Part 31

There was a strong conscriptionist group of Liberals in Ottawa. We must assume that Mr. Dafoe, though not a member of Parliament, was strongly behind them; his presence in Ottawa indicates that his counsels were needed in view of the attitude to be taken by Western Liberals. It was the conscriptionist group of Liberals in Ottawa that decided upon the Convention, whether on the advice of Mr. Dafoe is not generally known. The intention was to create a Western Liberal group free from Laurier control, prepared to consider coalition--involving conscription--on its merits. So far, the policy of the Convention was in line with the previous programme of Mr. Dafoe. But the Liberal machine in the West--which was not Mr. Dafoe's party at all, because for some time he had been working on the principle that both the old parties as such had lost their grip on the West--went out and captured the delegates. The Convention was suddenly stampeded for Laurier, a result which Mr. Dafoe never expected but against which he had strongly urged, the Liberal Unionist leaders. The Free Press thereafter thundered against the Convention as entirely misrepresenting Western Liberalism. The subsequent South Winnipeg convention shewed that the Free Press was right. Almost the entire strength of Western Liberalism swung into the Union movement and the Coalition, and the Free Press became a temporary, though independent, supporter of the Union Government for the purpose of winning the war.

Now for the larger front stage view; how does Mr. Dafoe's attitude in the defeat of the Winnipeg Soviet idea of government and his former campaign against Laurier Liberals match with his attitude towards the Farmer Movement as embodied by Mr. Crerar? The leader of the Agrarian movement is a friend of the Free Press for much the same reason that the strike leaders in 1919 were a foe to it. Crerarism in the West looks for the support of that paper in its drive upon Ottawa. From his experience outwardly to the public, and intimately behind the scenes, always concerned with building up a new Liberalism on the wreck of the old, Dafoe endorses Crerar and his movement. When Crerar went into the Government the Free Press favoured his going. Mr. Dafoe clearly states that, "if the Union movement could retain its Liberal elements and produce an economic and taxation policy acceptable to Western opinion, we could continue to support it." In contemplating such a miracle, did he expect that the ultra-Tories would lop away from the Union, making a "rump" party to match the Laurier Liberals, and leaving the Union Government free to make an alliance with the Farmer Group? This we do not profess to know. In a political age like this almost any sort of alliance may be made for the purpose of capturing Parliament. But a permanent alliance between Western Liberalism represented by Mr. Crerar and the Government by Coalition looks now as fantastic as a Coalition between Lloyd George and de Valera. Mr. Dafoe probably knew that the Government and Mr. Crerar would lock horns over the tariff--since any species of protection and free trade never could sleep together. When Mr. Crerar left the Government on the budget issue, the Free Press ceased its active support of the Government and moved its guns to a detached position. When Meighen became Premier and in his programme speech at Stirling outlined his policy, Dafoe definitely declared himself as no longer in support of the Union Government. As he could not support the Laurier Liberal party, which he had formerly opposed, the only thing left was to make an active and open alliance with Mr. Crerar.

Such a mobile course of action is incomprehensible unless we keep in mind the fact that Mr. Dafoe has long found it impossible to support either of the old parties. The Coalition was a new one which he consistently supported on its merits and up to a point. The point was reached. Unionism and Agrarianism were incompatible. Therefore Unionism was a Tory institution; and the only Liberal programme left for the Free Press was to form an alliance with Mr. Crerar and his great group of class-conscious Agrarians.

By this time, if he reads this, Mr. Dafoe will have observed that we are trying to corner him on the question:

If you were opposed to a Labor Soviet which aimed at making a little Moscow of Winnipeg, what are you going to do about a Farmer Soviet that aims to capture Ottawa?

Already he has begun to answer. He uses a label for the party led by Mr. Crerar and evolved with the aid of Mr. Dafoe:

The National Progressive Party.

A good name, even if not new. What is behind the label? That the party so named has now taken over all the Liberal economic traditions in the West and after the next general election will become the real Liberal Party of Canada. In the opinion of Dafoe, Mackenzie King should keep out of the West in the coming election in order to let Mr. Crerar romp home with three-fourths of the entire representation in Parliament. He alleges that Laurier destroyed the old Western Liberal party in 1917; that King has not revived it--though Mr. Fielding might have done so; that Western Liberals have become Progressive except in the cities, where some have become Unionists. In making this statement he probably reckoned on Michael Clark becoming a Progressive. But Michael Clark has turned out to be one species of even Free Trade Liberal which Crerarism cannot absorb.

Let us concede that here is one of the most absorbing problems in Canada. If Dafoe backs Crerar in the effort to get that preponderant majority away from Meighen and King, then he is afterwards committed to Crerarism. Dafoe cannot afford to take Crerar and abandon the traditions of the Free Press. If he is so keen about real "nationalism" in this country as to regret that Bourassa made the word obnoxious, he has surely decided that the policy of the N.P.P. must be to build up a true national life in Canada. And the man who was Canada's press representative at the Peace Conference, with such exceptional facilities for focussing Canadian national sentiment among other nations, will not dare to countenance in Mr. Crerar and his followers any policy that will open the gates for the United States to walk in and walk over this nation as twenty years ago his Free Press associate, Clifford Sifton, opened the doors to let Europe inundate us with a polyglot, un-national flood.

No Canadian journalist has shouldered so perilous a responsibility. Dafoe knows what a struggle it is to preserve national identity on a basis of one to twelve against us. Born in Ontario and experienced in the East as few editors have ever been, he surely knows the value of not surrendering our national birthright for a mess of free-trade pottage.

If he knows this as well as we think he should, will he uphold the Free Press as the constant critic of Mr. Crerar if he attempts to denationalize this country; or will he accept a portfolio of Minister of the Interior in the Cabinet dominated by Messrs. Crerar and Drury, and in his haste to establish the new Liberalism of the National Progressive Party help to strike out the meaning of the word "National" in the label?

Can a man who fought a Direct Action Strike because it aimed at revolution, consistently endorse, lock, stock and barrel, a movement which aims at a revolution by Indirect Action through Parliament?

Is government by a "National Progressive Party" Agrarian Group with a business-farmer Premier and a farmer-dominated Cabinet any less of a group government in principle than the One Big Union, even though it does not tie up the nerve centres of the country by a minority general strike, but merely throttles Parliament, which is supposed to be the national brain, by the use of the group minority in voting?

Mr. Dafoe has already begun to answer. Again we see him sweltering in his sanctum, his hair like a windrow of hay, as he dictates something like this to his stenographer:

"Your logic is good except that your major premiss is a case of being off to a bad start. The National Progressive Party is not a group; it is a business majority. It contains the people who produce the majority of the nation's wealth for consumption and export and therefore enable the nation to pay its bills. It is Liberal because it advocates free-trade and is opposed to big monopolies, and there is no other Liberalism in Canada left worthy the name. The N.P.P. is the new Liberalism, not for the West alone, but for the whole country. It depends upon the franchise of the people, not upon the strike action of revolutionary groups. Agriculture, not industry, is the basis of Canada's economics. Even labour as embodied in the Trade Unions does not aim at revolution: Only the Reds want that. And the Reds are a hopeless minority. The farmers are not as yet a popular, though they are an economic, majority; but the future of this nation depends upon a voting as well as a producing majority of farmers."

This may not be the exact way in which Mr. Dafoe would state the case, but it expresses the fact that sound economics are at the root of all ideas which have to do with fair government. And it suggests that J. W. Dafoe with his Free Press has more to do than the Grain Growers' Guide with what the people think about the N.P.P.

For this reason we hope that Mr. Dafoe, the judge and the advocate as well, will always stay "behind the scenes" to keep Mr. Crerar on the right track if ever he gets the right of way.

HEADMASTER OF THE MANCHESTER SCHOOL

MICHAEL CLARK, M.P.

The eminent headmaster of the Manchester School in Canada is one of the few M.P.'s who know how to build a wheat stack. He farms in the spot north of Calgary where the poplar bluffs begin to mark that you are in the black loam of wonderful crops at a maximum distance from Liverpool. It is an art to build a wheat stack. Michael Clark--so we believe--knows exactly how many tiers to lay before he begins the "belly"; how to fill up the middle so that the butts of the sheaves droop to run off the rain; and how high to go with the bulge before he begins to draw in with the roof. All day long as he worked on his knees, not in prayer, he had mental leisure to think about one vast, fructifying theme; which of course is Free-Trade as they had it in England; unrestricted trade according to the Manchester School. And when he got his stack done he could tell to a ten-dollar bill how much tariff the railways and steamships would levy on that stack by the time the wheat got to Liverpool.

During the War, Clark was a win-the-war Liberal. He broke away from Laurier on conscription, which he openly supported. In July this year he was scheduled in the press--another of those wish-father-to-the-thought news items--to join Messrs. Drury and Crerar in an anti-tariff tour of Ontario. He did not go. He probably never had the slightest intention of going. Michael Clark had other wheat to stack. An Alberta election was coming. It came. When it was all over Alberta was in the grip of the Agrarians. Liberalism by constituencies was swept out as clean as a barn floor at fanning-mill time. And Michael Clark sat down to think it over. He had half expected that tornado. But he refused to like it. The farmers had stolen his own programme of free trade and by means of it had stampeded his Province for the sake of using it as a spring-broad to make the grand jump into the Federal arena. The apostle of free trade, himself as good a farmer as any of them, was now regarded as a chip on the Agrarian stream at high tide.

Wherefore Michael Clark, after certain "conversations" with Mr. Crerar, wrote the letter which, if Mackenzie King is as wise as he is hopeful, will be used to flood the country. Hoardings and electric signs in the interests of true-Liberalism should blazon abroad such sentences as these:

"The House of Lords, the Family Compact, the Manufacturers' Association and the junkers and militarists of Germany are each and all examples of group government."

"Class consciousness is none the less class selfishness, and therefore doomed to die, because it suddenly appears in Farmer and Labour parties."

"The apostles of progress must unite upon common principles, sincerely held to resist reaction, which is ever present like a dead weight to drag down the aspirations of the race for freedom, justice and democracy."

"These were the things for which sixty thousand Canadians died in the recent war. . . . I have been fighting 'class' for forty years. It would be quite impossible for me to turn my back on my past and the right in this election."

Our political history contains no declaration of independence more significant, manly and sensational. Repudiation of the Free Trade, group-governed, National Progressives by Michael Clark, the farmer and the apostle of Canadian Free Trade, is the first truly emancipating note that has been struck in all this pre-election barrage of group against group. Michael Clark may be no bigger as a Canadian for such a stand, but he is true to his own form as one of the rarest and manliest Radicals that Canada ever had. And his declaration should be of immense value to the Government, which confesses that its real fear is, not of Liberals, but of Agrarians.

The headmaster of the Manchester School in Canada has had a multitude of pupils; none more brilliant than Mr. Crerar, who seems to have made Free Trade a species of bondage. In no other land could Michael Clark so well have demonstrated the virtues of Free-Trade. On those plains, buffaloes worth multi-millions of dollars in trade annually migrated across "Parallel 49" into Montana and back again into the Territories. The prairie schooner trekked northward over the border carrying migrants in search of homes when there was no government official to turn them back or to question the terminus of their travels. The freight wagons creaked up from the south into MacLeod and past it into the valley of Saskatchewan, carrying goods made and bought in the land of the Western Yankee long before the great antidote to Free Trade, the Transcontinental Railway, put those crooked trails out of business.