the
foremost living Border writer. Some of the finest pages in
his book are to be found in the "introductory" which gives
us a picture of the Elliots and other Border clans as they
were in ancient times. Up to the sixteenth century "it was
their devilish disposition not to favour an Englishman", as
one old chronicler put it. In the reign of Henry VIII the
whole crew of Border men were the objects of a most
picturesque curse laid on them by the Archbishop of Glasgow
at the instance of Cardinal Wolsey, concluding "I condemn
them perpetually to the deep pit of hell to remain with
Lucifer and all his fellows, and their bodies to the gallows
on the Barrow Mure, first to be hangit, syne revin and
ruggit with dogs, swine, and other wild beasts abominable to
all the world." But the Elliots were a hardy breed and the
best talent in the way of cursing could not exorcise them.

The conversion of the Elliots from turbulent moss-troopers
into sober men of affairs began early in the seventeenth
century after the union of the English and the Scottish
crowns under James I. The fortunes of the modern family
began with a younger son, Gilbert Elliot, a lawyer, who was
mixed up in the Monmouth rebellion of 1685 and sentenced to
death and forfeiture, but subsequently pardoned, and in 1705
raised to the bench of the very court that had condemned him
to death. The first Earl of Minto was his grandson, born in
1751, a Whig and close associate of Burke. He became
Governor-General of India in 1807, and filled the post with
marked ability. With him the name of the Earls of Minto
became an Imperial one. Of the many able Elliots who
intervened between him and Gilbert John, the fourth Earl and
subject of this article, suffice it to use Lord Palmerston's
phrase, "When in doubt, send an Elliot."

The life of our own Earl of Minto, born in 1845, was in
early days restless and adventurous. At that time he bore
the title of Lord Melgund. He took his degree at Cambridge
with a gown over his riding clothes, and in the late
sixties, using the incognito, "Mr. Rollo", was one of the
great steeplechase riders of England. In advanced years,
while Governor-General of India, he confessed that he would
like to have lived the life of a racing trainer; and while
Governor-General of Canada he sometimes wished that fate had
destined him to be a rancher in Alberta. He entered the
Scots Guards and his wandering spirit took him in quest of
adventure in many parts of the world. He was in Paris during
the Commune, 1871, and later visited the Carlist army in
Spain. He was a war correspondent in the Russo-Turkish war
in 1878. A little later he was in Afghanistan with his
friend, Lord Roberts, and by a narrow chance escaped
assassination. He did brave service as an officer of mounted
rifles in the Nile campaign of the early eighties. Mounted
infantry, indeed, was his lifelong hobby, and whenever he
was at home he actively promoted the efficiency of his own
volunteer corps, the Border Mounted Rifles. Having visited
many parts of the world, he eagerly accepted an invitation
to come to Canada in 1883 as Military Secretary to the then
Governor-General, Lord Lansdowne. One of his earliest
services in this country was to assist in the organization
of the Nile Voyageurs for service in Egypt, where the
exigencies of Lord Wolseley's campaign demanded river men of
the type that great soldier had used in Canada in conveying
an expeditionary force for the suppression of the first Riel
rebellion. As soon as the Riel Rebellion of 1885 broke out,
Lord Melgund was sent to the front as Chief of Staff; and he
had lifelong affection for the 90th Regiment of Winnipeg,
the first of the volunteer battalions to reach the scene of
the disturbances. Canadians of to-day are inclined to regard
the 1885 rebellion as trivial because the casualties were
small. But in few of the little wars in which the British
Empire has been engaged has there been more heroic service
than that of the untrained levies from Canadian cities who,
with limited transport facilities in the rigours of March
weather on the prairies, pacified a vast territory. There
was no time for delay; everything had to be improvised; and
to a true military expert like Lord Minto the campaign was
one that reflected lasting glory on Canadian valour and
resource.

Lord Minto had settled down in middle age to the life of a
Scottish country gentleman when, in 1898, the summons of
Imperial service came once more. Greatly to his own
surprise, he was offered the Governor-Generalship of Canada,
followed in 1905 by that of the Vice-Regency of India, the
highest of all Imperial offices, in which the Viceroy not
merely reigns but governs, and exercises a direct personal
authority far greater than that of the King himself in
Britain. Lord Minto's achievements in India form the most
important chapters of Mr. Buchan's book. Taking up the task
at the time when affairs had become embarrassed by the
quarrels of Lord Curzon and Lord Kitchener, when the rising
tide of Indian sedition had become formidable, he combined
firmness, liberality, and far-seeing statesmanship in such a
degree as to command the admiration of every shade of
opinion, native and white. It is singular that the most
fervent tribute to his greatness comes from Mrs. Annie
Besant. The most significant proof of his abilities as an
administrator is that Great Britain has found no successor
of equal prestige with the peoples of Hindustan, despite the
fact that he made no pretensions to intellectual brilliance
but contented himself with the virtues of simplicity,
honesty, and tolerance.

It is, however, the Canadian chapters that are the most
important to our purpose, and a few errata in the matter of
dates does not detract from their profound importance. As we
look back, those years 1898 to 1904 were more important in
the history of Canada's Imperial relations than any of us
realized at the time. They were the years in which Canada
took the revolutionary step of participating in the South
African war and thus paved the way for participation in the
Great War. They were the years of Joseph Chamberlain's
effort to cement the Empire in bonds of trade interest. They
were the years in which the whole question of national
defence (and it should be added of rational defence) was
under review; the years of governmental controversies with
distinguished soldiers like General Hutton and Lord
Dundonald, who had come to Canada as commanders-in-chief of
the Canadian militia, under the mistaken impression that the
office signified a post of actual authority.

Lord Minto, by personal experience, knew a great deal of the
possibilities of the Canadian militia and was interested as
a hobby in the problems of national defence. The situation
he found when he reached Ottawa in 1898 was briefly
this:--Certain elements in the Laurier Government, flushed
with recent accession to power, were determined to hamstring
the militia, because they thought that it was a Conservative
party machine. If it were to be allowed to survive, it was
their opinion that appointments should go by political
favour, rather than long service and ability. This book
furnishes proof that one member of the Laurier cabinet who
died unsuspected, Hon. Richard Scott, was to all intents and
purposes an enemy of British connection. He carried his
antipathies so far that, as Secretary of State, he tried to
prevent a state memorial service for the late Queen
Victoria, and actually succeeded in inducing Sir Wilfrid
Laurier to absent himself after he had promised to attend.
In contrast, eminent French-Canadian leaders like Hon. J.
Israel Tarte, and Hon. Mr. Parent, then Premier of Quebec,
showed their loyalty and breadth of view by co-operating.

During Lord Minto's regime, the Militia Department of Canada
was in the hands of a minister who was little better than a
buffoon; and partizans like Hon. Sidney Fisher were
constantly trying to interfere with the service. The
institution of a British Commandant for the Canadian militia
had not been abolished, but nothing that might make the
position unbearable for a soldier of conscience and
efficiency was overlooked. First there was the Hutton
episode; and the recall of an able general was asked because
he had tried to do his duty. This was hard to bear, for Gen.
Hutton was his friend, but Lord Minto stuck strictly to his
constitutional position, though his chagrin was known. Later
came the Dundonald quarrel, and another recall. Lord Minto
was less sympathetic in this case, because he thought Lord
Dundonald a bit of a demagogue. These disputes, however,
faded into insignificance in comparison with that which
arose in connection with Canada's participation in the South
African War. Lord Minto's sympathies were divided; he
suspected that the war was not a just one, and had a
profound personal distrust for Cecil Rhodes. As a Whig
constitutionalist, he felt that nothing should be done
without the assent of Parliament; but, nevertheless, he
regarded it as essential that the Empire should present a
united front toward Kruger. As we know, popular sentiment
triumphed over constitutional theory; and the pressure of
outside events forced the government to take up the whole
question of national defence and militia efficiency in a
serious way.

For the silent figure at Rideau Hall the instability on such
questions of Sir Wilfrid Laurier, who had privately confided
to Lord Minto his theory that Canada was a series of
parochial communities which could not be governed by large
theories of statesmanship, was a source of trial. Lord
Minto, on what he had reason to assume was authoritative
information, would send a despatch to London announcing that
the government had decided on a certain course, only to find
the Prime Minister reversing the decision in a day or two.
Yet he liked Laurier immensely; thought him brilliant, and,
personally, more honest than most men. By heredity and
training a man of action, he was puzzled to know how to deal
with one whose temperament constantly inclined toward
inaction. Once, in later years, he told Joseph Chamberlain
that Laurier was a great gentleman. "I would rather," said
Chamberlain, "do business with a cad who knows his own
mind." But Lord Minto could not assent to this; he had no
use for a cad under any circumstances.

Two things Lord Minto was able to induce Laurier to do
without hesitation and quibble. One was to reform the abuses
in the government of the Yukon territory, of which he made a
personal investigation. The other was to establish the
Dominion Archives Department and preserve invaluable
historic documents then in course of destruction. But the
outside world knew nothing of how actively and
conscientiously the silent sportsman took part in the duties
of government. Nor did they know of his profound love for
this country, surpassing that of many native-born Canadians,
which found emotional expression in his diaries. Certain
pages of these diaries are written almost in a spirit of
lyrical exaltation. No son, adoptive or native, ever loved
Canada more deeply.




TWO CANADIAN MEMOIRISTS


The material for a consistent picture of the development of
Canadian social and political life, especially in the period
between 1850 and 1900, is much more extensive than many
readers suppose.

Books of intimate recollections which give vivid pictures of
the development of English-speaking settlements from
primitive bush clearings to the present era of well-paved
roads, garages, and radios, would more than fill the
standardized "six-foot shelf". Even in the highly developed
pastoral districts of Ontario, in which to-day the
farmsteads give a suggestion of mellowed permanence, there
are men and women alive who were literally "cradled in a sap
trough". Within a few years after the influx to Canada of
sterling yeoman settlers of British origin, there came into
being a village community in many respects more vital and
interesting than that of rural districts in Eastern Canada
to-day. Of the numerous books of memoirs which reveal the
evolution of English-speaking Canada from its pioneer
beginnings, I select two, because the authors, owing to
their training as newspaper men, are able to relate their
recollections vividly, and because wide experience in
national affairs later gave them a sense of values and
perspective. The two books I have in mind are _Reminiscences
of a Raconteur_ by the late George H. Ham, for many years
assistant to the President of the Canadian Pacific Railway,
and _Reminiscences, Political and Personal_ by Sir John
Willison, long recognized as the most eminent of Canadian
journalists and, for the past decade and more, correspondent
in this country of the London _Times_.

In reading _Reminiscences of a Raconteur_ by George H. Ham,
who died in April, 1926, in his seventy-ninth year, the
title strikes one as inadequate. Its contents are a
permanent contribution to the social history of Canada.
George Ham reveals himself as much more than a mere teller
of funny stories. He shows himself a first hand observer of
the development of Canada from the days when Sarnia and
Windsor, Ontario, represented its western confines. Glance
at the earlier chapters of the book and you will find the
revelation that this man, who remained younger in
temperament than many half a century his junior, actually
stole a ride on the first Grand Trunk train that entered
Toronto. It makes one feel how young a country
English-speaking Canada is. The wayward youth who stole that
ride in 1856 was but nine years of age, for he was born on
August 23rd, 1847. Those of us who saw the first trolley car
in Canada run on the northern outskirts of Toronto feel
rather elderly, but here is George Ham boasting of having
ridden on the first railroad train which connected the lake
region with the East.

Before touching on other incidents related in his book, it
may be worth while saying something about George Ham's
position in later life. He was for many years the assistant
to the President of the C.P.R., the largest privately owned
railroad corporation on earth. Its only competitor in the
scale of vastness is the Canadian National railway system.
His particular duties as a sort of liaison officer between
the corporation he represented and the many august
individuals who made the transcontinental tour of Canada
after the prairie country and the Rockies began to attract
the attention of the world, probably brought him in contact
with more distinguished men than any other Canadian. In
addition he enjoyed an enormous personal acquaintance with
all sorts and conditions among his fellow Canadians,
constantly augmented in each passing year. An old-time
newspaper man with a gift of racy expression, and a
penetrating eye for the humours and ironies of human
existence, the accumulation of his reminiscences was
enormous. Though the 330 pages of his book are packed with
brief commentary and incident, Mr. Ham but skimmed the
surface of his experiences and, in the case of almost every
topic he deals with, his narrative could be infinitely
extended. His chapters have the effect of a pageant,
disclosing the emergence of English-speaking Canada from the
simple parochial conditions of sixty or seventy years ago to
its present highly complex development. And in the narrative
a shrewd and kindly personality is constantly revealed.

He was born at Trenton, Ont., one of the early U. E.
Loyalist settlements of the Bay of Quinte district. His
father was a doctor, who had turned lawyer--a not infrequent
transformation in those days,--and in 1849 the elder Ham was
appointed a sort of legal Pooh-bah at Whitby, Ont., twenty
odd miles east of Toronto. Except for the advent of the
telephone and the motor car, and the addition of a
government hospital and a high railway embankment, I do not
suppose that the Whitby of to-day is much changed from the
Whitby of George Ham's school days. Its invitingly
hospitable homes, surrounded by trees, have a quality of
dignity and peace, a sense of fine traditions, not to be
found in the newer towns of Canada. In George Ham's boyhood
it was relatively a more important place than it is to-day,
and I have heard old Whitbians declare that if only the old
Northern Railway, which first connected the Georgian Bay
region with Lake Ontario, had adopted their town instead of
Toronto as its terminal, it would have been equally
important. Anyhow, it was a good town to be reared in, and
the account that George Ham gives of his schooldays there
and his apprenticeship in the office of the _Whitby
Chronicle_, has that charm which memories of the
ever-so-long-ago possess for all who have unconsciously
drifted into middle age. He speaks with a great deal of
sentiment and respect of the school-master who was chiefly
responsible for teaching marksmanship to his youthful ideas.
The latter was a young mathematician named William McCabe,
who subsequently became one of the most renowned of Canadian
actuaries and the founder of the North American Life
Assurance Company. Whitby has produced many individuals who
have subsequently become famous in a wider field, of whom
not the least is the British politician, Sir Hamar
Greenwood, Bart.

For all the experiences of Mr. Ham as boy and youth, readers
must go to the book itself. The stolen ride on the first
train that ran between Whitby and Toronto, was of course the
red-letter event of his childhood. Subsequently he varied
newspaper work with commercial attempts, like clerking in a
general store at the then pioneer settlement of Walkerton,
Ont.,--not a very successful experiment. Of the early
political campaigns and the protagonists of those conflicts,
he tells us much that is entertaining. Especially
interesting is his account of the Reform leader, Archibald
McKellar. For many readers of to-day the name means nothing;
but those who have looked at Wyly Grier's picture of Edward
Blake as a young man, which hangs in the Legislative
buildings at Toronto, have also seen McKellar's countenance.
At Mr. Blake's suggestion (I suppose) the artist included
portraits of his old desk-mates in the Ontario Assembly,
Archibald McKellar and Alexander Mackenzie. Mr. Ham says
that, although he did not call himself by that name,
McKellar was the first farmer-leader in this country. Sixty
years ago he thundered on the platform the very arguments
that agrarian politicians circulate to-day, but he had no
desire for independent political action, or to be other than
just a plain militant "Grit". Mr. Ham relates a pleasant
anecdote of his first meeting with the politician, at a time
when he had transferred his services to the Whitby
_Gazette_, and was active in the many campaigns which took
place in that famous fighting ground, the old constituency
of South Ontario.

"It was in one of these campaigns," he says, "that a nice
looking gentleman of middle age called at the _Gazette_
office and politely asked to see the exchanges. I had no
idea of his identity, and we soon entered into an
interesting conversation. He asked me my honest opinion of
the leading politicians, and I, with the supreme wisdom and
irrepressible ardour of youth, fell for it. I was a red-hot
Tory, and what he didn't learn of the Grits from me wasn't
worth knowing. I particularly denounced Archie McKellar,
whom I termed the black sheep of the political crew at
Toronto, and vehemently proceeded to inform him of all that
gentleman's political crimes and misdeeds. He encouraged me
to go on with my abusive fulminations, and he went away
smiling and told me it was the most pleasant hour he had
spent in a long time. I was present at the public meeting
that afternoon in my capacity as a reporter--for in those
days the editor was generally the whole staff and was
sickeningly astounded when, to repeated calls for 'Archie
McKellar', my pleasant visitor of the morning arose amidst
the loud plaudits of his political supporters. I,--say,
let's draw the curtain for a few minutes. After the meeting
I met Mr. McKellar and apologized for my seeming rudeness,
but he only laughed pleasantly at my discomfiture, and told
me he thoroughly enjoyed our morning seance and that he
didn't fully realize before how wicked he was until I
picturesquely and vividly depicted his deep, dark, criminal
political career. We became fast friends, and I soon learned
that Archie was not nearly as black as he had been painted,
as perhaps none of us are--nor as angelic."

Ham was one of the pioneers of journalism in the Northwest
Territories and was an editor in Winnipeg, then devoid of
railway communications except through Minnesota, as early as
1875.

After he had been in the West for more than a decade he was
sent East as representative of a Winnipeg newspaper in the
Press Gallery at Ottawa, and saw much of political leaders
of the eighties. Forty years of life had mellowed his
partizanship. The political careers of the famous Liberal
leaders, Edward Blake and Alexander Mackenzie,--both victims
of party ingratitude,--strike him as tragic. Both had
rendered great service to the cause of Liberalism, but both
were permitted to depart from public life in this country
unhonoured. Mackenzie, especially, he regarded with respect,
as a man who had sacrificed himself to the public service
without just reward.

He speaks of other tragedies also; and one that touched him
deeply was the fall of Charles Rykert, a staunch Tory
fighter and member for Lincoln in the House of Commons.
Rykert was, in 1890, accused by Sir Richard Cartwright of
having eight years previously profited to the extent of
$75,000 in a timber transaction. "As a matter of fact," says
Mr. Ham, "the transaction was fully in accordance with the
law as it then stood, and no such profit as that reported
was made. Indeed, it is to be doubted that Charlie got
enough to pay him for his trouble. However the charge was
pressed and it ended Mr. Rykert's political career, for he
resigned his seat before the session closed."

A low order of political expediency seems to have inspired
the desertion of Rykert by his political friends; but the
party was in deep waters, and he was hypocritically
denounced by fellow members anxious to advertise their own
high ideals to the community at large. These are my words,
not Mr. Ham's. But the tale he tells of the ostracism of
this loyal fighter, and of the agonized countenance of
Rykert when he learned that one supposed friend after
another was assailing him, is indeed calculated to arouse a
sense of the callous selfishness of partizan politics. Of
one of those "unfriendly friends" Rykert sorrowfully said,
"And he--he got his share of the campaign funds, and wanted
more." The same thing happened in connection with Sir Hector
Langevin and the McGreevy scandal. "Of those who may have
benefited" says Mr. Ham, "not one came to the assistance of
the accused men. Nobody turned a finger in their behalf in
their time of trouble."

But his pictures of Canadian politics are not all on the
seamy side. He quotes examples of independence and humour in
public men. Sir Charles Tupper he especially admired. He
relates that when some Portage la Prairie supporters, who
were dissatisfied with something or other Sir Charles had
done, wired him from Manitoba that they did not see their
way clear to support him in that particular measure, they
received a curt reply which read, "You had better vote
Grit." He also tells a most amusing story of Hon. John Henry
Pope, whom, it is now generally known, was the most trusted
and steadfast of Sir John Macdonald's advisers in his days
of trial. Though Pope was not a polished speaker, his
ingenuous sincerity was a great asset. On one occasion he
squelched a long and savage attack on himself by the
brilliant rhetorician, Sir Richard Cartwright, by slowly
rising and saying, "Mr. Speaker, there ain't nothin' to it."

Very interesting also is the varied material dealing with
the rise and development of the Canadian West. George Ham
knew it intimately from the outset, for he first went to
Winnipeg, to follow the newspaper calling, in 1875. He was
eye-witness of that amazing outburst of financial madness,
the Winnipeg land-boom of 1881-2, when men made imaginary
fortunes over-night, and auction sales were held day and
night in the rooms of Jim Coolican, Walter Dufour and Joe
Wolf. One man he speaks of was a barometer for his friends.
"When he claimed to have made $10,000 or $15,000 in a single
day everything was lovely. The next day when he could only
credit himself with $3000 or $4000 to the good, things were
not as well, and when the profits dropped, as some days they
did, to a paltry $500 or $600, the country was going to the
dogs." And the craze ended even more suddenly than it began.
"It was," says Mr. Ham, "the morning after the night before;
and a mighty sad one it was." Personally I remember
Coolican, above alluded to, as a prematurely aged and
impoverished man in Toronto seven or eight years after the
Winnipeg boom broke. Legend had it that on one occasion,
after a successful day in real estate at Winnipeg, he had
filled a bath tub full of champagne and immersed himself in
it. But his career as a great spender was over. He could be
seen slipping into the cheapest "beaneries" to get a meal
within the limits of his purse.

_The Reminiscences of a Raconteur_ covers so wide a field
and deals intimately with so many phases of Canadian life
that nearly every page illuminates some episode in Canada's
development.

It is pleasant to take up Sir John Willison's
_Reminiscences, Political and Personal_, because of the
essential spirit of justice which pervades his portraits of
the public men who influenced the course of events in Canada
during the closing decades of the nineteenth century. If to
be a democrat is to hold the conviction that every man who
has held public office in the past forty years betrayed his
trust, and was indifferent to the interests of "the people";
if to be a patriot is to hold in abhorrence all who differ
in opinion with one upon great issues involving national
destiny; then Sir John is neither democrat nor patriot.
Nevertheless, I, for one, discern the best democracy and the
truest patriotism in the spirit that lies back of his pen
pictures of men and events. Especially does one note a
confidence in the genius of the Canadian people for arriving
at solutions, which tend in the long run to shape for us a
position of national greatness, within what must be regarded
as a noble and beneficent Empire. The pen portraits are not
panegyrics; the faults and quiddities of Canadian political
leaders, as well as their merits, are clearly limned. With
sure analysis, illumined by a sense of humour, Sir John
reveals the sources of their power and influence.

The author's own career, laid bare without egotism, is at
once unique and typical, possible only in a young country,
peopled by good stock. Born on a clearing in the Huron
tract, shortly after the Crimean war, his absorption in
politics, and his zeal for a participation in public
affairs, seems to have been lifelong. We get a picture of
him walking four miles to the village of Varna to attend a
political meeting in 1872. "I was just fourteen years of
age," he says, "and to me, Varna, with two general stores, a
shoemaker and a blacksmith, a wagon-maker, a tavern, two
churches and an Orange Hall, was a considerable community."
We get other pictures of the pioneer days on the shores of
Lake Huron: "Rude times, perhaps, but men were neighbourly,
limbs were strong, and hearts were sound. How women bore and
reared children and did the cooking and choring and making
and mending of those days, only God, who pities and
strengthens, understands." The country, even in those days,
was not without its intellectual pleasures, however, for he
tells of another village--Greenwood, in Ontario
county--where he lived for a time, which possessed a
Mechanics' Institute at which the classics of English
literature were available to lads with a zeal for reading.
Necessarily, the warfare of politics furnished a real
stimulus and recreation to rural communities. With partizans
the countryside was assuredly peopled; and if, as one of our
new leaders has said, partyism is a public sin, the men and
women "who sleep well in their quiet beds of the hillsides"
are deeply damned. The depth and breadth of it is almost
inconceivable to a city-reared man. Willison himself heard
Alexander Mackenzie, while Prime Minister of Canada, say
from a public platform: "The heart of the average Tory is
deceitful above all thengs and desperately wecked." The
laughing insouciance with which Sir John Macdonald met such
assaults drove many old Grits to desperation. In the many
anecdotes about platform utterances which this book
contains, it will be noted that the old timers drove home
their points pungently, and with humour. There was less of
the "moral infection of clap-trap" which afflicts public
speakers and journalists to-day, as with a pestilence.

Young Willison was of the fibre to make his dreams come
true. He got away from the farm as soon as he could, and he
confesses that no one who knows him will suggest that he
would have made a good farmer. His hobby was public affairs,
and his chief aspiration to become editor of the Toronto
_Globe_, though in Huron county he must have seemed like a
changeling, for his father was a staunch Tory, and his
Liberalism was acquired in a _wanderjahr_ that took him
through various small towns in Ontario, proof-reading and
scribbling for country weeklies. Rejected in an effort to
secure a position on the _Globe_ staff, we find him at the
age of twenty-five setting type and reading proofs on the
London _Advertiser_, with the _privilege_ of reporting as
well. His remuneration under contract for a year was $3 per
week. Once in later years he told the late Hon. A. S. Hardy
of this, and of expending $2.75 per week for his board.
"What in h--ll did you do with the other quarter?" was the
response. The London editor, John Cameron, who had driven a
hard bargain when he took him into the _Advertiser_ office,
proved a real friend, once he had discovered his quality,
for when he became editor of the _Globe_, he took Willison
to Toronto with him. In June, 1890, when Cameron returned to
London, the apprentice of seven years previously became his
successor in the chair of Hon. George Brown. At thirty-two
Willison had achieved his dream; he was not only the editor
of Canada's most historic newspaper; but from that day
onward he has taken a part in affairs, more intimate and
influential than that of any journalist in Canada, an
adviser whom Liberals by instinct consulted, and whom
Conservatives profoundly respected.

By temperament and early experience it was impossible for
him to become a very rigid partizan: he was too much given
to weighing and analyzing men and issues to indulge in
hatreds. In fact, the intellectual independence of the
higher order of journalist has ever been the despair of the
party leader who tries to make him his bond-servant. In this
volume it is clear that it was Sir John's obstinacy in
adhering to cautiously formed opinions that led to the
severance of relations with political friends.

There are many interesting revelations about the secret
diplomacy of politics that do credit to the man and the
methods he pursued. It is clear that he did a lasting
service to the Liberal party by his course, as its most
important journalistic mouthpiece and intimate adviser. At
the time he became editor of the _Globe_, influences were
strongly at work to commit that party to political union
with the United States or a form of independence, which was
but a halfway house to the same goal. The young editor stood
first, last, and all the time for British connection, and
helped to stifle the ill-begotten nursling of annexation
almost at its birth. He was determined that it should never
become a political issue at all, and he took long chances
with his own position to accomplish that end. And he makes
it clear that Sir Wilfrid Laurier was equally sound in this
matter of British connection.

Another great service Sir John Willison rendered to Canadian
journalism--that of banishing extreme partizanship from the
news columns of daily newspapers. Prior to his assumption of
the editorship of the _Globe_, political meetings were
dealt with, not from the standpoint of news value, but from
that of party interest. Thus a Liberal meeting would be
reported at great length; and a Conservative one unfairly
abridged, with the more telling statements in the speeches
edited out of the report. Willison changed all this; and in
time other journals saw the wisdom of following the same
policy. In so doing, he lifted the _Globe_ from a hazardous
financial position into prosperity. Men who disagreed with
the views in its editorial columns, subscribed to the paper
because of the fairness and excellence of its news. The
spirit of independence he introduced in newspaper work, in
time broke the back of interference with editors by
political leaders and political emissaries, which had become
a widespread abuse. There were partizans who sought his head
and did not graciously submit to the new orders of things;
but the principle of fair and unbiased reporting based on
news values had come to stay.

Nevertheless, Sir John is not harsh toward party leaders. He
gives them the credit that is due them, for a sincere desire
to arrive at policies which would be acceptable to the whole
people and further the interests of Canada. This, of course,
is a matter of self-preservation with all politicians. When
I first read the _Reminiscences_, I had hoped for a chapter
on the farmer in politics by the Canadian journalist best
qualified by experience to write it, but found none. Reading
the book, however, one realizes how absurd is the charge
that party leaders in the past have ignored the interests of
the farmer. It is clear that the farmer's vote has been the
prime subject in the thoughts of Canadian political leaders
from Confederation until this day. It was the farmers who
took the keenest enjoyment in the Berserk partizan warfare
of the old days; it was the farmers who most readily forgot
party and supported the policy of protection and helped to
force it on reluctant and doubtful Conservative leaders. The
number of city men by birth and education who have played a
part in our affairs is small in comparison with boys from
the farm like Sir John Willison. It is clear from these
pages that it has always been the countryside--its
prejudices as well as its interests--that has been the prime
factor in shaping Canadian legislation.




A PIONEER CANADIAN CARTOONIST


On a sunny autumn afternoon in October, 1923, death came
suddenly to John Wilson Bengough, a pioneer Canadian
cartoonist, who at one time held a unique position in
Canadian journalistic and political life. He had been warned
to expect such an event nearly a year before, when it became
clear that he was a victim of _angina pectoris_. At the
time death came to him, at his home in Toronto, he was busy
drawing a cartoon designed to be one of a series attacking
the habit of cigarette smoking. Despite his strong antipathy
to many things which seem acceptable and congenial to the
average man, few Canadians of his time were more widely
known or more generally held in affection. For many, the
cheerful and kindly qualities of his temperament softened
the angularity of his views.

The late Mr. Bengough was born in Toronto on April 5th,
1851, but reared and educated at Whitby, Ont. His entry into
journalism took place in 1871, when he became a reporter on
the Toronto _Globe_, then conducted by Hon. George Brown
with a brother, Gordon Brown, as managing editor. Just at
that time the greatest and most successful of all campaigns
ever conducted by a cartoonist, that of the famous Thomas
Nast against the "Tweed Ring" in New York, was in progress
in the pages of Harper's Weekly, and it inspired young
Bengough to try and develop his natural talent for drawing,
and to emulate Nast in the field of Canadian politics. To
prepare himself for his task he took lessons at the Ontario
School of Art, at the same time practising by making
sketches of the men with whom his duties as a reporter
brought him in contact. In the early seventies the Browns,
like most other newspaper publishers in Canada and the
United States, had no perception of the part cartoons and
illustrations were destined to play in the daily press of
this continent. It was left for Hugh Graham (Lord Atholstan)
of the _Montreal Star_ to initiate in America the practice
of using newspaper illustrations. This occurred about 1876
and brought to the fore the great illustrator Henri Julien,
probably the most gifted artist at any time connected with
the press of Canada.

The ambitions and initiative of young Bengough were to find
another outlet than the daily press. On May 24, 1873, at the
age of twenty-two, he had the courage to embark on the
hazardous waters of weekly journalism with the once famous
comic paper _Grip_. The title and the cover were happily
conceived. Mr. Bengough was all his life a Dickens
enthusiast, and took his title from the raven in _Barnaby
Rudge_. Throughout the eighteen years during which _Grip_
continued to be issued, a raven with a quill in his beak
always appeared on the cover. The young editor and
cartoonist wrote much of the text and drew most of the
illustrations, his weekly stint involving an enormous output
of nervous energy. It is said that _Grip_ attracted small
attention at first, but the incidence of the "Pacific
Scandal", a political issue which came to the fore in 1873,
gave Bengough a chance to jump into the arena as "the
Canadian Nast", and placed _Grip_ on firm commercial
foundations. The scandal seems petty enough in the light of
subsequent events; it related to alleged subscriptions to
the Conservative campaign fund by capitalists, whom Sir John
Macdonald was trying to induce to build the Canadian Pacific
railway, in accordance with a promise made to British
Columbia at the time of its entrance into Confederation. But
at that time five cents looked as large as a dollar does
to-day to most Canadians; and no doubt many Grits or
Reformers had convinced themselves that Sir John in
promoting a Pacific railway, was merely adopting a ruse to
raise campaign funds. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the
issue, it led to the defeat of the Macdonald government in
the autumn of 1873, and it made _Grip_, for it was admitted
that Bengough had contributed much to the Reform victory by
his cartoons.

The kindliness of his nature showed itself even in those
early days of ardent partizanship. He probably shared the
views of the Brown school of Reformers that "John A." was
the root of all evil, and the Tories incorrigibly perverse
and wicked; but it was his policy to avoid vulgarity, and
publish no cartoon that would give pain and offence. Thus,
in the succeeding years, _Grip_ found entrance to many
homes in Canada irrespective of political leanings. During
the seventies and eighties many public figures were made
familiar by Bengough's pencil. Sir John A. Macdonald's
expressive nose and "actorish" hair were great assets to a
cartoonist, and it is a fact that _Grip_ lost its savour
and went out of existence shortly after the old statesman's
death in 1891. But other public figures of that day were
useful material. Old timers recall Bengough's handling of
the gnome-like features of Sir Oliver Mowat, and the comic
twist he gave the dour, sterling countenance of Hon.
Alexander Mackenzie. The face of the former, because of his
Caithness ancestry, was of a Norwegian cast; that of
Mackenzie pure Scottish granite. Again, the elongated,
lath-like figure of Goldwin Smith, who in his earlier years
in Canada was active in connection with all public
questions, attained a widespread fame under Bengough's hand.

_Grip_ died through outside competition. It could not match
the finely produced comic weeklies of the United States,
_Puck_, _Judge_ and _Life_, or the exquisite finesse of
_Punch_. Bengough, too, as years went on, became more of a
propagandist and less of a cartoonist. He lost ground in
Canada, where new men of higher technical ability, like Sam
Hunter, were coming to the fore, through trying to crowd too
much verbal argument into his pictures. It is a test of
excellence in a cartoon that it should be accompanied by a
minimum of explanatory text. Nevertheless, in addition to
being a cartoonist and humorist, Bengough had sound business
ideas. For example, in order to make his cuts for _Grip_
economically, he introduced the process of zinc etching into
Canada, and founded a company that adopted new processes of
picture reproduction as they were developed. Thus he was a
pioneer of the modern commercial engraving industry, which
has since attained vast dimensions and largely superseded
old-fashioned lithography and wood block engraving.

In the thirty odd years following the demise of _Grip_,
Bengough's pencil was active in the advocacy of various
causes. Mentally he had a strong appetite for new ideas and
"isms". He was one of the early advocates of prohibition and
woman's suffrage, and in his last years an opponent of
tobacco. Single tax, proportional representation, and many
other radical theories won his ardent devotion; and his
liking for novelty even led him, for a time at least, to
accept the Baconian theory. He had a rooted distrust of
accumulated wealth, and of the manufacturing class in
general. His angular views influenced his cartoons, but his
pleasant, vivacious nature prevented his ever being regarded
merely as a "crank".

A very genial phase of his career was the comic lectures or
"Chalk Talks" which he began in the early seventies, and
which he continued to deliver in many parts of Canada, as
well as other countries, for half a century. In fact, when
the warning of the fateful malady which carried him off came
to him, it was at the close of a lecture in Moncton, N.B.,
and it is supposed to have been induced by over-work during
a previous Western tour.

In a very busy life, Mr. Bengough found time to publish
books, and his cartoon history of Canadian politics, for
which he made wide investigations and dug out the work of
earlier men, is now a precious work of high market value.
His reminiscences also throw light on by-gone phases of
Canadian life.




PAUL KANE: INTERPRETER OF THE ABORIGINES


One of the most valuable "one-man" collections of paintings
in America, from the commercial as well as other
standpoints, is the display of Paul Kane's studies of the
North American Indians, which is installed in that great
treasure-house of priceless things, the Royal Ontario
Museum, Toronto. Among the younger generation, too few know
the romantic story of Paul Kane, the pioneer of those
Canadian artist-travellers, who, since his day, have become
very numerous, and have recorded the distinctive beauties of
Canadian scenery and wild life in innumerable
pictures--good, bad, and indifferent. Paul Kane hardly comes
within the category of the great painters, but he was
assuredly one of the great illustrators. His canvases
constitute the best existing record of the dress, manners,
and customs of the redmen of the great North-West before it
had been invaded by white civilization, and while the
Indians still lived as hunters, trappers, and fishermen, not
as Government wards.

Some may be inclined to contest this claim and award the
laurel to Catlin. But though Catlin's fame is well
established, it is now admitted by ethnologists that
complete reliance cannot be placed on his accuracy, whereas
there is no question of the exactness and verisimilitude of
Paul Kane's pictures. I am told by those better qualified to
speak than I, that Catlin was a confirmed "pot boiler". He
had undoubtedly obtained copious material during his
wanderings among the Indians, but when he returned to the
East he painted Indian subjects romantically, as fancy
dictated; whereas Kane was nothing if not a hardened
realist, and as meticulous in detail as a pre-Raphaelite.

He was a writer as well as a painter and draughtsman, and
his _Wanderings of an Artist among the Indian Tribes of
North America_, published in London, England, by Longmans
in 1859, is a classic of its kind. Indeed, from Kane's
literary remains and from the recorded recollections of
those who knew him, a very interesting monograph could be
written. He was a wanderer by instinct, like George Borrow,
and claimed to have visited every part of the earth at
various times--and he was a Celt. Ireland's artists in all
fields have made contributions to civilization that almost
balance the mischief wrought by her politicians, and Kane
was of the former class. Nicholas Flood Davin, one of the
earliest writers to celebrate the painter, emphasizes the
racial factor in his book, _Irishmen in Canada_. His
father, Michael Kane, a soldier, came to Canada with his
wife, a Dublin woman, in the entourage of Governor Simcoe,
and after discharge from the army remained in Toronto, then
the muddy town of York. In later years he kept a liquor
store on the west side of Yonge street, between King and
Adelaide streets. Old citizens of Toronto, surviving into
the twentieth century, remember the old sign, "Kane, Spirit
Store".

Paul Kane was born in muddy York in 1810, and was as a child
attracted to the Indians. Davin says: "The child's growing
mind could not fail to be influenced by the picturesque
Indian figures then still to be seen haunting the Don, while
Indian trails ran where King and Yonge streets are to-day."
The latter statement is a characteristic flourish. During
Kane's boyhood, stores and churches were erected around the
spot in question, although the Mississauga Indians, not by
any means so handsome as the equestrian types of the plains,
lived in wigwams on a cleared piece of land near what was
then the mouth of the Don River. I surmise that this would
be near what are now the grounds of the Canadian National
Exhibition--for it was not until many years later that wind
and wave opened the eastern gap and gave the Don its later
outlet.

It is intimated by J. W. L. Forster, of Toronto, a fellow
painter, who has also written of Kane, that the boy learned
his craft from a Mr. Drury, an eccentric drawing master,
well known in York. It is said that Paul's artistic bias was
regarded with distrust by his father as a ne'er-do-well
symptom; and the youth was made to turn his talents to
practical account. The late W. H. Pearson, a venerable
citizen of Toronto who in his old age published his
memories, says that, as a young man of twenty-odd, Kane
carried on the business of a coach, sign and house painter
at 158 King street west. Later he went to Cobourg, Ont., and
from there to several American cities, where he followed the
same pursuit, and painted pictures as well. By 1841, when he
had turned thirty, he had gotten together enough cash to
justify his ambition to travel and study in Europe. Still
facing parental opposition, he made his way to New Orleans,
and sailed for Marseilles. The next four years were spent in
short sojournings in the leading cities of France and Italy,
where he walked the galleries and improved his craft. At
Naples he embarked on a Levantine cruiser to visit Northern
Africa and Western Asia. While _en route_ to Jerusalem with
a party of explorers, the Arab guides deserted the party.
They were obliged to make their way to the coast unaided and
endured great hardship. On his return to Toronto in 1844,
Kane published his book, _Travels_, and in its preface
announced the project which was to bring him fame, if not
fortune--that of painting a series of pictures illustrative
of North American Indians and scenery. Thus was the
collection, now in the Royal Ontario Museum, conceived.

Kane found a patron in the late Senator George W. Allan, one
of the most public-spirited of Torontonians, who gave Allan
Gardens to his fellow-citizens. Mr. Allan agreed to finance
Kane for a term of years while he was making his
observations and sketches and to accept pictures in payment.
Probably he had little idea of the value of the investment,
though fully seized of the historic import of the project.

Kane left Toronto in the early spring of 1846, and through
the interest of Sir George Simpson, Chief Factor of the
Hudson's Bay Company, secured permission to travel to the
interior of the continent with the spring brigade of the
"Great Company", which in the forties annually left Sault
Ste. Marie for north-western waters. Simpson travelled with
the artist as far as the Sault, and on arrival it was found
that the great train of canoes had left two days previously.
An H.B.C. steamer was about to embark for Fort William, and
availing himself of it, Kane overtook the brigade at
Mountain Portage, forty miles west of the latter trading
post. He remained with the brigade until it reached Fort
Alexander on the Winnipeg River, where it turned north, en
route for Norway House. With a guide or two, Kane made his
way across country to Fort Garry (now Winnipeg), which he
reached on June 13, 1846. In the Red River district he had
the good fortune to witness and take part in the annual
buffalo hunt by which the tribes of the region secured their
winter supplies of pemmican. One of the experiences of his
journey westward, taken in easy stages to secure pictures,
was a horseback ride from Fort Carlton on the Saskatchewan
to Fort Edmonton. He entered the Rockies, via Edmonton, and
finally, after long journeyings through lonesome and
awe-inspiring mountain passes, reached the Pacific Coast.
Wintering there, he made his invaluable studies of the Coast
Indians. He was a welcome visitor at the lonely Vancouver
Island outpost, Fort Victoria, to which ships and strangers
rarely came. The book he wrote a decade or more later had
the distinction of being the first which made the beauties
and resources of British Columbia known to the world at
large.

On July 1st, 1847, he started eastward, through the
mountains, with the fur brigade for Edmonton--then, as now,
a great centre of the fur trade--and passed five months en
route. The winter of 1847-8 was spent in the Edmonton
region, and in the summer of 1848 he commenced his long
journey east, taking time to record the most beautiful
scenery in his course, and to depict the various types of
Indians with the most minute fidelity. An exhibition of the
fruits of his voyage was given in Toronto on his return.
Subsequently the collection was packed up and stored at
"Moss Park", the home of Senator Allan, although some of
them were reproduced for commercial circulation, and others
served as illustrations for the book above named. The
Senator continued a good friend, and in 1859 the
_Wanderings_ were dedicated to him.

Kane died in 1871, and his patron a quarter of a century
later. Gradually the Kane collection slipped out of memory
until the widow of Senator Allan offered it for sale to the
late Sir Edmund Osler for a handsome figure, and Osler
closed the bargain with a view to making it a permanent
possession of the people of Ontario. The transfer became
noised abroad, and from at least two large American museums,
Sir Edmund received offers that would place most men beyond
the dreams of avarice. True to his intent, and to save
himself further importunity, Sir Edmund deeded the pictures
to the Royal Ontario Museum long before its present premises
were built, and for some years they hung in the old
examination hall of the University of Toronto. They have
been an object of pilgrimage with many ethnologists, and
historians of the North American Indian. One picture,
especially, is invaluable from an archological standpoint
because it is the only record of the ancient method of
spinning among the Coast Indians. The canvases depict not
only individual types but war dances, buffalo hunts,
conjuring feats, councils--all the pursuits and diversions
of savage life--with unimpeachable accuracy. As a painter
Kane's style was rather formal and mannered, for his was a
day preceding that chromatic and tonal analysis which
produced "impressionism". and all the atmospheric
perfections of the best modern landscape painting.

Sad to relate Paul Kane died a disappointed man, though
recognized abroad in his true eminence. The late Sir Daniel
Wilson, President of the University of Toronto, who wrote
the preface to the _Wanderings_, said: "My memory of the
veteran artist is of a gruff and moody man, embittered by
the sparing gratitude of a people to whose information and
pleasure he had sacrificed his life. 'Better break stones by
the wayside; your work will then be appreciated' was the
encouraging comment he gave to young artists." Here we have
the unassuagable grievance of the artistic temperament!
Perhaps Paul Kane was at times consoled by pre-vision of the
posthumous fame that now surrounds his name. At any rate he
was one of the earliest prophets of the future of the
Canadian West, its climate, fertility, and possibilities.




THE POWERS OF THE ATTORNEY-GENERAL


Turning the pages of an old-fashioned _Commonplace Book_,
dating from the very dawn of the nineteenth century, I came
across the heading "Attorney-General", and was surprised to
find statements which are almost in accord with the views of
a type of political agitator who periodically springs up in
many parts of America, and who would exclude lawyers from
public office. Often it is suggested that a farmer might act
as attorney-general and send for such legal assistance as he
needs. In most agrarian administrations in the Canadian
provinces, the attorney-general has been "like a rich jewel
in an Ethiop's ear", the sole representative of the legal
profession in the government.

It is enough to make any lawyer, who may have aspired to
such office, quail to read the words of my old commentator
on this historic functionary:

"Attorney- General--an officer of the Crown, armed by the
laws of England, or by immemorial usage, with powers,
apparently inconsistent with a free constitution, and which
it has been the earnest wish of many great and many good
men, to see moderated and restrained."

I have known a good many gentlemen who have held the office
of Attorney-General in various provinces of Canada, and as a
rule found them to be mellow and genial, with a professional
_savoir faire_ which evoked no feeling that they should be
moderated and restrained. But on looking into the history
and prerogatives of the office, I learn that the
Attorney-General may, if he wants to, be very formidable and
objectionable indeed.

Traditionally, in Great Britain he has precedence in all
courts, including the House of Lords, even though he himself
is usually a member of the House of Commons. He is a Cabinet
minister with a good deal more power than most of his
colleagues; for they are supposed to consult with him and
take his advice in connection with all legal questions that
may arise in their departments. And, above all, he has
extraordinary powers in the matter of initiating
prosecutions. Consequently, it was very important, for the
monarchs and governments of other days, when absolutist
ideas were more prevalent than they are now, to have an
Attorney-General of like sentiments, who could be relied
upon to use his powers to lay by the heels any individual
obnoxious to the throne or the administration.

Nominally, the Attorney-General has the same powers for good
or evil in the provinces of Canada; but it is only on rare
occasions that he makes drastic use of them. We do sometimes
get a glimpse of his iron hand, however. Not many years ago
a representative of the Attorney-General of Ontario appeared
in court and ordered that a suit for the nullification of a
marriage should not proceed, and the court perforce obeyed.
On another occasion an Attorney-General of an Eastern
province initiated a prosecution, on one hour's notice, of a
group of real estate dealers residing in Calgary, and they
were forthwith arrested and sent two thousand miles away for
trial. Such incidents show that any Attorney-General, by
virtue of his office, has a long reach and sharp teeth.

The reason why the author of the old _Commonplace Book_, to
which I have alluded, held the opinion that an
Attorney-General should be shorn of some of his authority,
was that in his time, (_circa_ 1800), such officials were
not slow to use it in defiance of public opinion. It was a
grievance that, in the filing of informations and carrying
on of what were called _ex officio_ prosecutions, he was
not directed by the previous enquiry of a grand jury, nor
controlled by the established forms of any court, but on his
own mere motion could "give a name to, and put any
construction he pleased on the conduct, the writings, or
even the thoughts, of any person whatever".

His proceedings were commenced at that time without any
previous affidavit, and even when acquitted, the defendant
found himself without redress and saddled with heavy and
ruinous costs. In England during the eighteenth century it
is unquestionable that various Attorneys-General made use of
their powers to ruin unfriendly journalists; but their acts
of oppression seem to have had little effect in suppressing
the stream of abusive pamphlets that sprang up around every
Governmental act of importance.

The old critic I have quoted made a very acute analysis of
the manner in which even well-disposed law officers of this
rank could be cajoled into committing acts of tyranny to
oblige the Government or the sovereign: "Another
circumstance which has attached suspicion to this mode of
proceeding," he says, "is that the Attorney-General is a law
officer removable at pleasure, and placed in the high road
to promotion; a trying situation dangerous to human virtue,
which is not always sufficiently powerful to make a man
decide in favour of conscience, duty, and honour, against a
good place, the solicitations of a minister, or the mandates
of his master." Fortunately, owing to the different
character of our constitutional system, such dangers do not
exist in this country.

In other times, the wide powers vested in the
Attorney-General were not without their defenders. Crown
lawyers replied to critics that the licentiousness of the
press had carried it beyond all bounds of decency and truth;
that kings and ministers were constantly exposed by artful
seditious writers to hatred and contempt; that in
proceedings for libels against the Government, juries were
notoriously partial to the accused; and that even in
aggravated cases of slander a verdict could not be obtained
for the Crown. Therefore, it was held that a judicial and
more summary method, free from the inconveniences of popular
restraint was, for urgent reasons, absolutely necessary. It
is clear that in the eighteenth century royalty was not so
popular as it is to-day, and the ministers who pandered to
the whims of royalty were even more disliked than their
masters. Juries were admittedly influenced by the temper of
the times, which regarded with distrust any proceedings by
the Attorney-General. A general cry against them echoed
throughout Great Britain in the days of George III and his
son, the Prince Regent. This, says our critic, "Has been
considered by many as a sufficient reason for modifying and
restraining them; nothing in general being so likely to
counteract the impartial administration of justice as a
defendant coming into court, with every appearance of having
been rigorously or unfairly proceeded against."

"It is," he adds, "the opinion of several sound lawyers,
whom I could easily name, and whose inclinations in favour
of the liberty of the subject will never be numbered with
their faults--it is their decided opinion, that whenever the
Attorney-General commences a prosecution, the defendant, as
in other cases, ought to be permitted to show cause, why the
information should not be granted. This rational and
salutary concession will still leave ample discretionary
power in the breast of a court; would deprive many a
plausible superficial declaimer against our constitution of
a powerful commonplace argument, and refusing it cannot be
defended, on any plea of justice, common sense, or good
design."

As the nineteenth century progressed, the Attorney-General
ceased to be the hated figure he had formerly been, and the
office was restored to public esteem by the good behaviour
of those who held it. With the gradual extension of the
franchise, it became necessary for governments, of which the
chief law officer was a member, to avoid acts likely to
bring them into public odium, and to refrain from
prosecutions which possessed even the colour of unfairness.
When the Attorney-General of that day undertook to fasten
charges of gross misconduct on Queen Caroline after the
accession of George IV in 1820, both he and his sovereign
tasted of the public displeasure, despite the fact that the
proof of her guilt with an Italian lover of plebeian origin
was practically conclusive. After Victoria began to reign,
the conduct of the law officers of the Crown in England
became so discreet and tactful that the ancient reproach
against the office of Attorney-General was wiped out. The
men selected for the post by the dozen or more Prime
Ministers who have held office in the past eighty years have
almost invariably been lawyers of high probity and ability;
and sometimes men of great personal popularity. They have
been impelled to maintain good behaviour because they have
usually represented in Parliament large urban centres which
would be quick to resent anything that resembled undue use
of their powers, and to visit that resentment both on the
individual and his party.

The Attorney-General of to-day, both in Great Britain and
Canada, eats out of the public's hand, so to speak.




THE PERMANENCE OF PATRONAGE


In this country there is no more hardy perennial as a
newspaper topic than "Abolition of patronage,"--which, as
that dear friend of my youth, Euclid, would say,--is absurd.
The politician who promises to _abolish_ patronage has
either never taken the trouble to acquaint himself fully
with the English language, or else he is the type of
individual, prevalent in most democracies, who regards
language as a useful medium wherewith to deceive the
multitude. The voluble talker who could really perform such
a feat ought also to be clever at levitation, materializing
the spirits of the dead, and other marvels which most of us
have heard about but never expect to witness. No man, woman,
party, corporation, or government, with anything to bestow
in the way of a job, a gift, or ordinary business custom,
can escape the exercise of patronage. All anyone can do is
to try and exercise it as intelligently, honestly, and
thriftily as possible, and the best of us never wholly
succeed.

Under the circumstances, then, an outcry for the abolition
of patronage is not unlike a demand for the abolition of
parallelograms. Let us suppose that a political coterie,
anxious to display its true reforming zeal, should discover
that there was something base and symbolic of the obscene in
the form of a parallelogram; and should declare its
intention of striking at the very root of this source of
moral corruption and national decadence. Let us suppose that
a number of newspapers anxious for something to shout about
should take up the cry against parallelograms; and create
the impression among large numbers of people who had never
taken the trouble to find out what a parallelogram was, that
the further toleration of this hated geometrical form was
inimical to the interests of the people--the people between
the plow-handles especially. We should then have a movement
not unlike that which periodically arises with regard to
patronage. Let us suppose that this coterie should actually
try to abolish parallelograms and the analogy would be
complete.

Seriously speaking, patronage, though an ineradicable factor
in human existence, has a history, in certain aspects,
unsavoury. The seven definitions of the word in _Webster's
International Dictionary_ awaken memories of human
infirmity and often of governmental turpitude. Thus:

A. [In ecclesiastical law the protection or defense of the
rights of the church in a benefice carrying with it the
right of presentation; now the right of presentation to a
church or ecclesiastical benefice; advowson.] Here the
horrid head of simony rises; the traffic in sacred things;
the sale for cash of ecclesiastical preferments. Certainly
patronage in its religious connections had once a bad name,
but the time-spirit has changed all that.

B. [Guardianship as of a saint; tutelary care
(_obsolete_).] This is certainly the most beautiful
association attaching to the word patronage, but it is
doubtful whether it longer sways the popular imagination.
Angelic favour is now regarded as too intangible to be
counted on.

C. [Special countenance or support, favor, encouragement, or
aid given to a person, work or cause; as the _patronage of
letters_, or patronage given to a singer.] Literary men
long ago rose against the humiliation involved in the
old-fashioned patronage of letters, anent which Dr. Johnson
wrote some very warm words to the Earl of Chesterfield. Not
so singers and musicians. They like it, whether it be the
encouragement of the critic, or the practical generosity of
the musical philanthropist. The more of that kind of
patronage the better. And in the case of men of letters the
British Government has in a measure taken over the functions
once performed by noblemen of literary tastes. It does
occasionally exercise patronage to assure the poor poet
means of subsistence.

D. [Protection or defense. Roman; _obsolete_.] This is one
of the black chapters in the history of patronage. The
corrupt acts of powerful Roman patrons in behalf of their
clients in the early days of the Republic are said to have
provoked a popular rising. Most of us have read the legend
of the centurion, Virginius, whose fair daughter was torn
from him by a grave abuse of patronage on the part of the
cruel decemvir, Appius Claudius. Virginius took a short way
of dealing with this kind of patronage by slaying his
daughter; but historical critics relegate the tale to the
same category as that of Jonah and the whale.

E. [The right or control of nomination to political office;
also the offices, contracts, honors, etc., which a public
officer may bestow by favor.] And here we jump right from
ancient Rome to Canada in the twentieth century. We are up
against the ineluctable fact that when an office is vacant
someone must be appointed to fill it; and it cannot be
filled without the exercise of patronage by somebody or
other. Who shall bestow the favour? That is the problem of
which no solution can satisfy everybody. It is like trying
to abolish the parallelogram.

F. [A cant or colloquial phrase for business custom.] This
brings in the individual. We all exercise patronage when we
buy anything, not always intelligently; but we certainly
expect governments to be wiser than ourselves. In Canada
this has been the real source of any corruption that has
prevailed in connection with patronage; but it is probable
that matters are a good deal better than they used to be. No
government can abolish this kind of patronage, but it can
take the curse off it.

G. [Condescending favor; patronizing.] Here we are at the
end of the string. Condescension is not a vice from which
our politicians suffer; so the seventh definition may be
dismissed.

It is clear that the word patronage has very wide
applications and that it is not likely to be dropped from
the English vocabulary yet awhile. Like human nature, it has
its roots in both good and evil.

Frankly, I think it must be admitted that Canadians have
done a good deal of recent years to modify the evils of
patronage. So far as appointments are concerned, few of us
could, if put to the test, name one made, even under the old
system, whereby party committees had a voice in the
decision, that was really disgraceful. The outright cruelty
involved in the American phrase, "To the victors belong the
spoils", has never found acceptance in Canada. And as for
corruption in connection with government purchases, that,
too, is to-day more a matter of envious gossip than of
actual fact. A government must buy somewhere and it cannot
abolish profits in connection with its own purchases. The
end to be striven for is to abolish the abuses of patronage;
and these have long been light with us. In Great Britain
much progress has been made in the same direction. The
heyday of wasteful and corrupt patronage really ended a
considerable while ago. In the eighteenth century and up to
the middle of the nineteenth, the friendly exercise of
patronage in England constituted an enormous source of
waste; though it had its agreeable features for the
governing classes. Sir Robert Walpole, afterwards first Earl
of Oxford, enriched himself and his family connections
enormously while Prime Minister of England, and few
apparently, except the author of _The Beggar's Opera_,
thought the worse of him for it.

A picture of conditions a hundred years ago is to be found
in the autobiography of John Robinson Planche, once famous
both as dramatist and antiquary. Planche's mother had a
staunch patron in Isabella, Duchess of Rutland, and in 1800,
when he was four years old, Planche was offered an ensign's
commission in the army by the Duke, which his mother
declined for him owing to her horror of the military life.
"Oh, happy days of England!" says Planche, "when babes were
really born with golden spoons in their mouths, and could be
made colonels of regiments, commissioners of excise, or
masters of the Mint, in their cradles and without
competitive examination!"

Planche cites a remarkable example of this "precocity of
preferment" that came under his own observation. The wife of
a Cabinet Minister had promised to stand god-mother to an
infant, and, calling on its parents a day or two before the
ceremony, expressed her regret that her Lord had nothing of
importance left at his disposal; all he could do for Her
Ladyship's godson was to put his name on the pension list as
a superannuated general postman. The offer was accepted and
though the babe lived to upwards of eighty and amassed great
wealth he still remained a superannuated general postman,
and drew the pension with much satisfaction. "He died," says
Planche, "a few days after one payment was due, and one of
his executors came to town to receive the money and announce
his decease. On asking the clerk who paid him if it were
necessary to produce a certificate of death, he was
answered, "Oh, no, not in the least--I will take your word
for it. My father paid this pension as long as he lived, and
I have paid it myself for the last thirty years. I'm quite
sure Mr. -------- must be dead by this time."

Patronage was patronage when George III was King.




SIR ALLAN MACNAB'S GRANDDAUGHTER


In 1923 there was published a very interesting book,
_Indiscretions of Lady Susan_, which at the time was widely
commented on in England and America, though it disappointed
many because it was not really indiscreet. It is a book with
a sentimental interest for Canadians, because its author,
Lady Susan Townley, is, in part, of Canadian ancestry, the
granddaughter of Sir Allan MacNab of "Dundurn", Hamilton,
Ontario, and it is clear that she inherited some of the
characteristics of that dominating personage. Prior to her
marriage, in 1896, to the distinguished diplomat Sir Walter
Beaupr Townley, she was Lady Susan Mary Keppel, a daughter
of the late seventh Earl of Albemarle. Though she makes no
allusion to the fact, her father at one time held an
important position in Canada. Before he succeeded to the
Earldom he was known as William Coutts Keppel, Viscount
Bury, and in the mid-fifties came to Canada as A.D.C. to the
Governor-General, Sir Edmund Head. At that time Canada's
Department of Indian Affairs was under the control of the
Imperial Government, and its offices part of the Vice-Regal
patronage. Early in 1854, Lord Elgin appointed Laurence
Oliphant, a man of strange eccentric nature, who
subsequently became a famous author, to the post of
Superintendent General of Indian Affairs in this country.
When Lord Elgin left Canada six months later, Oliphant
resigned and Sir Edmund Head, finding a vacancy on his
arrival to assume the post of Governor-General, appointed
Viscount Bury to the office, despite the fact that he was
then but twenty-two years of age. The future Earl of
Albemarle filled the post from Dec. 19, 1854, to Jan. 31,
1856, and on the whole did very well under difficult and
anomalous circumstances. Four years after his departure for
England, Imperial control of Indian Affairs ceased and was
invested in the Department of Crown Lands of the two Canadas
(now Ontario and Quebec). During his stay in this country
Lord Bury married Sophia Mary MacNab, the daughter of Sir
Allan Napier MacNab, Bart., Prime Minister of Canada in the
MacNab-Tach and MacNab-Morin administrations.

In the first chapter of this book Lady Susan tells much of
one of her grandfathers, George Keppel, the sixth Earl of
Albemarle, and for Canadians it is interesting to supplement
it by a few words about her other grandfather, Sir Allan
MacNab, whom she never saw. He was originally a Scottish
officer who had retired from the Army with the rank of
Colonel and settled in Hamilton nearly a century ago. There
he built "Dundurn Castle", one of the historic ornaments of
the city, where its ample grounds are now a public park. A
stern man of faultless rectitude, he was one of the ablest
statesmen of the old "Family Compact" era in Upper Canada.
He had a natural inclination for politics and in the
Assembly of Upper Canada was a valiant figure, so much hated
by William Lyon Mackenzie, himself a ruthless Scot, that
anything which MacNab proposed was sure of opposition from
the Toronto journalistic gadfly. MacNab had also a knack of
ruffling more moderate Liberals, like Hon. Robert Baldwin,
and it was on motion of the latter that he was once
committed to jail for refusing to answer the Speaker's
questions in one of the petty Parliamentary investigations
that preceded the rebellion of 1837.

When that crisis came, Colonel MacNab was placed in charge
of the defence of law and order in what is now Western
Ontario, and did his work so quickly and expeditiously that
the rising amounted to nothing in a military sense. His work
was not complete, however, for Mackenzie, who had escaped
from the Toronto authorities, seized Navy Island on the
Niagara River and there declared a Republic of Canada. It
was justly feared that he would succeed in obtaining armed
aid from the United States. To MacNab was assigned the task
of routing him out, and it was he who planned and ordered
the seizure and burning of the supply steamer, "Caroline",
which was supporting Mackenzie from his commissariat base,
Buffalo. This peremptory measure finished Mackenzie's
"republic" and gave Canada an international controversy in
exchange; for the Governor of New York State, Hon. W. H.
Seward (afterward Lincoln's Secretary of State and an avowed
advocate of the forcible annexation of Canada) was disposed
to make a _casus belli_ of the episode.

The international difficulties created by the burning of the
"Caroline" had no detrimental effect on the fortunes of
MacNab. He received a baronetcy from the British Government
and became the political idol of the "men of the Gore", now
the garden spot of Canada, embracing the fruit-growing
districts of the Niagara and Lake Erie region. After the Act
of Union he became the natural leader of the Tory party in
opposition to the Baldwin and Lafontaine coalition. But he
was a man of progress nevertheless--one of the first
Canadians to see the possibilities of railroad development
and to endeavour to promote it; one of the first to
recognize the future of the "magnetic telegraph", and a
pioneer in endeavours to secure a stable banking system for
Canada. Unfortunately his later years were embittered by his
unworkable disposition, the infirmities of which were
intensified by gout. He died filled with an unconquerable
jealousy of his brilliant young successor in Tory
leadership, John A. Macdonald, but this not unfamiliar
weakness of aged men should not dim the memory of his
splendid services in his prime.

At the outset I had not intended to talk so much about Lady
Susan's maternal grandfather, but the interesting things she
tells us of her paternal grandfather, George Keppel, sixth
Earl of Albemarle, set me thinking of MacNab. The lot of
Keppel lay in far different channels. He was born in 1799
and was the playmate of Princess Charlotte, daughter of
George IV, who, but for her tragic death in childbirth as a
girl-wife, would have become Queen of England instead of the
revered Victoria. He was able to relate to his grandchildren
delightful memories of that frolicksome princess. So early
were boys taken into the army a century ago that he was
appointed to a commission in the 14th Foot, then on service
in Flanders against Buonoparte, when he had just turned 16.
Fourteen of the officers and 300 of the privates of his
regiment were under twenty. Yet these boys fought bravely at
Waterloo. Six months after they were ordered home to England
and found the country so satiated with glory that they
received but a cold reception. "If we had been convicts
disembarking from a hulk we could hardly have received less
consideration," the old Earl used to say. "It's us as pays
they chaps" was the remark of a bumpkin as they came ashore,
and this sentiment seemed to voice popular opinion. The
sixth Earl of Albemarle continued to be much identified with
the Court, as are his descendants. He attended the young
Queen Victoria when she opened her first Parliament in 1838,
and on the occasion of her Coronation and marriage. His son,
Lord Bury, of whose Canadian experiences one has spoken, was
an amateur artist, and Lady Susan recalls him as always
sketching in his leisure moments. Of her mother, Sophia Mary
MacNab, she says: "Canadian brides were a novelty in England
at that time, and great was the excitement in London society
over this marriage. My mother was a beautiful girl, and soon
won her place in the affections of her young husband's
family; but she must have had her trials to bear, I fancy,
for, from being her father's constant companion in Canada,
sharing all the interests and anxieties of his high office
(her mother had died when she was only fourteen), she found
herself suddenly in a strange land, the wife of an eldest
son, under the careful chaperonage of a rather severe and
very dignified mother-in-law. When her first baby was
expected she was treated almost as an invalid, never allowed
to go out except in the carriage, and stair-climbing being
forbidden her by Lady Albemarle, the bell was rung and a
pompous pair of footmen arrived with a carrying-chair
whenever she wanted to go upstairs." It is interesting to
note that she survived this treatment and lived to bring
into the world a very large family of whom Lady Susan was
one of the youngest.

As to Lady Susan's own experiences, some American reviewers
were at first deeply disappointed to find them quite devoid
of Margotisms in the telling. It would have been well if she
had printed her last chapter first and then her critics
might have discovered that the title "Indiscretions" is
ironical. It arose in this way. In 1918, her husband, Sir
Walter Townley, then Minister at the Hague, discovered that
after long service in many parts of the earth, he was being
side-tracked to make way for untrained favourites of Rt.
Hon. Lloyd George. He put the case bluntly to a confidential
official of the Foreign Office, who told him that the cause
was "the indiscretions of Lady Susan". So she has written a
plain narrative of her experiences as a diplomat's wife in
Lisbon, Rome, Berlin, Peking, Constantinople, Palestine,
Washington, Buenos Ayres, Persia, and the Netherlands, to
justify herself. There are no very sensational revelations
in her book, but plenty of shrewd observation. It is evident
that Lady Susan was no cipher wherever she went. Probably
because of her family's connection with the British Royal
household, she was on more intimate terms with dynastic
personages than most diplomats' wives. Her personality made
her an intimate even in the palace of the Empress-Dowager of
China, who wielded a power exceeding that of any other woman
in all history. Glancing through her pages one pauses to
reflect on the stupendous changes in the fortunes of royalty
that have occurred in the past quarter of a century. Nearly
all the royal personages Lady Susan knew are either deposed
or dead, several by the assassin's hand. The most intimate
pictures that she gives are those of the ex-Kaiser and
China's Empress-Dowager. The latter, though certainly
villainous, was rather an ingratiating old personage.
Wilhelm, the quondam "All Highest", figures as an impulsive,
erratic, but not unattractive being, who, imagining himself
strong, was unconsciously swayed by others,--the eternal
tragedy of the egotist. It was, indeed, a lie spread by
Horatio Bottomley to the effect that she, Lady Susan, as the
wife of the British Minister of the Hague, had headed a
deputation of welcome to the Kaiser when he fled to Holland
on Nov. 10th, 1918, that led to a clash between the British
Foreign Office and Sir Walter Townley, which ended in the
latter's resignation. Townley rightly thought that the
Foreign Office should have definitely repudiated the charge,
whereas that institution had conceived a rooted prejudice
against Lady Susan as "indiscreet".

This was unfair in the extreme. Lady Susan during the war
rendered splendid and loyal service; first as one of the
deputy postal censors, where her knowledge of foreign
countries was invaluable; and later in the supply of news
from Holland. At the Hague she had access to all the leading
German newspapers, and spent hours every day summarizing
German press opinion on the progress of the war. The British
Government found these summaries so clear and judicious that
they issued them daily to the press of the world. Thus every
newspaper reader in America during the last year of the war
was unconsciously familiar with the work of Lady Susan as a
press correspondent.

It is clear that she was a journalist by instinct; and it is
disgusting to read of the manner in which she was hounded by
the Hearst press during her residence in Washington, where
her husband was Counsellor of British Embassy in 1905 and
1906. It was evidently hard for her to realize that the
class of readers to which Hearst caters is never so happy as
when it sees a woman of high position who cannot defend
herself, insulted and slandered. She made the initial
mistake, on coming to America, of treating inquisitive
reporters ironically and jocularly. As there is no being in
the world who takes himself so seriously as the average
Washington correspondent, this was akin to a sin against the
Holy Ghost, and she was made to suffer for it. But her
memoirs show her a wholesome, candid woman and a credit to
her Canadian ancestry.




FRANKLIN K. LANE'S LETTERS


A considerable number of native sons of the maritime
provinces of Canada have risen to eminence in the United
States. A most outstanding example was Franklin K. Lane,
Secretary of the Interior in the Cabinet of Woodrow Wilson
from 1913 to 1919. Therefore Canada has especial interest in
the volume, published in 1922, entitled Letters of _Franklin
K. Lane_. His was in many respects the strongest and most
interesting personality among Wilson's advisers during the
crucial period of the great war, and it was felt by
Democrats that, if the barrier of his Canadian birth could
have been overcome, he was his party's "man of destiny".
Such hopes would have been unavailing in any event, since he
died on May 18, 1921, at Rochester, Minnesota, following an
operation for gall stones. Lane was born near Charlottetown,
P.E.I., on July 15th, 1864, in a low white farm-house that
still stands and is screened by hawthorn trees. He was the
eldest of four children of Christopher S. Lane, originally a
Presbyterian minister, whom chronic bronchitis had compelled
to give up preaching. To support his family the elder Lane
became a dentist, and in 1871 ill-health prompted him to
remove to Napa, California. Franklin was early compelled to
earn his own livelihood, and put himself through the
University of California by working as a newspaper reporter.
Subsequently he studied law and was called to the bar of
California in 1889. Owing to his oratorical ability and
brilliant mind he was a success almost from the start. He
distinguished himself as corporation counsel of the city of
San Francisco, and in 1902, when but thirty-eight, was
Democratic candidate for Governor. When, ten years later, it
became Woodrow Wilson's duty to select a cabinet
representative from the Pacific Coast, Lane was accepted as
the most eminent Democrat in that section, and a man
especially expert in transportation and development
problems.

The elder Lane was of Ulster stock, and his wife pure
lowland Scottish. The son's love of her was so deep that he
says he was enough of a Catholic to pray to the only saint
he has known,--his mother. Though he was regarded as a man
of judicial temperament, there was in him a strong
undercurrent of emotion. In one letter he whimsically
laments that he is not a phlegmatic, stolid Englishman
instead of a combination of dreamy Irishman, and dour
Calvinistic Scot. This of course involves a conventional
delusion. The world is full of mercurial Englishmen, the
most constructive dreamers on earth. Undoubtedly there was a
strong vein of ideality in Lane and a wide range of
sympathies and interests. Though identified with the
Democratic party, his real political hero was Theodore
Roosevelt, whom he rated with Henry George, and Professor
William James, the famous psychologist, as the three most
important influences in modern American life. Lane was by
temperament the best type of Progressive. Countless folk of
both sexes imagine themselves Progressives, when they are
merely Mutationists, enamoured of change,--change of
religion, change of economic system, change of matrimonial
partnerships. California is the chief stamping ground of
Mutationists. What makes most self-styled Progressives so
fatuous and such a drawback to real progress is the fact
that very few of them have a background of culture, and
consequently no power of self-criticism. But Lane was a man
of real culture, with the faculty of
self-criticism,--consequently his public services, like
those of Roosevelt, were essentially practical.

The Canadian reader of his letters is interested chiefly in
his self-revelations and in the part he played in the Great
War. The latter was not so great as he would like to have
made it. In the early stages of the conflict he was absorbed
in the manifold details of the Department of the Interior.
Later he became a member of the Committee of National
Defence; but it was the policy of Woodrow Wilson to restrict
the activities of that body as far as possible; and after
the United States became a belligerent, to exclude his
cabinet advisers from his counsels. For a man of action like
Lane this was hard to bear, though it is rather clear that
he, like most other Western Americans, failed to understand
the war during its early stages. Though Pro-British in
feeling, he shared the feeling of irritation at British
control of the seas, which restricted American trade with
Germany. He did not grasp the fact that the Allied naval
policy was dictated by the primary law of self-preservation.
He could only see "stubbornness", where the Allies
visualized disaster. But early in 1915 the "Lusitania"
episode cured him.

Shortly after the long course of official letter-writing in
connection with that atrocity began, he wrote: "I shall have
a few words to say upon the German note next Tuesday (the
regular day for cabinet meetings). They will be short and
somewhat ugly Anglo-Saxon words, utterly undiplomatic, and I
hope some of them will be used." He seems to have thought
that Woodrow Wilson could be induced to speak out, and held
that the Germans thought the administration was bluffing
because the tone of the United States communication was
polite. "We have talked Princetonian English to a
water-front bully," he said. At this time the late William
Jennings Bryan's career as Secretary of State had come to an
inglorious end, and Lane was spoken of as his successor, but
he overheard the remark, "Oh, my God, that would never do,
never do; born in Canada!" "So you see I am cut out from all
these great honours. Is this visiting the sins of the
fathers upon the children?" he comments.

When, early in 1917, Germany, satisfied that the United
States would never go to war, went to the length of ordering
American shipping off the seas, Lane was happy because the
inevitable crisis had come at last, though utterly
distrustful of the President's capacity for action. On
February 9th he resolved to write personal notes of the
progress of events to his brother, George W. Lane, with a
view to future publication, and it is to this resolve we owe
the best pages in his _Letters_. Wilson held that nothing
should be done just then,--and that they should delay until
the Germans committed an "overt act". The American lives
that would be lost seem to have been of small concern in his
eyes. The President said he was "passionately" determined
not to overstep the slightest punctilio of honour in dealing
with Germany, and emphatically refused to stop the German
crews known to be gutting interned German ships in American
harbours. This was madness. Within a year Lane and other
public officials were straining every effort to supply ships
to save the Allies from starvation, and the interned ships
purposely rendered useless would have been invaluable. While
the President was trying to find excuses for
procrastination, Lane set about the business of mobilizing
national industries for war. But he raged inwardly that the
Army and Navy were "standpat", and the task of moving them
to action was seemingly hopeless. "No wonder the Kaiser
sizes us up as cowards," he wrote. A tempestuous scene
occurred at a cabinet meeting of Feb. 25, 1917. The
President accused four of his advisers, Messrs. Lane,
Houston, Redfield, and McAdoo of appealing to the _code
Duello_ and trying to force him into war. He was savagely
abusive of his son-in-law, Mr. McAdoo. "He comes out right
but he is slower than a glacier and things are mighty
disagreeable, whenever anything has to be done. I don't know
whether the President is an internationalist or a pacifist,
but he seems to be very mildly national--his patriotism is
covered over with a film of philosophic humanitarianism,
that certainly does not make for 'punch' at such a time as
this", was Lane's comment on this crisis.

As everyone knows, the President was at last forced into
action, but even after he had declared war, the vices of
inaction and deadlock continued to paralyze the hand of
Uncle Sam. Once Lane exclaims: "Politics, politics, curse of
the country! It has gotten into the whole war programme",
and we learn of deplorable feuds within the cabinet. Mr.
McAdoo left on his desk for an entire week a joint message
from Lloyd George, Clemenceau and Orlando stating that
Britain, France, and Italy were threatened with starvation,
without drawing anyone's attention to it. The poltroonery,
or worse, of Josephus Daniels, who wished to keep the U. S.
Navy in harbour because it might be endangered, was
especially disgusting to Lane. The latter fully realized
that unless the submarine menace were checked, and losses
met by more and more ships, Germany would win; and finally
took his own measures to better the situation. By publishing
the facts as to the submarine danger, through private
channels which were his as an old time newspaper man, he so
roused public sentiment that the cabinet was forced to act.
In this campaign he made especial use of the New York
_World_, where he enjoyed confidential relations with one
of the ablest of modern editors, the late Frank Cobb. The
most extraordinary revelation in the book is that, even
after the United States had been at war for a year, the
President ignored the existence of the conflict at cabinet
meetings; nothing was talked of that would "interest a
nation, a family, or a child." But the pressure which the
President's friends had unceasingly exerted was beginning to
tell, and on March 16, 1918, Lane was able to write: "We do
things fast here, but I never realized before how slow we
are in getting started. It takes a long time for us to get a
new stride. I did not think that this was true industrially.
I have known it was true politically for a long time,
because this (the United States) was the most backward and
conservative of all the democracies. We take up new
machinery of government so slowly. But industrially it is
also true. When told to change step we shift and stumble and
halt and hesitate and go through all kinds of awkward
misses. This has been true as to ships and aeroplanes and
guns, big and little, and uniforms. Whatever the government
has itself done, has been tied by endless red tape."

Long before the war ended, Lane had already begun to lay
plans for the repatriation of American soldiers and he was
far-seeing as to the coming industrial crisis; but the
slowness of political action was apparent even here. By the
end of 1919 he had decided for private reasons to resign,
but waited until President Wilson's recovery from illness.
Later, while in retirement, he could not help sympathizing
with Woodrow Wilson in the hour of President Harding's
inauguration in March, 1921. "Not all the devices of Tumulty
(the President's ever-devoted secretary) for keeping alive
delusions of grandeur could offset those headlines," he
says.

An operation, which proved fatal, took place on May 6th,
1921, and Lane died on May 18th. In his room in the Mayo
Hospital at Rochester, Minnesota, was found a manuscript
written on the previous day in which he speculated on the
hereafter. The following sentences are significant: "For my
heart's content in that new land, I think I'd rather loaf
with Lincoln along a river bank. I know I could understand
him. I would not have to learn who were his friends and who
were his enemies, what theories he was committed to, and
what against. We could just talk and open our minds, and
tell our doubts and swap the longings of our hearts that
others never heard of. He wouldn't try to master me nor to
make me feel how small I was."




CIVIL WAR OPERATIONS IN CANADA


During the Great War the people of both Canada and the
United States were brought to a sharp consciousness of what
spy operations, long a theme of popular romance, really
meant. The excitements of that period, and the attempts,
some abortive and some successful, to destroy lines of
communication and munition plants in America recalled to a
few of the older generation a period in the latter part of
1864, when Toronto and Montreal were hotbeds of conspiracies
against the Northern States, originated by officers of the
Confederate army who had been detailed for that purpose by
Mr. Seddon, the Southern Secretary for War. The plots of
these men, mostly youthful soldiers, whose daredevil
characteristics had been tested on the battlefield, finally
assumed such serious proportions as to alarm the people of
the North and to imperil cordial relations between the
United States and Canada. Piracy, robbery, murder,
incendiarism, were the charges on which a number of them
finally faced trial in the Canadian and American courts, and
one or two lost their lives because of deeds plotted and
financed on Canadian soil.

The most complete account of their proceedings is to be
found in a book published in 1906 by John W. Headley, of
Louisville, Ky., entitled _Confederate Operations in Canada
and New York_. The law reports of the extradition
proceedings against Bennett G. Burley (afterwards famous as
Bennett Burleigh, the British war correspondent) for piracy
and robbery on Lake Erie, and against Lieut. Bennett H.
Young for robbery and murder in connection with a raid on
St. Albans, Vt., led by him, also give many details. The
_Memoirs of a Great Detective_, published in England twenty
years ago by the late John W. Murray, Chief of the Bureau of
Criminal Investigation for Ontario, and who at the time of
the Civil War was attached to the American secret service,
also throw a romantic glamour over the campaign of
"frightfulness" which the Confederacy had adopted as a last
resort.

These attempts, the most sensational of which was the plot
to burn the business section of the city of New York on the
night of November 25, 1864, were chiefly frustrated by a
secret service agent of remarkable abilities. Godfrey P.
Hyams, who lived in Toronto in the guise of a Confederate
officer and was the confidant of Col. Jacob Thompson, who,
in company with C. C. Clay, Jr., served as Commissioner of
the Confederacy to Canada. Hyams managed to check most of
the projects without revealing his identity as a spy until
it was necessary for him to give evidence in the Canadian
courts.

Mr. Headley in his book is frank in his statements as to the
various plots in which he, in company with Col. Richard
Martin, Capt. Cole, Capt. Hines, Capt. Kennedy, Acting
Master Burley, Acting Master Beall, Lieut. Bennett Young,
and may others were engaged. Owing to the sympathy of a
large section of the Canadian public with the South--a
sympathy caused by the "Trent" affair--and the fact that
Canada was at that time filled with refugees from Northern
prison camps, the conspirators were able, at first, to plot
almost openly. Col. Thompson, who received his orders to
come to Canada as Commissioner in April, 1864, made his
headquarters at the Queen's Hotel, a hostelry which is still
standing, then overlooking Toronto Bay. His aides, who made
their way to Canada, via Halifax or Chicago, from time to
time, lived quietly in boarding houses, going and coming on
their missions with little or no risk until the situation
became intolerable to the Canadian Government.

In a report to Judah P. Benjamin dated at Toronto on
December 3, 1864, Col. Thompson gives a plain, unvarnished
narrative of what had been attempted during his seven months
of service in Toronto, and the calmness with which he
outlines operations of a most desperate, criminal character
is rather appalling. All the officers who were afterward
apprehended urged in justification of their deeds the
burning of Atlanta, Georgia, and the devastation of large
tracts of Southern territory by Northern generals. The
Confederate Government had been careful to give all their
agents commissions as army or naval officers, so that in the
event of detection they could fall back on the plea that
they were engaged in legitimate belligerent operations. They
were also instructed to avoid enlisting Canadians in their
enterprises, so that they could not be charged with breach
of the existing neutrality laws.

The first task that Col. Thompson set himself on his arrival
in Canada was to endeavour to provoke an armed rising in the
north-western states with a demand for an immediate peace.

There existed at that time an organization headed chiefly by
Irishmen, known as "The Sons of Liberty", which was strongly
sympathetic towards the South. Through this society, it was
believed that by a bold stroke the States of Illinois,
Indiana, and Ohio could be seized, the States of Kentucky
and Missouri lifted from their prostrate condition, and the
war ended in sixty days. It is singularly suggestive of what
happened in the United States during the late European war,
that Col. Thompson first thought it wise to organize a
series of peace meetings at Chicago, Peoria, and other
places to prepare the public mind for a rising, and he sent
agents and money from Toronto for that purpose.

Arrangements were first suggested for a rising at various
cities on the day of the opening of the Democratic
Convention at Chicago in July, 1864. Chicago was regarded as
a pivotal point because 8,000 Confederate prisoners were
confined at Camp Douglas, and it was thought they could be
released and armed. Disagreements led to the postponement of
the rising until Election day, in November.

Then the first of the series of misfortunes happened which
were to wreck all the plans of the Confederate conspirators.
On November 7 and succeeding days the ringleaders and the
emissaries of Col. Thompson were arrested and taken to
Cincinnati for trial by a military court. Some were found
guilty of sedition and given comparatively light sentences,
others were freed. But "The Sons of Liberty" were hopelessly
disorganized, and hopes of a seizure of the north-western
states were at an end.

Col. Thompson, however, still pinned his hopes to secret
organization, and helped to finance a new society, known as
the "Order of the Star", which was pledged to offer armed
resistance in case of another draft, but before it could
accomplish anything the nest of conspirators at Toronto had
been broken up.

He and his staff, while engaged in promoting pacifist
political movements in the United States, had also turned
their attention to a more practical matter, the destruction
of American shipping on Lake Erie and the release of 3,000
Confederate prisoners on Johnson's Island, a prison camp
opposite Sandusky, Ohio. Officers entrusted with this work
were Capt. Cole, Acting Master Beall, Acting Master Burley,
and Lieut. S. B. Davis. It was arranged that Cole should go
to Sandusky and worm his way into the friendship of the
officers of the United States gun-boat "Michigan", on guard
at Johnson's Island. He arranged a party for its officers at
Sandusky for the night of September 19, 1864, at which he
intended to drug their wine.

On the same night Burley, Beall, and Davis, who had gone to
Detroit and raised a small band of followers, boarded a
passenger steamer, the "Philo Parsons", which ran between
Detroit and Sandusky. At Middle Bass Island, where she
stopped for wood, they whipped out their revolvers, drove
the passengers ashore, seized by force another small
steamer, the "Island Queen", and proceeded to Johnson's
Island, intent on seizing the "Michigan" while the officers
were ashore and her crew asleep. When they reached the
"Michigan", they found her lighted up and ready for attack.

Cole was under arrest at Sandusky, having been apprehended
by Murray, the young secret service man, who forty years
later wrote the story, and who had, under the direction of
Hyams, gained Cole's confidence. Cole insisted on his
belligerent rights, and finally became a prisoner of war.
Burley and his companions beached the "Parsons" on Canadian
soil and escaped in various directions. He and Davis were
finally arrested by the Canadian authorities, after lying in
hiding in various villages, and extradition proceedings
against them on charges of robbery and piracy proved a
_cause clbre_ in Canadian legal annals. The charges were
fought on every technical point, and the Canadian courts
ordered the return of the men to the United States.
Representations by Mr. Mason, one of the protagonists of the
"Trent" affair, and later Confederate agent in London, that
they were officers engaged on a legitimate belligerent
enterprise led, however, to an order for their release from
the British Colonial Secretary.

New proceedings were taken, and were in progress when the
war ended. Burley was ultimately released, and became famous
as a war correspondent for the London _Daily Telegraph_. Of
him it may be remarked that one of his first services to the
South after he came from Scotland was somewhat like the
alleged exploits of the German agent, Capt. Fay, in the late
war, for on one occasion he swam across the Potomac and
attached an infernal machine to a Northern gunboat. It was
Beall's misfortune that he escaped the Canadian authorities.
Three months later he was caught, in company with others, in
the act of trying to wreck a train at Dunkirk, near Buffalo.
He was taken to Fort Lafayette, New York, tried on both
counts, convicted, and hanged.

The only Confederate operation on Canadian soil which
produced important results was the raid on St. Albans, Vt.,
of which neither Col. Thompson nor the spy, Hyams, knew
until after the event. Young was only twenty-one years old,
and an escaped prisoner from one of the Northern camps. He
planned the raid at Montreal; in co-operation with C. C.
Clay, Col. Thompson's fellow commissioner. In the old St.
Lawrence Hall, a famous hotel in that day, he raised a band
of thirty escaped prisoners, and provided them with
Confederate uniforms. Disguised with long overcoats, they
left Montreal in pairs, and assembled in St. Albans, a town
of five thousand inhabitants, near the international
boundary line, on October 18, 1864. At three o'clock in the
afternoon they formed ranks in the public square, threw off
their coats to show their uniforms, and proceeded to take
possession of the banks and fire the leading business
establishments. It took the population some time to rally,
but they did so, and several were killed on both sides. The
raiders were chased over the Canadian border, and Young and
others were arrested. Their extradition was asked for on
charges of murder, robbery, and incendiarism, and the
proceedings were fought at every point by numerous counsel
engaged by the Confederacy. After a brilliant defence by J.
J. C. Abbot, afterward for a brief period Prime Minister of
Canada, Young was acquitted on the ground that he was a
commissioned officer engaged on a legitimate belligerent
enterprise for his country. This decision did much to
increase the bad feeling between the United States and
Canada that already existed.

The most diabolical and, in the outcome, the most ludicrous
of all the plots that were hatched in Toronto was the
attempt to burn the business section of the city of New York
in November, 1864. Various projects to release Confederate
prisoners in the camps of the North had proved untenable,
and the young men on Col. Thompson's staff were chafing at
inactivity. These are the words in which the Commissioner
reports the matter to Mr. Benjamin:

"Having nothing else on hand, Col. Richard Martin expressed
a wish to organize a corps to burn New York city. He was
allowed to do so, and a most daring attempt has been made to
fire that city, but their reliance on the Greek fire has
proved a misfortune. It cannot be relied on as an agent in
such work."

According to Headley's narrative the date first fixed for
the burning of New York was election night, November 8, and
the party which left Toronto a few days before consisted of
himself, Col. Martin, Capt. Robert Cobb Kennedy, of
Louisiana; Lieuts Ashbrook and Harrington, of Kentucky; John
Price, of Maryland; James Chenault, of Kentucky, and one
other whom he does not remember. They were informed that on
election night there would be a rising in Chicago, and that
a Capt. Churchill had made arrangements to fire Cincinnati,
and Dr. Luke Blackburn was to perform similar service in
Boston. The agents in New York whom they were instructed to
meet were Capt. Longmire, of Missouri; James A. McMasters,
editor of the _Freeman's Journal_, and Henry McDonald, who
kept a music-store at 73 Franklin Avenue.

The only people in Canada who knew of the project, save this
party, were Col. Thompson, G. Hyams, and W. Larry McDonald,
a brother of the music merchant. When they reached New York
they found that Longmire's arrangements for supplying "Greek
fire" were incomplete, and the conflagration had to be
postponed until November 25. They loafed about New York,
went to hear Artemus Ward, the humorist, lecture, and Henry
Ward Beecher preach.

As days went on both McMasters and Longmire weakened. The
latter fled from the city, but gave Headley and his
companions the address of a house on Washington Place, where
the "Greek fire" was to be procured. Headley went to get it
and a valise full of bottles containing a liquid that looked
like water, but gave forth a phosphorescent smell was handed
to him. They had been informed that it would burn any
substance with extreme rapidity and could not be
extinguished by water.

Capt. Kennedy, who was later captured and hanged, seems to
have been the daredevil of the crowd. He remarked as the
party assembled at their rendezvous at 6 p.m, on November
25: "We'll make a spoon or spoil a horn." The plan followed
by the conspirators was that of engaging rooms at different
hotels which they had kept for them, and which they visited
from time to time and where they were to start the fires. At
seven o'clock they started on their routes, going to the
various hostelries, throwing the "Greek fire" into the
bedding of their rooms, and hastening away before the blaze
could be discovered. Nineteen hotels in all were set on fire
in this way. Headley fired the Astor House, the City Hotel,
the Everett House, and the United States Hotel. Col. Martin
fired the Hoffmann, the Fifth Avenue, the St. Denis, and two
others. The establishments other than those mentioned in
which blazes were started were the St. James, La Farge, St.
Nicholas, Metropolitan, Howard, Tammany, Brandreth's,
Gramercy Park, Hanford, New England, Belmont, Lovejoy's.

Kennedy, after he had attempted to fire the hotels on his
list, went to Barnum's Museum while it was crowded with
sight-seers and set fire to one of the stairways, and the
party then made attempts to fire the shipping on the North
River. Harrington tried to fire the Metropolitan Theatre,
and Ashbrook made a similar attempt in Niblo's Garden. Then
the conspirators mingled with the throng on the streets to
hear their work discussed. But it soon became apparent that
they had been fooled by the chemist who supplied the
incendiary liquid. Far from being inextinguishable, the
fires had in every instance been put out with little
difficulty. Next day the gang loafed about New York under
the very noses of the police and were surprised when they
purchased copies of the _Evening Post_ the next afternoon
to find that it gave minute particulars about every one of
them. Hyams, it was later shown, had, a month previously,
sent an emissary from Toronto with their names and
descriptions. The story was treated as ridiculous, and
though on their arrival they had been shadowed, the
detectives had given up the pursuit when nothing occurred on
election night and reported that the party were harmless
youths.

Even after the event no watch was placed on outgoing trains.
At nine p.m. on Saturday, November 26, twenty-four hours
after their crimes, they boarded the New York Central train
due to leave at 11 p.m. and after a very nervous two hours,
left New York unmolested. They arrived at Albany on Sunday
morning and found that no trains left for Suspension Bridge
until evening. They spent the day in various hotels, left
Albany unsuspected, and were on Canadian soil next morning.
Henry McDonald and an accessory in New York, a man named
Horton, who edited the _Day Book_, were arrested, but later
released.

Kennedy was the only man who faced trial on the actual
charge. A month later he and Ashbrook went on a spying
expedition to Michigan. They were betrayed once more by
Hyams to the authorities. Officers came on board a train
near Detroit to arrest them and apprehended Kennedy.
Ashbrook escaped by diving out of a window into a snow bank.
Kennedy was tried in Fort Lafayette and gave drunkenness as
his excuse for firing Barnum's Museum. In his confession he
said he had exceeded his orders in endangering the lives of
women and children. Appeals for mercy in influential
quarters failed, and he was hanged. The early close of the
war saved the lives of the others.

Col. Thompson, in his report to Mr. Benjamin, speaks of
agents who claim to have accomplished feats of incendiarism
at St. Louis, New Orleans, Louisville, Brooklyn,
Philadelphia, and Cairo, Ill., but suggests that not one
dollar of remuneration should be paid until the parties had
adduced proof. The agents directly under him were
unsalaried, but were reimbursed for expenses out of the half
million dollars or more of gold placed at the disposal of
himself and Mr. Clay.

After the failure to burn New York it became tolerably clear
that there was a traitor in the camp, and who he was became
certain when Hyams testified at Montreal and Toronto,
against Young, Burley, and their fellow prisoners. The
Northern authorities were so incensed that Major-Gen. Dix
issued an order directing his troops to pursue into Canada
any suspects, an order which was a few days later revoked on
representations by the British Ambassador.

The Canadian authorities had now become madly anxious to get
rid of their dangerous visitors, and the day of departure
was at hand. The last exploit engineered on Canadian soil
was a plan to wreck a train at Dunkirk, N.Y., which it was
supposed would convey seven Confederate officers from
Sandusky to Fort Lafayette. The affair was clumsily managed,
but all the conspirators, save Beall, who had been mixed up
in the "Philo Parsons" affair, and Anderson, who had been
with the New York party, again escaped to Canada. Anderson
saved his neck by turning State's evidence and may in
reality have been a Northern secret service man, as Longmire
was also suspected of being.

Beall, despite his plea that he was an officer concerned in
a legitimate belligerent enterprise, was hanged. After the
war, Col. Martin, the leader of the New York expedition, was
arrested and confined in irons at Fort Lafayette for seven
months, when President Johnson granted him an unconditional
pardon in the summer of 1866. By January of 1865, all the
conspirators, save the prisoners awaiting extradition, and
Col. Thompson, who stayed to finance their defence, had
departed from Canada, greatly to the relief of the much
harassed legal authorities.




LINCOLN AND CANADA: A FOOTNOTE TO HISTORY


Collectors of Lincolniana must be embarrassed for library
space by the great number of books and casual
writings,--some sane and illuminative, some exaggerated and
hysterical,--which increasingly celebrate the career of the
"Emancipator". In the unabated enthusiasm for his memory,
common to all English speaking countries to-day, it is not
generally realized that the reverence in which the name of
Lincoln is held is largely posthumous; that during his
lifetime his genius for statesmanship was not recognized by
great numbers of educated people, and those who did
recognize it were especially contemned by American
politicians as a class, not merely among his opponents, but
in the inner circles of his own party. Men who had sat in
his cabinet, not merely endeavoured to prevent his
nomination for a second term as President, but as late as
August, 1864, eight months before his assassination, the
pundits of the Republican party brought the strongest
pressure on him to withdraw his candidacy and hand over the
nomination to General Fremont. The charge against him was
that of inefficiency and half-heartedness in the conduct of
the Civil War--a type of allegation with which many of us
became too familiar in the recent conflict. That Lincoln was
a great statesman was recognized almost immediately after
the assassin's bullet had done its work, not merely in his
own country but in Great Britain; but unquestionably the
last year of his life was rendered sorrowful by the distrust
and treachery of supposed friends.

That Lincoln was nobler than many of his associates Canadian
statesmen of the Civil War period had reason to know, and it
is worth while recalling an episode of "secret diplomacy" in
which he proved his good-will to this country. The facts are
to be found in Lord Newton's monograph, _Lord Lyons: A
Record of Diplomacy_. Lord Lyons, it will be remembered,
was British Ambassador to Washington throughout the Civil
War, and later served in a similar capacity at Paris
throughout the Franco-Prussian War. Of the greatness of his
services during the former incumbency, little is remembered.
Suffice it to say that on his arrival in Washington, in
1859, he found matters between the North and South rapidly
approaching a crisis, and what was more alarming still from
the standpoint of a British diplomat, a movement among
influential politicians to unify the country by provoking a
war with Great Britain and forcibly annexing Canada. The
leader of this movement was William Henry Seward of New
York, the favourite of Eastern Republicans for the
Presidential nomination at the convention which nominated
Lincoln in 1860. In his canvass for this honour, Seward had
publicly advocated the annexation of Canada as a
compensation for any loss which might be occasioned to the
Union by the defection of the South, and he did not abandon
his ideas after he had accepted the portfolio of Secretary
of State in Lincoln's Cabinet early in 1861. No doubt he and
his friends had some curious idea that many Canadians would
welcome such a step, and as Lord Lyons put it in a letter to
Sir Edmund Head, the Canadian Governor, "The people
calculate here (I am afraid not without reason) upon being
effectively aided in an inroad upon Canada by the Irish
Secret Societies which have been formed, especially in the
State of New York, nominally for the purpose of invading
Ireland."

The short-sightedness of this agitation was presently
apparent, for the possibility of the North being involved in
a war with Great Britain encouraged the South in its purpose
of cutting loose from the Union. Seward and his followers
were presently obliged to use their influence with editors
friendly to them to "call off the dogs of war". Nevertheless
the project of securing Canada and her resources as an
offset to defeat by the South continued alluring.

The policy advocated by Lord Lyons after he had become aware
of the policies of Mr. Seward (who was a baiter, not merely
of Great Britain, but of all European powers, notably
France) was that of placing Canada in a state of complete
defence, but he had another difficulty to encounter, in that
many British statesmen, concerned with domestic reforms,
were more or less favourable to abandoning self-governing
colonies altogether. On May 21, 1861, Lord Lyons wrote from
Washington to the British Minister of Foreign Affairs, Lord
John Russell, "One of the great difficulties I have to
contend with in my endeavour to keep this Government within
such bounds as may render the maintenance of peace possible
is the persuasion which prevails, even with sensible men,
that no outrage will compel England to make war with the
North. Such men, although seeing the inexpediency and
impropriety of Mr. Seward's treatment of European powers,
still do not think it worth while to risk their own mob
popularity by declaring against it. If they thought there
was really any danger they would no doubt do a great deal to
avert it." In this connection he especially mentions Charles
Summer of Massachusetts, Chairman of the Senate Committee on
Foreign Relations, as a man likely to prove an influence for
peace.

Seward was a man who knew little, and cared less, about
international law, and as has been stated, his policies had
helped to whet the Southern resolution for war. The
ignominious defeat of the Northern forces at Bull Run in
July, 1861, brought some Northerners to their senses, and
but increased the belief of others that the annexation of
Canada would be a desirable solution. Such was the state of
the public mind when the "Trent" affair occurred in November
of that year. A Northern commander, Capt. Wilkes, fired a
shot across the bows of the British ship "Trent", boarded
her, and made prisoner the Confederate commissioners Mason
and Slidell, men of the highest eminence in the South, who
had formerly been members of the United States Senate. How
the dying Prince Consort averted war by altering the wording
of a peremptory despatch is well known--though the
intervention is usually credited to Queen Victoria--and the
cause of peace was also skilfully aided by the delaying
tactics of Lord Lyons. Ultimately Capt. Wilkes' action was
repudiated and Mason and Slidell sent to England.

It may be imagined how much anxiety the "Trent" affair,
coming after two years' advocacy of forcible annexation,
caused to Canadian statesmen. There was no thought of
yielding passively, and the British Government had at last
awakened to the necessity of defending its subjects in this
country. It was then that Sir John A. Macdonald decided on
the wise course of "putting it up to Lincoln", and that the
good-will of the "rail-splitter" was revealed. Mr.
(afterward Sir) Alexander T. Galt, the Canadian Minister of
Finance, happened to be in Washington in November, 1861, and
was instructed to call on Lincoln and ascertain his views.
The President at once disclaimed, on behalf of himself and
his cabinet, all thought of aggression against Canada. One
of Seward's acts had been to embark on a breach of the
treaty of Ghent, which forbade the establishment of
fortifications along the Great Lakes. This, Lincoln said, he
had opposed but had been over-ruled, and added, "We must do
something to satisfy the people". About the Mason and
Slidell case he said, "Oh, that will be gotten along with."

Lincoln also entrusted Galt with a singular confidence,
which illustrates his despondency over the military
situation as it was in the autumn of 1861. He volunteered
the observation that if he could not within a reasonable
period get hold of Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri, and
keep Maryland, he should tell the American people to give up
the contest, for it would be "too big" for them. Fortunately
the North developed a great deal more resolution and unity
than seemed apparent to Lincoln at that time.

The news that Mr. Galt brought to Canada was reassuring in a
measure, but precautions for defence were proceeded with
because the impression produced on the Canadian emissary was
that Lincoln, while absolutely honest and sincere, was far
from being the master of his own cabinet. That this
impression was ill-founded was presently apparent, however,
for in the "Trent" negotiations, Lord Lyons found not only
Lincoln an earnest supporter of a peaceful solution, but
even Seward, the main cause of apprehension, a convert to
the Presidential view. If Lincoln had yielded to the desires
of those who had over-ruled him in connection with
fortifications on the Great Lakes, undoubtedly Canada would
have been a scene of conflict. The calibre of the men he had
to deal with is shown by the fact that his Secretary of the
Treasury, Salmon P. Chase, while campaigning in 1863 with a
view to seizing the Presidency, talked of "taking Old Mother
England by the hair and giving her a good shaking", which,
of course, meant invasion of Canada. Canadians, proud of
their own institutions, may well give thanks that Lincoln
was in the White House in the troublous early sixties.




WALT WHITMAN IN CANADA: MARGINALIA


Whitman societies are as numerous to-day as were Browning
societies thirty years ago, and are by no means confined to
the United States. When the centenary of the mighty Walt
occurred on May 31st, 1919, retrospective references to him
were published on all sides, but none, so far as I am aware,
made allusion to his close affiliations with Canada. This
circumstance was largely due to his long personal friendship
with the famous Canadian alienist, the late Dr. Richard
Maurice Bucke, of London, Ont., who, in 1882, wrote the
first authorized biography of Whitman, and who was for many
years his intimate correspondent and devotee. It is not
generally known that Whitman not only visited Canada, but
wrote his impressions of this country. His _Journal in
Canada_ was published in full in 1897, five years after his
death; and extracts from it were contained in the volume of
prose notes known as _Specimen Days in America_, published
in 1887. These make his affection for those parts of Canada
which he knew (Ontario and Quebec) abundantly clear. Had he
lived to visit the Western provinces and the Canadian
Rockies, his admiration would have been even greater, for no
man who ever lived had a deeper relish for both ordinary
human character and the magnificence of Nature. It is
possible, too, that one of his longer excursions in blank
verse, "By Blue Ontario's Shore", was of Canadian origin,
though I have not delved deeply enough into the history of
his works to speak definitely on this point.

Let me be frank and say that, though I have been dipping
into his writings off and on for a good many years, I have
never been able to make up my mind about Whitman. I cannot
decide whether his impatience of literary forms and exact
expression was due to the surge of tremendous emotions or to
ordinary laziness. If I remember rightly, the latter view
was that of his contemporary, Oliver Wendell Holmes. Some
years ago a noted American journalist--I think it was
William Henry Hurlbert--upset the serenity of a Whitman
celebration by calling him a "literary troglodyte". After
all, a man had sooner be called that than a "literary
eunuch", a phrase Goldwin Smith applied to Ruskin. Whitman's
gusto of approach to every sensation that constitutes human
existence stamps him as an original in whom interest will
not die. The paradox of his fame lies in the fact that,
though no man who ever lived was a greater enthusiast for
democracy, his works make no popular appeal. His public in
his lifetime and since his death was, and has remained,
exclusively literary. He is lauded by select sthetic
coteries; is a writer's writer, and nothing more. The public
of Whitman is much more limited than even that of an elegant
and meticulous artist like Oscar Wilde. The poems which have
most general appeal owe their popularity in part to the
strong general love for Lincoln's memory, which they so
eloquently voice, and also to the fact that he is really
saying something potent and true. Others of his poems seem
to be a welter of words in which, seemingly, he had not
found a clue to his own thoughts.

In truth, the men who have written most appreciatively of
Whitman, strike one as being more interested in the man than
in his work--a tribute to what must have been a wonderful
personality. The memory of that personality Dr. Bucke did
most to preserve. He was not only one of Whitman's literary
executors, with Thomas Biggs Harned and the latter's
brother-in-law, Horace Traubel, of Philadelphia, but the
_Life_, published in 1882, is, in the opinion of the
distinguished British critic, Ernest Rhys, "invaluable". So
great was the impression that Whitman made upon the
Canadian, that the latter took to dressing and wearing a
beard like him, so that in his lifetime, Dr. Bucke, though
eighteen years the junior of his idol, might have passed for
Whitman. To the poet's personality the great Lincoln himself
paid an involuntary tribute when he said, "Well, he looks
like a man." Had Lincoln not been assassinated, it would
possibly have made a difference in the career and fame of
Whitman.

In the first place, his two most memorable poems, _When
Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed_ and _O Captain! My
Captain!_, would not have been written, and in the second,
he would probably not have been the victim of the outburst
of Puritanism which, in 1868, led to his dismissal from the
American Civil Service. When in 1855 _Leaves of Grass_ was
first published, it fell absolutely flat. Subsequently, in
the American civil war, Whitman wrecked his health by
unselfish service as a hospital nurse and orderly, and was
rewarded by a small post in the Government service. Then it
was discovered that in certain poems in _Leaves of Grass_
Whitman had infringed the prerogative of the writers of the
Old Testament by dealing frankly with certain natural
functions. The "past" of the sick and impoverished patriot
was unearthed, and American Puritanism decided that, though
certain aberrations might be pardoned in the books
attributed to Moses, they were intolerable in a modern
American poet. If Lincoln had lived, the demand for his
dismissal would hardly have succeeded, but in 1868 Whitman
had no friends powerful enough to cope with the "uplifters"
of the carpet-bag era. Nevertheless, the episode served to
direct attention to his seemingly still-born book of verse,
and to win him permanent literary friendships.

Whitman's career for the next twenty-four years was one of
idleness, broken by fits of literary production, and at the
age of sixty-one he spent a summer in Canada as the guest of
Dr. Bucke, who then gathered much of the material for his
_Life_. He was charmed from the moment his train began
slowly to cross the old suspension bridge over the Niagara
gorge, which, he says, "gave me Niagara, its superb severity
of action, and colour and majestic grouping, in one short
indescribable show. The Falls were in plain view about a
mile off, but very distinct, and no roar--hardly a murmur.
The river tumbling green and white far below me; the dark
high banks, the plentiful umbrage, many bronze cedars, in
shadow; and tempering and arching, all the immense
materiality, a clear sky overhead, with a few white clouds,
limpid, spiritual, silent." Passages like these convince one
that Whitman's real talent was as a writer of prose rather
than of poetry. With eloquence as exact and fine he wrote of
the St. Lawrence, the Saguenay, and Capes Eternity and
Trinity; and was struck by the simple democracy of all types
of Canadians.

His host, Dr. Bucke, was then Superintendent of the London
Insane Asylum; and Whitman wrote a brief impressive note on
his emotions on taking part in a religious service in the
chapel with the insane: "O! the looks that came from those
faces. There were two or three I shall probably never
forget. Nothing at all markedly repulsive or
hideous--strangely enough, I did not see one such. Our
common humanity, mine and yours, everywhere:

   'The same old blood--the same red, running blood.'

Yet, behind most, an inferr'd arrire of such storms, such
wrecks, such mysteries, fires, love, wrong, greed for
wealth, religious problems, crosses--mirrored from those
crazed faces (yet now temporarily so calm, like still
waters); all the woes and sad happenings of life and
death--now from everyone the same devotional element
radiating--was it not, indeed, _the peace of God that
passeth all understanding_, strange as it may sound?"

There are some to whom the fact that the Canadian most
deeply interested in Whitman was an eminent alienist will
seem significant and appropriate. For instance, Professor
Maurice Hutton, of the University of Toronto, in alluding
recently to the manner in which Gilbert and Sullivan had
ended "Wilde-mania" in England with _Patience_, said it was
a pity there had not been someone in America at the same
time to end "Whitmania". Dr. Bucke's literary efforts were
by no means limited to his work as biographer and editor of
Whitman. He wrote extensively on mental evolution,
maintaining the theory that the human mind has been
gradually evolved by a species of growth extending over
millions of years. In 1894 his paper, _Cosmic
Consciousness_, caused much discussion; and in 1897 he was
President of the Psychical Branch of the British Medical
Association. He was unquestionably a great authority on
mental diseases; and as such was sometimes briefed as an
expert witness for the defence in murder cases. Once, at
least, his logic almost proved fatal to the prisoner whom he
was trying to free, for under suave pressure by a Crown
prosecutor he admitted his conviction that the judge, jury,
and everyone in the courtroom were probably insane. The
verdict of "guilty" was arrived at in record time, and the
prisoner would have been hanged had it not been for the
exercise of executive clemency. Yet Dr. Bucke would
certainly have made an exception in favour of the sanity of
Whitman; though many of his literary contemporary critics
regarded him as a madman.




THE HYDRO-ELECTRIC PIONEERS OF ONTARIO


One of the most stupendous economic events that has come to
pass within the present century has been the birth and
growth of the Ontario Hydro-Electric Development System, the
greatest institution of its kind in the world, and also the
first experiment in public ownership of such vast
proportions. Its importance from every point of view is not
yet realized in Canada. But it has of late years become a
subject of political controversy in several states of the
American union, and in both countries a great deal of
"information", largely false or misleading, has been
circulated.

The meaning of this development may be briefly stated in the
following words: It is as though a source of energy as vast
as the entire soft coal deposits of Pennsylvania had by some
miraculous process been transferred to Canadian soil and by
another miracle made not only clean but inexhaustible as the
widow's cruse. Some day a full and accurate history of the
Ontario Hydro-Electric System will be written. In the
meantime the following notes, written at the time of Sir
Adam Beck's death in August, 1925, may serve to correct
certain false impressions on the subject.

To allege, as has been asserted in a widely circulated
posthumous brochure by a professor of political economy, who
died shortly after Sir Adam Beck, that the origins and
perpetuation of "Hydro" were merely a political "fake", is
to propagate the most fantastic of fables. "Hydro" came into
being as a direct result of the economic and industrial
needs of Ontario, and was actually forced upon politicians
against their will by the more enlightened manufacturers and
municipal leaders of the province.

The memories of communities are proverbially short. There
has been so much confusion in the statements concerning the
origins of Ontario Hydro-Electric development published
since the death of that truly great Canadian, Sir Adam Beck,
that it is worth while recalling the facts relating to its
inception. If ever a man needed to be saved from his friends
as well as enemies it was Sir Adam. In his later years the
more vociferous of them helped to embarrass his policies and
to embitter his life by surrounding him with an atmosphere
of suspicion. In certain quarters his death was made the
occasion, not of tributes to himself so much as of assaults
on living men. After the death of Napoleon it was said of
Marshal Marmont that he used the grave of his former leader
as an ambush to shoot at those whom he disliked, and the
same process has begun since the death of the late Chairman
of the Ontario Hydro-Electric Commission. Some of the most
belated converts to government control of electrical
developments at Niagara Falls were the first to seize the
occasion of Sir Adam Beck's death to suggest that they had
fought an almost single-handed and lonesome battle in behalf
of bringing the "white coal" of Niagara to the factories and
homes of Ontario.

The present writer, as a newspaper reporter, was identified
with the early campaign for developing the power resources
of Niagara Falls for the benefit of the people within the
widest possible zone of distribution, and can speak from
first-hand knowledge of the difficulties overcome,--the
chief of which were public indifference and skepticism. It
is almost unbelievable to-day, but nevertheless true, that
twenty-five years ago a majority of the business men of
Ontario were of the opinion that electric energy would never
be a serious competitor with steam power as a source of
energy for industrial purposes. Its importance in connection
with traction and lighting utilities was of course
established, but even these were, at the dawn of this
century, operated on a coal basis.

The idea of utilizing Niagara Falls as a source of electric
energy originated in Buffalo, and a corporation was formed
to develop power on the American side of the cataract by
Col. Rankin of that city. Col. Rankin, who was far-sighted
enough to see that development on the Canadian side would
one day become necessary for his plans, took steps to
incorporate the Canadian Niagara Power Company, and obtained
a concession for development on our territory. This was in
the early nineties, and for several years Buffalo interests
kept their Canadian concession locked up, awaiting future
developments. Subsequently another Buffalo corporation,
known as the Ontario Power Company, headed by the late
Banker R. Paine, obtained a concession to develop power on
the Canadian side by a simpler and more economical system,
but was debarred from going ahead by lack of capital. When
Arthur Sturgis Hardy became Premier of Ontario in 1896, he
was confronted with a situation whereby cities like Buffalo
and Niagara Falls, N.Y., were enjoying the benefits of
hydro-electric development, while possibilities on the
Canadian side of the river were lying idle, awaiting the
mandate of American concessionaires. The only development on
the Canadian side was a small plant for the operation of the
Niagara Falls and River Railway, constructed by the late W.
T. Jennings, at one time City Engineer of Toronto. At the
instance of William Manley German, who at that time
represented the riding of Welland in the Ontario
Legislature, Premier Hardy forced the American corporations
to commence development work on the Canadian side by
threatening cancellation of their concessions. Mr. Hardy had
difficulty in forcing action, because Col. Rankin, the head
of the more powerful of the two companies involved, had been
advised that he could obtain a veto from the Laurier
government, on any cancellation proceedings that the Ontario
Legislature might decide upon. Mr. Hardy "put the fear of
God" into both the Ottawa Government and the Buffalo
interests, and development was started. The engineer of the
Canadian Niagara Power Company was the late Cecil B. Smith,
a splendid type in every sense, who was some years later
engaged by Adam Beck as the first engineer of the Ontario
Hydro-Electric Commission, and who had earlier been
identified with power projects in other parts of Canada.

The public ownership idea in connection with the
distribution of electrical energy from Niagara Falls
originated in Waterloo County among the Swiss and German
industrialists, of whom Adam Beck's father, Jacob Beck of
Baden, Ont., was a type. The real originator of the idea was
E. W. B. Snider, a flour-miller of St. Jacobs, Ont., a man
of pure Swiss descent, who was familiar with what
hydro-electric development had done for Switzerland,--and it
is a fact worth noting that the first turbines installed at
Niagara Falls were made at Zurich, the original home, it is
said, of such appliances. Mr. Snider had active associate
propagandists in Messrs. Breithaupt and Detweiler, prominent
business men of Berlin (now Kitchener), Ont., and that city
may honestly claim to be the original home of "Hydro" as a
publicly owned enterprise. With regard to the natural
initiative of Mr. Snider, it should be recorded that he was
the very first miller on the continent of North America to
import and instal the Hungarian roller milling process--an
invention which later revolutionized flour-milling on this
continent, and which was first used in the United States at
Minneapolis two or three years after Mr. Snider had brought
his machinery to Canada.

About the year 1900, the Toronto Board of Trade took up the
idea of Niagara power development largely at the instance of
two gentlemen interested in the jewellery trade, P. W.
Ellis, at present chairman of the Queen Victoria Park
Commission,with jurisdiction over the entire length of the
Niagara River frontier, and the Toronto Transportation
Commission; and the late W. K. McNaught, the man who made
the Canadian National Exhibition what it is to-day. Messrs.
Ellis and McNaught were aware of what hydro-electric
development had meant to jewelry manufacture in Switzerland
and Northern Italy, and were keenly alive to the advantages
of a clean source of power in contrast to the dirt and waste
caused in their trade by coal-generated power. They brought
the Toronto Board of Trade to their way of thinking; and,
indeed, Toronto manufacturers had an object lesson before
their eyes in the city of Hamilton. Certain progressive
Hamiltonians, of whom Sir John Gibson was the most
prominent, had already developed hydro energy at DeCew
Falls, near St. Catharines, with the waters of the Welland
River at its back, and industry had gone forward by leaps
and bounds in their city. Hamilton could afford to be
indifferent to Niagara development with such resources at
its doors.

Messrs. Ellis and McNaught found a political champion in the
late Frank Spence, who had attained prominence as a
temperance leader. Mr. Spence was a very able speaker and,
at that time, a member of the Toronto Board of Control.
Though he is best remembered as a prohibitionist, his
services in furthering the cause of hydro development were
much more important from the standpoint of public welfare.
The first important and well-informed political speech in
advocacy of hydro-electric development and distribution of
power under government auspices was made by the late Dr.
Beattie Nesbitt, a practical politician, who aspired to be
the Conservative "boss" of Toronto, but nevertheless an
educated man of marked scientific tastes. Dr. Nesbitt was
erratic and uncontrollable, but a man of rare initiative and
progressive instincts. He had studied the problem in
Switzerland, Italy, and California, and was firmly convinced
that development at Niagara would revolutionize the
industries of Ontario. If he had had the powers of
concentration possessed by Sir Adam Beck in carrying through
a task, his name would be an honoured one in connection with
the history of "Hydro".

The earliest eminent journalistic sponsor of government
control of both development and transmission was Sir John
Willison. In 1902, as editor of the _Globe_, he enunciated
this policy in opposition to the views of the leaders of the
party of which his newspaper was the organ, and which was
then in power both in Ontario and at Ottawa. The opposition
of the Ontario Government of that day to anything savouring
of public control or ownership was dictated largely by its
Attorney-General, Sir John Gibson, an honest believer in the
principle of private ownership, who had already done great
things for his home city of Hamilton by furthering the DeCew
Falls development.

When Willison took charge of the Toronto _News_ on January
1st, 1903, under the ownership of Sir Joseph Flavelle, the
issue had become clear cut. Late in 1902, the Ontario
Government had granted a concession to a syndicate headed by
the late Sir William Mackenzie, the late Frederic Nicholls,
and Sir Henry Pellatt, all of Toronto, which tied up one of
the few remaining development sites at Niagara Falls. It was
well known that these capitalists intended to allocate the
power developed on special terms to the utility corporations
and industries in which they happened to be stock-holders,
and thus discriminate against less fortunate competitors.
Though it was not generally realized, unfair discrimination
against the smaller manufacturing cities of Western Ontario
in connection with a great national asset was also
inevitable.

Willison made the establishment of a government-owned
transmission line for the equitable distribution of electric
energy the foremost plank in the platform of the rejuvenated
_News_. The writer was one of the newspaper men engaged by
him in connection with the new enterprise, and for two
months it was my principal assignment to arouse public
interest in the whole matter of hydro development at
Niagara, and the necessity of its being preserved for the
benefit of all consumers and not for the selected few, by
means of interviews with prominent business men. It amazes
me to-day to recall the backwardness and conservatism of
many manufacturers on the subject. I not only ransacked the
business establishments of Toronto for men who were really
aroused to the importance of the issue, but travelled
through the manufacturing towns of Western Ontario on a
similar mission. In the majority of instances manufacturers
were still unconvinced that electricity would ever supersede
steam power, as a source of energy; and of the wisdom of
governmental action.

Nevertheless the progressive minority carried their point.
Late in the winter of 1903 a conference was held at the
Walper House, Berlin (now Kitchener), and there most of the
propagandists first met Adam Beck, who as mayor of London
had won general approbation by his solution of a local water
problem, and was also a member of the Ontario Legislature.
Mr. Beck, who was then best known as a horseman and daring
rider in steeplechases, said he was at the Conference to
learn, and listened with deep interest to the
representations of Messrs. McNaught, Ellis, Spence, and the
ardent Waterloo county group, who regarded him with
affection as a native son of their district. A great
deputation was organized to wait on Premier Ross; and,
contrary to expectations, the latter conceded the principle
of a government-owned transmission line. He appointed a
commission to formulate a plan of distribution, consisting
of E. W. B. Snider, the original agitator, who served as
Chairman, P. W. Ellis of Toronto, W. F. Cockshutt of
Brantford, and Adam Beck of London. Curiously enough all of
these gentlemen, with the exception of Mr. Snider, were
Conservatives. They were selected for sectional reasons, and
Mr. Beck was named on account of his prominence in Western
Ontario. Premier Ross's decision was a single-handed triumph
for Willison and the _News_. Beck, who had been
non-committal at the historic Walper House conference,
became the most ardent of converts, and without his
organizing genius and Napoleonic energy, Hydro development
could never have reached its later proportions. He made it
the corner stone of his political ambitions and "hewed to
the line". One of his greatest conquests was the winning
over of J. P. Whitney to his views, for the latter at the
outset was not an enthusiast for public ownership. When
Whitney, not then knighted, came in to power in 1905, he
created for Beck the new office of Minister of Power, and
from that day forward the course of "Hydro" was straight,
though not always easy sailing.

The original intention of "Hydro" advocates was that the
government should control distribution, and leave
development to private capital. The interested capitalists
themselves made this impossible by "black hand" tactics
against Beck and his chief engineer, the late Cecil B.
Smith. Finally, for its own salvation, the Hydro Commission
was compelled to buy the Ontario Power Company to ensure a
supply to municipalities. It was here that some of the
original supporters of government control parted company
with Sir Adam Beck. They held that in adding development to
the transmission project, it was the Hydro Commission's duty
to buy out competing private interests. In principle they
were perhaps right, but my own opinion, based on inside
knowledge, is that the slanderous campaign these interests
organized against Beck and his associates, in the period
between 1906 and 1910, put them entirely out of court. He
would have been less than human had he failed to fight tooth
and nail the men who sought to ruin him in every sense that
the word implies; but in the minds of some, the idea of
governmental competition with private enterprise was, and is
still, regarded as an unfair usurpation of authority.




THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO


[_The following article was originally written at the
request of a periodical of wide circulation in the United
States, "The Dearborn Independent", and lest the writer be
accused of purely parochial pride, it should be added that
in making the request the editor stated that so many
American visitors to Canada had been profoundly impressed by
the University of Toronto that an article interpreting its
spirit would be welcomed in many parts of the United States.
As originally published, it bore the title "A Capital in the
Realm of Higher Scholarship". A fact which impressed United
States readers as unique was the position of the University
as a federation of colleges in which diverse elements found
a common meeting ground. Subsequently the writer learned
that the article contained much that was news to Canadians
themselves with regard to the history and nature of one of
the country's most celebrated educational institutions.
There has been no attempt to deal exhaustively with its
history, which is long and intricate._]

Within recent decades Toronto has grown to be one of the
great cities of the continent, a financial, manufacturing,
and trading center, whose interests reach not only all over
Canada but to many parts of both hemispheres. Of its
material prosperity ample evidence exists in residential
districts that for opulence and extent are excelled by no
city of the half-million class.

But Toronto has one institution which seldom forms the theme
of oratory--an institution but indirectly connected with its
latter-day prosperity, though a priceless possession--and
that is its University.

Remove the University and the savour of individual life
which Toronto possesses would largely disappear. For
Torontonians themselves it would cease to be the city in
which they have been reared. It has not the ancient
traditions that envelop the historic universities of the
motherland with a haze of romance. It does not go back as
far as American universities like Harvard and Yale; but from
the days when English-speaking Canada commenced to mean
something to Canadians themselves, and to the world at
large, it has been a fountain of intellectual aspiration, a
civilizing influence, with an atmosphere all its own.

To define that atmosphere is not easy; but even the casual
visitor who comes momentarily in touch with the social life
of the city instinctively feels it; for whatever there is of
distinction in that social life emanates from the
University. Its influence makes itself felt in the minds of
industrial and financial leaders who have helped to build up
Canada's prosperity, and who feel it an honour to support
the University. Though in later years it has by no means
neglected those practical and scientific aspects of
education, which are all-important for a country in so early
a stage of development as Canada, it also represents the
spirit of education in its larger sense, as a means whereby
the youth of to-day shall not be the empty-handed heir of
the ages, but shall mingle, as it were, in the struggles and
triumphs of the human spirit since the beginning of recorded
history and poetic utterance.

The University of Toronto is still in its essence, what it
was in its beginnings--a fountain of old-world culture and
tradition set down on the fringe of a wilderness. When it
first came into active being, conditions in many parts of
the province of Upper Canada, as Ontario was known until
1867, were not unlike those of the state of Ohio as
described in W. D. Howells' graphic picture of primitive
society--_The Leatherwood God_; and it has played a vital
part in the development of Canada ever since. It is
intimately bound up in the history of Toronto, as an early
centre of government, and it is to the credit of the men who
laid the foundations of British institutions in the country
of the Great Lakes, and from thence by gradual steps in the
vast prairie country of the Canadian West, that from the
outset they had the idea of establishing University culture
in the new-tapped wilderness.

To define the tradition that lies back of the University of
Toronto, it is necessary to touch briefly on the conditions
under which the Province of Upper Canada, which for a brief
period included much of what is now Michigan, came into
being. The cession of Canada to Great Britain after Wolfe's
victory at Quebec in 1759, brought with it vast, and partly
unexplored, tracts of territory lying on both sides of the
Great Lakes, and extending far down the Mississippi Valley.
The actual ownership of these tracts was not really settled
until many years later; for before Great Britain had really
time to take cognizance of her heritage, she was involved in
the difficulties with the thirteen American colonies of the
Atlantic seaboard.

The populated region to the east of Montreal then became the
Province of Lower Canada, and the unpopulated region lying
north of the lower lakes became Upper Canada. There were old
French trading posts on the Niagara River, the Detroit
River, and on the north shore of Lake Ontario. One of these
posts was Fort Rouille, on the site where Toronto now
stands. Because of its land-locked harbour, and easily
defended position, it was selected as the seat of government
in the new territory. The British Government gave little
heed to this beautiful and fertile acquisition until the
decade following the cessation of the Revolutionary War. It
became necessary then to find homes for those American
colonists who had sided with Great Britain and whom several
of the states had driven out. In passing, it may be said
that one reason the name of George Washington has been held
in esteem in Canada is that he did his best to prevent this
policy of spoliation. The Federal power in the United States
was at that time too weak to make his protests effective.
The United Empire Loyalists, as they came to be known, were
chiefly made up of business and professional classes of New
England and New Jersey; and though the confiscatory policy
left them despoiled, it did not leave them helpless. New
homesteads were found for some in the older colonies of Nova
Scotia and New Brunswick; but large numbers were given
holdings in the virgin territory of Upper Canada. In the
last decade of the eighteenth century, York, now Toronto,
was to all intents and purposes a New England settlement,
supplemented by British officials and by enterprising
immigrants with a little capital, who presently began to
arrive from the British Isles.

The newcomers at once began to organize the young colony in
earnest, and it is evidence of their qualities that higher
education was one of their first cares. As early as 1798,
the British governor, General Simcoe, recommended to the
Imperial government, on the advice of his council, an
educational plan to be sustained by vast grants of Crown
lands in Upper Canada. It provided for the establishment of
grammar schools at four points, at Sandwich on the Detroit
River; at Newark (now Niagara); at Kingston near the eastern
extremity of Lake Ontario; and at Cornwall on the St.
Lawrence River; and for a university at York (Toronto). The
British Government assented to this recommendation in 1799,
and thus the University of Toronto had its documentary
beginnings.

Nevertheless, it took more than a governmental edict, even
when supported by ample financial provisions, to make a
university. Many events intervened to prevent immediate
fruition. There were the Napoleonic wars in Europe which
retarded colonization and which had an off-shoot in 1812 in
renewed war between Great Britain and the United States,
during which the fringe of settlements along the lower lakes
became battle fields. The town of York was burned by
American troops and, in reprisal, British troops burned
Washington. It was in 1819, before York had risen from its
ashes and the world had become so tranquilized, that talk of
a university could be revived. Then ensued a different type
of conflict to delay matters still further--religious
differences.

At that time educational and religious interests coincided
in nearly all countries; and the question as to which sect
was to control the management of the proposed institution
was important. There was a strong party which desired to see
the Anglican or Episcopal church established in Canada as in
England. This party held that the university should be an
institution of the church controlled by the ecclesiastical
authorities. On the other hand, the United Empire Loyalists
who had come from the American colonies included many
Wesleyans and Baptists; while nonconformity was well
represented in the more recent immigration from England,
Scotland, and Ireland.

The agitation for the abolition at Oxford of religious
tests, which made all members of the student body compulsory
members of the Church of England, had begun. The high
churchmen in the young Canadian colony would have liked to
see religious tests in the projected university; but the
bulk of the population would have none of this. The savage
parochial controversies of that day ended in a
disintegration of forces and the establishment of a number
of colleges or seminaries by various religious
denominations, each drawing government funds. In later years
nearly all these colleges have returned and now go to make
up the federated group which comprises the University of
Toronto.

The advocates of a university which should be a home of
humanistic education in which all religious differences
could be sunk, did succeed, in 1827, in obtaining a charter
for the "University of King's College", which has since been
the pivotal point of the institution, but the original
resources had been sadly diminished. To put an end to
controversy, it was provided that no clergyman of any
denomination should be eligible to act as a professor.
Things moved slowly still; there was a rebellion in the
Canadas in 1837, which resulted in a change from the
advisory to the responsible form of government. It was 1843
before teaching actually began under the charter,
significantly enough within the halls of the legislature of
Upper Canada itself. In 1849, the name of the institution
was changed to "The University of Toronto", and in
subsequent years when the federal principle was adopted, and
the various denominational colleges came back into union,
the parent stem (once King's College) became University
College, operating under the original charter.

This charter retained one very interesting provision,
designed to perpetuate University College as the linking and
pivotal institution, from which all the affiliated colleges
should radiate without compromising their special aims. No
ordained clergyman of any denomination may hold a chair in
its various faculties. It devotes itself to the teaching of
the humanities and the abstract sciences like philosophy and
mathematics. Thus it is possible for denominational colleges
like St. Michael's, a Roman Catholic seminary; Victoria
College, the chief educational institution of the Methodist
church (now merged in the United Church of Canada); Trinity
College, originally a foundation of High Church
Episcopalianism; Wycliffe College, devoted to the spread of
Low Church ideas; Knox College, a Presbyterian theological
establishment; and various other colleges to co-operate on
the general lines of higher education. Co-ordination in
lectures is attained thereby. In a sense, therefore,
University College, housed in the beautiful Norman-Gothic
building, erected in 1857, which overlooks what used to be a
very large campus, is a clearing house of culture for the
whole University. Symbolically, it occupies the central
position in the group of affiliated colleges and special
faculty buildings which have in the past thirty years grown
up. Situated in the very heart of Toronto, they give an
ornamental, old-world atmosphere, which exercises a strong
fascination over the minds of visitors to the city.

The special position of University College, and the various
denominational interests to be reconciled, have led to the
adoption of a dual system of government. It is presided over
by a principal, the celebrated classical scholar, Professor
Maurice Hutton, who holds prestige similar to that of Sir
Robert Falconer, president of the federated university.
Though an ordained clergyman is debarred from holding the
post of principal of University College, the restriction
does not apply to office of president of the University, and
Sir Robert was originally a Presbyterian clergyman. It will
be seen that the presidency, by its very nature, demands an
incumbent of infinite tact.

The dual system runs all through the system of government,
but though it appears complicated, and disputes are not
unknown, the machinery runs smoothly for the most part. The
university is both a state and a private institution. Its
main factors are state-supported, but some affiliated
colleges, like the Toronto Conservatory of Music, for
instance, are private foundations. It has a senate which
exercises control over the scholastic side of its activities
and which is elected by the graduate body, with provision
for the representation of every profession. It has also a
board of governors, chosen by the government of the province
of Ontario, which deals with the financial problems, and
with other practical details of management. At one time it
was feared that the University's position as a state
institution militated against it as the recipient of those
private gifts, which have been as vital to many of the great
American universities of to-day as for Oxford in the Middle
Ages. But of recent years the wealthy men of Ontario have
come to a better realization of the situation and have been
generous. It is to some extent a grievance among scholars
that donations are usually ear-marked for the promotion of
scientific studies, and since 1890, when the University was
primarily academic and theological, the scientific side has
expanded enormously and is mainly responsible for the ever
increasing international fame of the institution. The Massey
Foundation, created by the founder of the greatest
agricultural implement industry in Canada, has been lavish
and discerning in the humanistic character of its gifts; and
of recent years the Rockefeller Foundation, of the United
States, has, by its munificence, assured to its professors
security in old age.

I should like to be able to say that all of the many
buildings associated with the university are architecturally
beautiful, but it would be an exaggeration. Many of the
edifices are individually of rare artistic appeal; one or
two are frankly ugly. But the incongruity of the general
ensemble sometimes arouses hostile criticism. There has been
no general plan either in the matter of design or material.
Several schools of Gothic are represented, side by side with
Grecian, Romanesque, Renaissance, and modern American or
Richardsonian architecture. There is almost as great a
diversity in the matter of materials; contrasts which are
especially marked in the newer buildings. Now the modern
mind seems instinctively to tend toward uniformity; and we
have aesthetic critics in Canada who scoff at these
contrasts and incongruities. The parent edifice, University
College, hallowed by sentiment, is beautiful from every
point of view; and not far from it is Hart House, also in
the Norman-Gothic style, an edifice still but a few years
old, that is the envy of academicians from various parts of
the world. Linking the two is a noble memorial tower erected
by the Alumni Association as a monument to the thousands of
graduates and undergraduates who fell in the great war.

Hart House was built by the Massey Foundation at lavish cost
as a gift to the student body, and has brought international
fame to its architects, Henry Sproatt and Ernest R. Rolph.
Its "Great Hall", where students dine at low cost, is an
oak-beamed chamber in the Gothic style that is hardly
surpassed for dignity and beauty of style anywhere; and the
edifice includes sumptuous clubrooms, gymnasiums, a vast
swimming pool, and a most finely equipped "little theater".
The scope of its activities even includes a printing shop
for student publications.

Despite the thoroughly modern character of many of the
offshoots that have grown up around the parent stem, the
University still retains something of the scholastic
atmosphere that gives an inner significance to the very word
"university". Its professorial and lecturing body has grown
in thirty years from about eighty to eight hundred or more;
and many members of the various faculties come from Oxford
and Cambridge, and other famous European universities. The
June convocation when the Chancellor, magnificent in robes
of gold and black and attended by beadles, heads a
procession across the campus from University College to
Convocation Hall, followed by scholars in the robes of many
universities, is an unforgettable spectacle.

The real greatness of the institution lies not merely in
the scholars it has sent forth, and they are numerous, for
its sons figure on many a faculty in the United States, and
in some of the universities of Great Britain; but in the
part it has played as an illuminating factor in the country
at large. It takes the boy from the village and the farm and
places him in touch with the larger things of life. Nor does
it destroy his aptitude for practical affairs, as Oxford and
Cambridge are accused of doing. A surprisingly large number
of the younger financiers, manufacturers, and business men
of Canada are graduates. Many leading public men of the
Canadian north-west provinces call it their Alma Mater. Its
association with Canadian public life in the Federal arena
has indeed been long and continuous. The best illustration
of the close touch it holds with the life of the people is
the fact that when a few years ago a government of farmers
was constituted in Ontario it was revealed that more than
half of them boasted the University of Toronto as their Alma
Mater.

In a sense, the University of Toronto furnishes a link
between the systems of higher education in Europe and in the
United States. A university in Great Britain or on the
Continent is composed of colleges. In the United States a
university is practically a large college, with various
departments but yet a single entity. Toronto in its unique
organization of federated and affiliated colleges occupies
both sorts of relationships to the students. The adoption of
the extension idea, so widely used in the United States,
helps to bring the benefits of the great institution home to
many who otherwise would be denied its privileges. Rural and
urban residents alike share in these advantages, and the
great university has been brought into intimate touch with
many phases of life throughout the province. In truth its
roots are not merely civic, as its name implies, but
national.




Transcriber's note:

The edition used as base for this book contained the
following errors, which have been corrected:

Page 8: Sir John in one letter emphasize
=> Sir John in one letter emphasized

Page 47: supposititious
=> suppositious

Page 88: fr ction
=> friction

Page 110: who subsequenly became
=> who subsequently became

Page 138: The winter of 1846-8
=> The winter of 1847-8

Page 144: put any constructon he pleased
=> put any construction he pleased

Page 144: pamphlets that sprang up aroud
=> pamphlets that sprang up around

Page 150: tutelary care (_obsolete__.
=> tutelary care (_obsolete__).

Page 178: with little or no risk uutil
=> with little or no risk until

Page 221: of Higher Scholarship", A fact which impressed
=> of Higher Scholarship". A fact which impressed

Page 224: far down the Missislippi Valley
=> far down the Mississippi Valley




[End of _The Canadian Scene_ by Hector Charlesworth]