Part 23

A sagacious professor in McGill who knows by experience what it is to get the ear of the public, said when Currie was appointed President that almost the entire faculty were opposed to him because the idea was so ridiculous. That professor now alleges proudly that faculty, students and management are all convinced that Currie is a wonderful President; that he has revolutionized all existing ideas about the headship of a university, that he understands even the academic mind; that the esprit de corps of McGill is such as it never was.

In short, nobody is left to remark--

"I say, what a pity Geddes left us in the lurch!"

They are making a new stereopticon for that slide.

A COAT OF MANY COLOURS

SIR JOHN WILSON

After a life of wearing Joseph's coat, Sir John Willison, ex-editor of the Toronto Globe and of the News, finds himself President of the National Reconstruction Association. Programme--to reconstruct Canada, beginning in 1918, after fifty years of Confederation.

A supercilious editor once asked why on such an Association no farmer had been appointed. The answer was simple enough. Sir John was born a farmer. He used to wield a handspike at logging bees in Huron County, Ont. Why no Liberals? But Sir John used to be the leading Liberal of unelected Canada. Why no professor of political economy to represent the great universities who are always supposed to be reconstructing a nation? Simple again. Sir John himself once conducted a university of culture, economics and general information known as the Toronto News. In fact there was no need of an Association at all. Sir John Willison was sufficient unto the day.

One finds it tolerably easy to be sarcastic about Sir John Willison, because for many years he was to some of us the sort of man that compelled a sincere, almost idolatrous admiration. In this also he is more adept than the average man. He himself once idolized Sir Wilfrid Laurier in two volumes; but a few years before he turned all his political guns on the French-Canadian Premier to get him out of power for good.

In all Canada there has never been a more versatile character; never one who after a volte face in politics could turn with such poise and dignity upon any critic cradled in the foundations of belief and ask, "Well, what's new?"

From his crisp manner of speaking and a certain austerity of manner, I used to think that Sir John was in a measure inscrutable. He had such a curt way of summoning a reporter, as once,--

"Never," he began when the culprit had got into the corridor facing the editor-in-chief, "never, when interviewing a man in his own home, say anything about the furniture."

Born a Conservative and a farmer, Willison became on the Globe Canada's greatest unelected Liberal. He conserved Liberalism. On the Globe he held the balance between the Free Traders who believed only in reciprocity and Brastus Wiman, who with Goldwin Smith made Taft a mere plagiarist when he said that Canada was an "adjunct" of the United States. It was Willison's attempt to consider commercial union on its merits that made the Globe seem like a mark for the annexationists, at a time when the high priest of the movement in Canada had the effrontery to remain a citizen of the nation which he was openly trying to sell at a bargain counter. The man who kept the Globe from becoming an annex to Goldwin Smith in 1891 had an experience that would fit any man to become a protection-tariff Chairman of Reconstruction, and to remember the sirens that tempted Ulysses.

Nobody could have predicted in those days that the great editor of the Globe would live to become first an Independent, next a Tory, and at the last a Liberal-Unionist. And perhaps none of these transformations would have been necessary if Sir George Ross had not tried the trick of "32 years in the saddle" from the days of Mowat; to do which and to remain politically virtuous was an impossible feat, even though the Premier of Ontario was a director of the Globe. Ross remained director, and also Premier. But it seems that Mr. Willison saw in such a dual role a greater inconsistency than even he deemed to be worthy of so brilliant a man. As he could not remove the director, he took what seemed to be a providential opportunity to remove the Premier.

The reconstructed Toronto News was the opportunity. The elimination of Ross was the first result. The removal of Laurier was the necessary sequel. The first was a pleasure. The second must have been a pang. Because of the first, in place of Sir George Ross, Willison had as frequent visitor to his sanctum James Pliny Whitney, the new Premier of Ontario, "honest enough to be bold and bold enough to be honest." From that to Toryism was merely opening a door. It took the new Tory editor eight years to remove his old idol Laurier, the result of which was a sort of intense and bigoted animosity to the Province of Quebec which Sir John is now learning to overcome. When the Tory News became a Northcliffe Imperialist organ it was inevitable that Sir John should convert his common hostility to the western Laurier-Liberals into a polite suspicion of the Radicals who were becoming Agrarians.

When finally, weary of mere politics in which he was our greatest journalistic expert by instinct and experience Sir John left the News, he was free to engage in work of a more practical character than writing, and to become Chairman of the Government's most important branch of active agenda outside of professional politics.

In all these Protean changes of makeup, if not of character, Sir John Willison has never abandoned two early habits; lawn bowling and reading the Globe. He is an expert in both. Bowling vexes him least, because its rules never change. The Globe gives him pangs because alas! it is now engaged in the unpardonable effort to merge the Liberals with the National Progressives as a greater Liberal Party.

Inconsistency may be the evolution of greatness. Inconstancy never. The Globe of a certain date in June, 1921, contained a front page display of the Agrarian bye-election victory in Medicine Hat. On another date there was an editorial once again advising the Agrarians to make common cause with Liberals against the common enemy, Meighenism, or as it might be said, Willisonism.

Perusing the Globe in his Reconstruction office, Sir John glances up--leisurely at a spot on the wall, next to the portrait of Sir John A. Macdonald. Like Macbeth's dagger, he sees a cold, organizing face smiling like Mona Lisa, fair at Sir John; the face of T. A. Crerar.

The Levite of Reconstruction shakes his fist.

"Down with you," he mutters. "Avaunt! I'll have none of you. There's nothing under Medicine Hat--except what Kipling said, 'all hell for a basement,' Natural gas, Crerar, not a test case at all. Oh, no. Too near the border."

Sir John yawns and peruses a proof of the 745th pamphlet issued from Reconstruction, total of nearly seven million copies paid for not by taxation of the people, but inferentially by tariffs. Probably a very patriotic minority read these Willison bulletins aiming to reconstruct the country by putting a crimp in the exportation of the Canadian dollar, looking after welfare work in factories, women and children, grappling with unemployment, helping to change over industry from war to peace, aiming to "stabilize" the nation, to curb that team of wild horses, Bolshevism and Agrarianism, and generally to keep Canada from going to perdition.

In spite of Sir John, in 1919 and 1920, people bought Canada almost bankrupt on the exchanges. Hence among the items in the cheapening list may be placed the Canadian dollar which is now worth about 89 cents in New York. That is what happens to the dollar when it goes away from home and plays prodigal son. What Sir John works to see is Canadian commodities crossing the border and the Yankee dollars coming back in exchange.

Here is one of the greatest moral issues of the age for this nation. Even the preachers, if they could see us put up the barriers against luxury imports from the United States--said to be such a wicked nation--would breathe more easily. People so often buy sin done up in dutiable packages. For the fiscal year ending March 31, 1921, Canadians went into debt to the United States over a million a day--adverse exchange. Nearly $400,000,000 in one year spent for Yankee goods more than Yankeedom spent buying goods from us.

And now comes the need for the rationalizing philosophy of Sir John Willison, truly our most versatile expert on tariffs from the Globe reciprocity down to the Reconstruction. Beginning in 1917 with Foster's "economic unity" in North America, a friendly Democratic tariff had let Canada send certain natural products into the United States free of duty. Private interests found it profitable to handle Canadian trade, much of it in transit to Europe in a state of high demand. The democratic element in Sir John must have approved that. Grit as he used to be, Sir John must believe in letting the great United States practise free-trade if it be so disposed. Those good Democrats! Had they not enacted the Underwood tariff, what a mountainous load must have been imposed upon the Atlantean shoulders of Reconstruction!

Which brings us to the eve of Dominion Day, 1921. Sir John was not bowling; he was reading the Round Table for June--at least if not he should have been--an article on the meeting of the "Imperial Cabinet".

"Mischievous title!" he mutters. "It's an Imperial Conference of Premiers. John S. Ewart will be sure to make a kingdom article out of that. Very ill-advised. Er--Come!"

"Evening paper, Sir John," says the boy.