Part 32

Clark was spouting free-trade on the prairies at a time when many men in the West scarcely knew that trade had any restrictions except in the matter of beverages. He was an apostle of Cobdenism almost before the Territories were baptized into party politics at all; when Regina was the home of a Territorial County Council that had neither Tories nor Grits. He was farming and prophesying commercial union before James J. Hill began to compete with the protective C.P.R. for trade north and south instead of the long-haul east and west. Before ever a real Agrarian began to head out on the plains he was contending like a tribune of the plebs, that unrestricted reciprocity between two halves of a great productive continent, of which one-half contains nine-tenths of the people, was not a prelude to annexation away from the grand old Empire. And when he got into Parliament the voice that had been so mighty in the trail-side school houses and the little town-halls became more potent than ever as "Red Michael" went full tilt in the House against the high protectionists.

High courage was here. Bucking bronchos from the West who had gone to Ottawa were duly corralled, haltered, hobbled, surcingled and thrown, finally harnessed and driven by either of the old parties. In breaking a political broncho the Liberal party was as good as the other. But the House is full of insurgents now, lining up into a tyrannized and tyrannous group organizing as a party. In Clark's inaugural days, and for years after, there was but one real solo voice calling like a trombone from a high tower for Free Trade as the Kingdom of God which, if they would first seek it, all other things would be added unto them.

French psychology traces certain forms of insanity to the fixed idea. There have been times when Parliament has regarded Michael Clark as a melancholy victim of this big idea that warped his whole political mentality. But it was a grand form of insanity. Nobody ever heard Clark in the House who did not realize that here was a fine British rebel whose brain should be a great hope to his party. The old chief knew that. He kept his ear towards Clark when he was sometimes deaf to his ministers.

Clark was the mountain peak which the party had left for its fleshly sojourn in Egypt. The Liberal party in Canada had once been a free trade party--somewhat before Clark's time. In free trade and the universal franchise had been its life. But Liberalism before 1896 was one thing; afterwards another. Laurier in practice knew that Clark was magnificently wrong; in theory superbly right. Therefore he indulged and admired him; sometimes playing with him, conscious that Liberalism was the only show in which Clark could be a national performer.

In truth Michael Clark was for long enough a man without a party. But from the benches of the Liberals he could stand and preach his Manchester doctrines to Hansard and the nation, even when the party yawned and held dangerously on to the tariff.

It was always a tonic to hear Clark in the House. Like Carlyle he breathed a certain inexorable vitality into public affairs. To meet Clark in the corridors was to get a breeze that swept like a chinook across the frozen waste of old-line politics. In the gloom of the lobby this apostle of red hair and rubicund visage was a beacon light. I have met him so, of a Saturday afternoon when the House was out of session, and when the member for Red Deer was ripe for a free talk to any stranger. A great friendliness possessed him always. He could laugh at the besetments of party and the tyranny that opportunism imposes on great minds. He himself was free. He wanted others to be free. He could stand for half an hour in one gloomy crypt of those corridors in the old Parliament and talk of the power of being that kind of Liberal.

It was the wheat that helped to keep Clark where he was on the outpost of Liberalism. When his old leader became enswathed with election bandages, Clark looked out upon the landscapes of the wheat, not so long ago the limitless pasture of the free-trade buffaloes, and felt again the vision of the life that is Liberal but is sometimes called another name.

Alberta was leaping to a great life. Almost in the middle of it north and south is the town of Red Deer. All about it were the settlements of "nationals" emancipated from bondage in Europe. What was the use, quoth Clark, of bringing such people to a country of free homestead land, of alleged free institutions and making them the slaves, first of political machines, second of protected interests in the East? If enslaved people were to become free in a new land why should the wheat and the oats and the cattle which they raised not be made free to move for a market as naturally as the wind blows across the borders?

This may not have been the precise order in which such ideas generated in the mind of Michael Clark; but it is the way those ideas confronting such a man strike a contemporary. I have lived in the land where Clark lives, though not at Red Deer, and remember well the burning desire of twenty years ago in that far northwest for economic emancipation. Then at any meeting, no matter what, any little dinner to a citizen no matter whom, men rose to talk about the need of conquering the isolation of the country. They remembered the tyranny of the old Trading Company into Hudson's Bay. They clamoured for more people, more farms, more towns, more railways, more life--from the East. And when it came they said the East was a tyrant, an economic monster to bleed them white. Clark, as one remembers him best, has not been so much a foe to the East as he has wanted to be a friend to the South.

But a new oligarchy was arising on the great prairies. As official liberalism got its grip on the three Provinces and became itself a tyrant, while unofficial Toryism in league with the big railways got a stranglehold on British Columbia, and when even "Honest" Frank Oliver ceased to be an independent Liberal and became a red-taped Minister of the Interior, Clark the Free Trader in Parliament found himself striking hands with a sect mainly of Liberal Radicals first called Grain Growers, next Agrarians, and by some the very devil. With official Liberalism as expressed by Scott, Sifton, Cross, Norris and Martin he had only superficial sympathy. These men were more or less on masquerade. The Agrarians were barefaced, one-faced Radicals who would open the borders, and abolish the customs houses, and set up a sort of Western political autonomy whose root idea was that trade should be as free as grasshoppers. These people were not raising Old Flag wheat.

How far Clark fell in line with all the doctrines of the United Grain Growers, I do not know. But one thing clear about this insurgent is that he has always stood four-square for the British connection--and for all that it means to Canada. Clark is a Britisher. He still has his English accent. You would spot him at once as a transplanted Englishman. He is prouder of being a Briton in Canada than he ever would have been in England. Clark never forgot--Manchester and Cobden. He stood among the wheat and saw the Empire.

When the War came and his adopted Province of Alberta for a long while held the lead in enlistments for war, no man was happier in the grim outlook than the member for Red Deer. The War to him was a great emergence of Liberalism the world over when Peace should bring Free Humanity, Free wheat, Free trade. Why not? His son went to the war--and he lost him. His speech on the Military Service Act was in many respects the best of all in that debate, not in rhetoric, but in logical virility. It was a howitzer broadside, slow, deliberate, but every shot a hit. His old leader had already declined a belated offer of Coalition and was now opposing conscription and arguing for amendment by Referendum. In all his life he never got from a political foe such a searchlight on his soul as his once devoted follower gave him in this speech.

Laurier had previously executed the Nationalist dodge of taking refuge behind the Militia Act, asserting that it was right to enforce that Act calling out the Militia for the defence of Canada; to which Clark replied:

"England is fighting this war wherever she sees the turban of a Turk or the helmet of a Teuton. She is fighting it in Egypt, Mesopotamia, in Macedonia, in Belgium--most of all in France. . . . America, whose independence had been fought in a struggle of blood for sound fiscal ideas was now immortalizing her reunion with Britain, her old enemy. . . . If organized labour was opposed to conscription, so much the worse for labour, whose own trades unions were a form of conscription; in England he had never named either lord or labour with a capital L. . . . Canada should be in the war to her last man and her last dollar. . . . As to the referendum amendment, it was fathered by the man who down to his attitude on this question had gone into history as the greatest of all Canadians, but who had applauded Pugsley when he argued against extending the life of this Parliament, and who in the matter of sending men to fight, in organizing the whole nation for war, in conserving national unity, and in making an election a smaller matter than the honour of a nation was opposed to the Government. If the amendment should carry, and the Referendum show a majority against the Government measure by omitting the soldier vote and piling up the vote from the Province which had given birth to the Referendum, then when the author of that measure should be returned to power on a no-conscription issue what chance was there for Canada to win her part of the war with the lion Laurier and the lamb Oliver lying down together--and a little child--Macdonald from Pictou--leading them?"

Not as a climax, but as a mere personal note midway in his speech, he had said:

"I have a little toddling grandson on my farm out West to-day whose father was killed with a gunshot wound in his neck two weeks ago. I say to you, sir, on my soul and conscience I support this Bill, because I believe it to be a part of the necessary machinery which can save that little fellow, born a Canadian, and thousands of others like him from ever going through what his father and his uncles have gone through."

Parliamentary debate has risen to much higher levels of oratory, but seldom to such a height of accusing vindication and personal affection for the accused from whom an insurgent is driven to sever his allegiance. Clark can always make some sort of big human speech with a natural knack of getting at the vitals of a subject in simple, dignified language and a searching logic--once you admit his major premiss. That one speech flung into bold relief, almost as the No Man's Land under a flare of a great barrage, the issues between men who for so many years had been political confederates.

A couple of years later I again met Clark when he was speaking guest at an Empire Club luncheon. His topic was--the Empire. His brand of political ideas was vastly different from those of the average man in his audience, and he knew it. The Club had invited him, because he was Michael Clark. He said not a word about trade. He uttered no propaganda. He talked simply and strongly about the race that had made the Empire which to him was a commonwealth of neither trade nor conquest but of liberating ideas.

I don't think that any of the Chamberlain-Foster school could have uttered quite so broad and noble a tribute to the inner vitality of the British League of Nations. And not even Mr. Rowell could have surpassed it for breadth of view on that subject, Clark looked at the Empire from within outwards. He saw in it the expression of a great race of people working the leaven upon other races; a mighty confederacy of free nations.

Red Michael has been a great informing Liberal, and a big illuminating Canadian. Whether grandly right or magnificently wrong, he is never uninteresting; a man who could come off a stack of wheat, wash himself up bare-armed, and in Sunday clothes but seldom well-dressed and never groomed, step on to a platform over in the schoolhouse or the town hall and make a great speech to men who believe in the simplicity of a big mind that thinks hard on the welfare of the majority. John Bright would have loved such a man. Even John Macdonald might have loved him. And the one regret among those who value the power of a big free nature in a nation is, that owing to some fatalistic streak in his genius, Michael Clark has not risen to the inspiring height from which the country might get the best that he has to give. Never cured of his insurgency in Parliament, he has become an uncompromising conformist to one big and bigoted idea that universal Free-Trade is the need of the world, and especially of Canada. He persists in the delusion that what has been good for Britain must be good for Canada; not only is Canada at war when Britain fights, but when Britain has no tariff Canada must have free trade.

All which is freely forgiven this stalwart on account of his challenge to the group who took his Free Trade luggage and attempted to label it National Progressive. The Free Trader who could watch that caravan of adventurers going down the trail and stoutly tell them all to keep on going to the devil, deserves well of his country. Michael Clark's advocacy of Progressivism might have got him the promise of a Cabinet position. His rejection of it is the proof that the free-man who believes in great parties can never be bound by a class-conscious group. "Better a dinner of herbs . . . ." Michael Clark, whether M.P. or not, is free to consider himself if need be a party of one man--without a platform, but not devoid of a cause.

Whatever Michael Clark knows about the benefits of Free Trade and its effect upon the exchanges, he knows peculiarly well the danger of unrestricted reciprocity in sentiment between Canada and the United States.

THE SPHINX FROM SASKATCHEWAN

HON. J. A. CALDER

The Hon. J. A. Calder has never seen the Sphinx. But he has a looking glass. He has never been in Egypt. But he has lived a long while in Saskatchewan. A man who can continue to know as much as he knows about the confessional side of government, and who can say so little, has some claim to be considered--Canada's political Sphinx.

Such a reputation is sometimes enviable. The average public man babbles. Often he talks to conceal thought or as a substitute for action. The mental energy needed to turn end for end what some of these garrulous people say, in order to decipher just what they mean, is usually more than the wisdom is worth. Calder spares us. He tells us nothing. His silence may be golden, or it may be just a habit; but from the known character of Calder it is never the omniscience of stupidity.

A Sphinx in action may sometimes give himself away. It is not usual for a Sphinx to do anything except to conceal the riddle. Calder has all his life been a busy man. He is still in middle age. All but fourteen years of his life up till 1917 he spent in the West, most of it in the part now known as Saskatchewan. Ten years ago he was furtively discussed as successor to Laurier. He is now a Unionist-Liberal. To give him work in the administration commensurate with his ability--or somewhere near it--a new department was created in Immigration. Now he is slated for the Senate!

Little was heard about Calder's department. He had a publicity bureau which did not spend vast amounts of money on diffusing information. The department is said to contain a moving picture section, some of whose films probably creep into Canadian movie houses. But nobody ever saw a picture of J. A. Calder on a screen. He had a Canadian novelist as chief of publicity. That novelist might have yearned for the chance to immortalize his chief in a story, but so long as he is in the pay of Mr. Calder's department he will continue to yearn. And not even he has been given to understand why when a reconstructed Liberal like Mr. Rowell left the Cabinet at the appointment of Premier Meighen, the Minister of Immigration stayed on. One might surmise that the man who, a decade ago, looked to some people like an Elisha to Laurier, would run again in Moosejaw as a National Liberal Conservative with the expectation of re-entering the Cabinet, probably as Minister of the Interior. But he was suddenly and humdrumly designated for the Senate.