Part 34

The Immigration Minister should be our leading sociologist. He should be able to diagnose communities. He might easily begin upon Ottawa. What a study a cross section of the Smart Set would be, especially upon the arrival of a new king at Rideau Hall! There's nothing in other democracies quite like that. Washington has a White House, but the inmate is merely an elected servant of the State. Rideau Hall is an endowment, a gift of the gods. The 30,000 people of greater and lesser degree in Ottawa who normally or abnormally live by the Civil Service are profoundly affected by the arrival, sojourn and departure of the Governor-General. They are vitally influenced and entertained by the Parliamentary restaurant, even without the bar. The social show provided by Ministers' and members' wives and their visiting friends is itself a subtle study in the art of getting on in the new world, which is at the root of all immigration. Bridge for money and dining out with your friend's wife are within the reach of any ambitious immigrant. The Smart Set in Ottawa is an exotic colony all by itself. Montreal and Toronto and Winnipeg can merely copy it. Some of the farmers have their eye on the Set; no, not to abolish it. Women must have their share in the Government. Petticoats and politics are affinities. Farmers are no more necessarily immune from what is said to have corrupted the Roman Empire than Tories or Grits. Farmers in fact, as Mr. Calder knows, are not the hope of the world; neither are lawyers nor manufacturers.

Suppose we ask the Sphinx about this. Listen in imagination to this once Liberal, as with an astounding burst of candour he says:

"My friend, your description of my make-up may be as right or as foolish as anybody feels disposed to think. None of it bothers me. What does bother me is the law of compensation. Agree with me that the manufacturer had his drastic innings with Canadian governments; that tariffs and protected industries are the result; that lawyers--yes, I'm a lawyer--have had a big day in our affairs because they had the talent for schemes and speeches. Admit that and conclude--that the very human farmer thinks his turn is coming, and rather soon. But--somebody who was never educated as a Tory has got to help the National-Liberal-Conservative Government to get an even chance to administer this nation after the upheavals of war. Somebody who moves silently while others are talking their tongues loose may be needed to manipulate----"

Before the Sphinx could complete his statement of the case he was politely asked if he would care to inter his talents in the Canadian Senate, and he suavely answered that such a thing might be a good way to solve the conundrum, even though it would make a thoroughly stupid last act in the play.

A TRUE VOICE OF LABOUR

MR. TOM MOORE

Many years ago an Irish poet visiting Canada and voyaging down the Ottawa wrote a poem of which may people recall only the lines--

"Row, brothers, row, the stream runs fast, The rapids are near, the daylight's past."

The Tom Moore about whom this article is sketched is not a poet. He is, in fact, one of the prosiest public men in Canada. But we may leave it to any of those who have known him during the past three years when he has been President of the Trades and Labour Congress, if many and many a time he has not felt some such sentiment as--

"Row, brothers, row, the stream runs fast, The rapids are near, the daylight's past."

Since Mr. Charles Draper first became Secretary of that Congress he has never known a period when so much was expected of a President by way of limitless patience, statesmanship and self-control as has been shown by Tom Moore. The rapids were always close to this man, and there were rocks under the rapids. It took steady piloting by the captain to keep the crew of the labour ship from getting holes in her bottom and going down.

So far as one has been able to follow the career of Moore at the head of the Congress, and as reported in the public press, he stands now and always for adherence to the principle of Union in evolution. He believes in labour getting ahead; but not by the method of upturning everything that is established just to see what kinds of crawling things there may be underneath.

When we reflect that Canada is not primarily an industrial so much as an agricultural country, it is startling to remember that two years ago it was the home of the only organized attempt ever made in America on a scale of efficiency to establish something closely resembling a Soviet government. The big Winnipeg Strike was a lurid menace to the solidarity of labour in Canada. West of Winnipeg, once the Red River Soviet had been set up, there was a chain of inflammable centres to link up with the revolution. Calgary was the scene of one convention which had sent a cable of sympathy to Moscow. British Columbia was full of seething susceptible elements, regarded by some of the Reds across the border as the real centre rather than Winnipeg, of the One Big Union idea. The mines of Alberta were dominated by swaggering foreigners who owed no allegiance to the British or any other flag except the Red emblem. Long ago under the influence of the clergy and the Archbishop of Montreal, Quebec had created a Canadian Labour movement intended to cut Canadian labour away from the American Federation. This was a phase of the Nationalism that had its headquarters in Quebec, but had spread in various strange guises to other parts of the country, when none of the clergy or intellectuals behind the movement dreamed that the One Big Union insurgent against the A.F.L. would be the most theatrical result. Once get the O.B.U. idea rampant in Quebec with its scores of big industries and its thousands of poorly educated workers, and the Red movement was due to spread faster than the United Farmers' programme had ever done.

In the propagation of the Red programme Ontario, and especially industrial Toronto, was regarded as the buffer state. But if the Soviet had succeeded in Winnipeg and further West, then the whole weight of that success marching upon Ontario, with Quebec bringing up the eastern end, would form a sort of nutcracker device from which Ontario would have had a hard time to escape.

This was the dazzling formula propounded at a time when every nation in the world was in a state of ferment, and when the vast loose-jointed nation known as Canada was in a condition of instability unknown since it became a Confederation. The apostles of the Red programme had all the advantages of being able to sling the paint on to the canvas of the future without caring overmuch about the drawing. Men in large numbers everywhere seemed ready to grasp at and embrace the unusual. People who for years had been ground down by high prices for the commonest necessities, considered seriously the question of the "salariat" joining forces with organizing labour under a banner that might be red. Civilization, physically shattered by the war and hysterically stampeded by the doctrine of self-determination of peoples--a high form of Bolshevism--stood ready to inquire whether the theories being tried in Russia were not, after all, right, no matter what butchery might be perpetrated in working them out.

Revolutionary ideas were everywhere.

Everything prepared the public mind.

A barrage of propaganda had been set up--and kept up.

Legitimate Trades Unionism itself in Britain had subscribed to The Aims of Labour put forth by Arthur Henderson, who foreshadowed barricades and bayonets in London streets if the proletariat did not get their "rights".

Canada did not surely escape. We had the Winnipeg flare-up, which was watched by legitimate labour across the border. The A.F.L. was challenged for authority in this country. It came to the peculiar pass, that in order to maintain the solidarity of Canada as constituted by Government under the Old Flag, the legitimate leaders of labour had to fall back upon the one continental organization which makes brotherhoods, not across the seas, nor so much across Canada, but across the border.

It was Ontario's opportunity; the steady old Province of some bigotry, great industry, many labour unions, and more or less fixed ideas regarding the function of Government. The office of Tom Moore is in Ottawa. There the President of the Trades and Labour Congress is in close touch with the Labour Department, with the Labour Gazette, with the Government in Council. We shall never know just how much of the steady conservatism of Moore at the first Congress following the Winnipeg strike, as well as at other Congresses later, was developed and held steady by association with Government.

But whether or no, even though it was nothing but loyalty to the established brotherhoods of the A.F.L. or a deeper loyalty to his own ideas of the case, the rock-steady influence of Tom Moore at the conventions was the one biggest hope of the indirect action element winning out. He was not opposed to Socialism. He has to work with Socialists--of many sorts. The whole basic idea of the Federation of Labour is a degree of Socialism. But it was the Marxian brand of Socialism born in Germany and transplanted to Russia to which Moore was opposed. He saw no field for this in Canada. He believed that Canada had a right to freedom of action. At least if it came to a choice between authority from the Gompers organization in the United States, and the Lenine tyranny in Russia, the course was clear. Time and time again he was bombarded and machine-gunned by the Red elements in Congress and Convention. As often he solidly stood his ground, based upon the older idea of labour getting its rights through negotiation and later through the ballot.

"Row, brothers, row, the stream runs fast, The rapids are near----"

But the daylight was not yet past for this Tom Moore. He could see ahead.

"I have seen Moore," says a close observer of him for two years, "faced by labour opponents in a number of Western cities. In all the howling he has never lost his temper or his dignity."

It would have been so much easier for this man to lose his temper, except that he knew it would be harder at the end when he had to face his own steady rank and file accusing him of poor chieftainship. It would have been so much easier to compromise with the preachers of glittering formulae, except that in the settling up he would have to justify himself to those who suspected him of defection.

Moore stuck to the commonplace business of wages and hours and agreements. He had no head for the poetry of Utopias. He knew, as he knows, that wages are the chief item of cost in all commodities, and that no matter what form of capitalism you choose, whether embodied in a Soviet or in a close corporation of dividends, wages of labour must be paid. He knows that prices of living and of labour are almost convertible. Amid all the howling and paeaning for a better day, for the new life, for the heaven upon earth, for the glorification of the proletariat, he could stand hard and fast by the common necessity of sticking to an agreement and as fast as possible bettering conditions.

We have heard independent observers say that the Reds have always shown a grasp of the new life, while the Trades Union men were crawling along with the uninspired programme of wages and hours; that the Reds were the sacrificing idealists and the Unionists the selfish Tories who wanted nothing more than to slowly improve their condition. Well, the logic of events seems to show that in the long run the Moores have the gospel. One scarcely cares to think what might have happened in Canadian industry and common living had Tom Moore given way to the Reds who came at him from almost every quarter.