Part 8

What? No more elections for Laurier? Not one more chance, after all the waiting, for him to finish his work? Poor old infatuate! splendid even in his illusions. There was no work for Laurier to do now. There was no room for him to do it if there had been. There were few to follow him except in Quebec--for in his dotage he would not believe that the West had so forsaken him.

In a few months he was dead. And when dead, once again men forgot their political opinions and for a brief while somehow worshipped the memory of the man whose life was almost the coming true of a dream, whose work was never done, whose evening of life was a tragedy. And case-hardened politicians who had borne the burden and the heat of the day with Laurier, wept.

But the power of Laurier is not dead. In the long perspective of history the figure of this great Canadian, with his "sunny ways" and his bewildering Atlas load, will stand out vividly when many of his successors will be scarcely visible in the haze.

THE GRANDSON OF A PATRIOT

HON. WILLIAM LYON MACKENZIE KING

In December, 1913, there was a Literary Society dinner in the University of Toronto at which Sir Wilfrid Laurier was the guest of honour and speaker on "Democracy." My own seat at a table was next to a restless, thick-bodied, sparse-haired man who seemed younger than his years and to whom I had not been introduced. During the hour that Laurier spoke this man continued to lean over the table so as to catch a view of his fascinating face. He interested me almost as much as did the speaker. I had never sat beside such an irrepressible vitality. Like a bird to a succession of swinging boughs, he hung upon the golden utterances of his old chieftain and political mentor concerning a subject so poignantly dear to the experiences of one and the imagination of the other.

First impressions are sometimes reversed on closer acquaintance. I was uncomfortable beside Mackenzie King, but interested. On a latter occasion I was still more interested, and rather more uncomfortable. The early impression remained, that he had very little faculty of restraint--what scientists call inhibition.

That occasion will not soon fade from memory. Often I can hear in imagination a thousand students singing "Vive le roi! vive le compagnie!" before the fine old leader spoke, and that earnest, hectic disciple joining in. When I discovered who he was I ran back in fancy to the time when Mackenzie King was a student at that same university. At that time William Mulock was Vice-Chancellor and became keenly interested in the brilliant young student of economics with whose father he had attended law school. King entered the University the year that the chief author of the National Policy died. He graduated one year before Laurier became Premier, in the golden age of Liberalism triumphant, when "freer" trade was emerging as a symbol of that brand of democracy in opposition to free trade in a minority. How we have fallen upon evil days! Farmers' sons at college no longer regard free trade as the forerunner of political absorption by the United States, but as the vindication of the farmer as a group in government.

Mackenzie King is a man about whom nobody ever could have a lukewarm conviction. He is either cordially liked or disliked. More than most other men in public life he has become the victim of violent opinions. For this he is temperamentally responsible. People consistently decline to reason about him. They speak of him vehemently. His dominant note of character is rampant enthusiasm. King is always intensely in love with whatever interests him. His enthusiasms are not so much on the surface for many people, as underneath for causes--and for a few men. Gifted with an uncommon capacity for absorbing impressions and collecting data for research, he has made himself a sort of pathological study to other people. In mastering economics he has himself been enthralled by his own enthusiasm.

At the time of Laurier's speech on democracy King was peculiarly enthusiastic about John D. Rockefeller, Jr., head of the Rockefeller Foundation. But he had lost no jot of his fervent admiration for Laurier in Ottawa and was still passionately devoted--as he remains--to Sir William Mulock, his political godfather. Nobody has ever criticized him for his ardent discipleship to the two older Canadians. There is an old-fashioned spontaneity about this mutual regard much above the common commercial admiration of one man for another in business. Many have blamed King for his attachment to Rockefeller, and have used that connection to his detriment as Liberal leader.

In April, 1920, he was flatly accused of having been an absentee from Canada during the war, employed by the Rockefeller interests and so "entangled in the octopus" that as leader of the Liberal party he would become a menace to Canada. It was the old bogey of continentalism in a new setting, and it took Mackenzie King twelve pages of Hansard to make his defence in the House. The incident forms a hinge to a career which is worth a brief survey.

King was born in Berlin, Ontario, son of a subsequent lecturer in law at Osgoode Hall and of a daughter of William Lyon Mackenzie. At the University of Toronto he was one of the '95 group that included also Hamar Greenwood, Arthur Stringer, and the late Norman Duncan and James Tucker. There was a rebellion during that period in which there is no record of the grandson of a glorious rebel having taken part. At college he displayed a passion for pardonable egotism in which there were elements of a desire for public service. The Family Compact at Ottawa must have interested him. Liberalism, as understood by the Laurier group, was emerging from the disreputable mess known as continentalism, fathered by Goldwin Smith, who was beginning to be estimated for what he really was, a brilliant philosophical pamphleteer bent upon the obliteration of Canadian nationality.

After graduation King went for a brief term on the staff of the Toronto Globe. In that year the Liberals came into power. King was engaged by Sir William Mulock, Postmaster-General, to inquire into sweatshop methods in contracts for postoffice uniforms. No man could have done it better. He had a native appetite for that sort of investigation, and he was helping to establish the new Liberalism.

For the next four years King was out of the country. Had he followed the academic fashion of that period he would have been in training to become a citizen of the United States. Chicago University, built by John D. Rockefeller, attracted him first; Harvard next. He was still studying economics. No other Canadian had ever spent so much time and talent on this subject. At Harvard he became a Lecturer, and was sent to Europe to investigate economic conditions. While there he got a cable from the Postmaster-General of Canada, who had created the Department of Labour as an adjunct to the postal department, and established the Labour Gazette, and wanted a deputy who should edit the Gazette and look after the details of the office. King courteously declined, saying that he could not accept until the expiry of his contract with Harvard. The salary of the Deputy-Minister of Labour was $2,500 under a man whom he tremendously admired, and as yet with no clear ambition to become a member of the House led by the man whom he was afterwards to worship, and to succeed.

There is no proof that Laurier took any uncommon interest at this time, as he afterwards did, in the Deputy-Minister of Labour, though he noticed that the young man was making a great success of his work. Much if not most of King's tuition in politics at this stage came from William Mulock, who as a member of the Commons in Opposition, had fathered the fair trade resolution in Convention and did much to convert the Liberal party from free to "freer" trade.

In the eight years up till 1908, by experience with conditions, King made himself master of the subject which was later to appear in his book, "Industry and Humanity." He was repeatedly made chairman of this or that mission, board, and commission at home or abroad, to get the true facts about labour, immigration and employment. By a sort of genius for conciliating groups, even when he antagonized individuals, he became for a time the world's most successful mediator in labour disputes. Industrial warfare had not as yet adopted the trench system. Direct action, the One Big Union, the sympathetic strike and collective bargaining were scarcely dreamed of, though anticipated in the philosophy of Karl Marx, as yet not transplanted to America. Socialism, as expressed by Henry George, whose "Progress and Poverty" was a classic in King's college days, was the most radical element with which the young Deputy had to deal. But the Government's policy of foreign labour nationals being gradually absorbed into labour unions made Canada, in proportion to population, a very difficult country in which to act as conciliator.

During his eight years as Deputy, King was made two offers, each of which illuminates the criticism that in the war he was only a nominal citizen of Canada. A group of Canadian employers, recognizing his success as a mediator, offered him $8,000 a year to act on their behalf with the heads of labour. Without consulting his chief, King declined the offer. He said that he preferred the $2,500 from the Labour Department, where he could be independent of either one side or the other. Later President Eliot, of Harvard, on the death of the man who occupied the chair of political economy, offered King the post, pointing out that his duties would keep him but six months a year in Boston. The salary was at least twice what he was getting in Ottawa. Again without consulting his chief, King declined, on the pretext that he had no desire to leave the useful work he was doing for the Ottawa Government to become a citizen, even of eminence, in the United States. During the same period he was asked to act as conciliator in a great mining strike in Colorado, when violence and murder were the law, and when the result of his action led to the enactment of a successful arbitration measure by the Government of Colorado.

All this was prior to King's election as member of the House of Commons. Eight years as Deputy in the Department of Labour, he stepped into the Commons and the Ministry of Labour with exceptional qualities to succeed. His record as Minister was the natural but uncommon sequel to his experience as Deputy. King was so long the one man whose whole time was spent in the effort to reconcile industry and humanity in Canada that it seems hard to recollect that he spent but three years as Minister. During that time, as well as before it, he became the ardent disciple of Laurier. While there was great advantage in having spent so many years as Deputy, it is a pity for the sake of the young leader's subsequent elevation that he did not come under the spell of the old chieftain as a candidate before Laurier had begun to grow cynical in office. In 1908 Laurier had been at least three years tired of public life when there was no man to succeed him, and when, as often as he expressed his weariness of trying to govern a nation so temperamentally difficult as Canada, he was tempted by the adulation of his supporters to try again, until winning elections for the sake of remaining in power became a habit.

Admiration such as King felt for Laurier made criticism impossible. He worshipped Laurier. In this he was not alone. Older men than King, among his colleagues, shared the same spell-binding sentiment. And there was no member of the Cabinet who grieved more than King at the defeat of Laurier in 1911.

Here begins the Standard Oil story. The Montreal Gazette, in a report of two speeches made at a certain club, published an accusation that King had "deserted Canada in her hour of crisis in search of Standard Oil millions."

As similar statements may be made during the election campaign, it is fair to know the facts. King was employed by the Rockefeller Foundation, not by Standard Oil. The connection is merely one of cause and effect. The Foundation spends on the wholesale betterment of humanity the multi-millions which Standard Oil accumulated from the people. The theory of justification here is that the people would have spent these millions foolishly, whereas the Foundation spends them well. There is some truth in the theory. King was engaged solely upon the industrial relations programme of the Foundation, with special reference later to industries of war, and with permission according to his own stipulation to conduct his researches in Ottawa from which in the ten years between 1911 and 1921 he has been absent only upon special occasions. He was in the unusual position of working in Canada and being paid in the United States, for researches of benefit to the cause of American industrial relations during the war. His book, Industry and Humanity, which is the literary form of those researches, was all written in Ottawa.

These are respectable facts; the only objection to which is that the full statement of the apologia occupies twelve pages of Hansard and must have taken at least two hours of Parliamentary time. The original accusation was a malicious stupidity. The vindication was a confessional in which the Liberal leader told the House every item that he knew. Half the number of words would have been twice as effective.

This introduces my second impression of the Liberal leader, two years after the outbreak of war, at midnight in a baronial farmhouse in North York, Ont. He had been addressing a political meeting in a school-house some miles away. There was a golden harvest moon and the scene from the spacious piazza overlooking the hills of York was a dream of pastoral poetry. Suddenly motor headlights flared out of the avenue and from the car alighted the same restless man whom I had met three years before at the dinner to democracy. In a very little while we both became so interested in what he had to say that neither of us cared to go to bed.

Next day I found him still more interesting. He spoke with bubbling frankness and uncontrolled fervour about many things and certain people, chief among whom was John D. Rockefeller, Jr. He described the young magnate's trip into Colorado during a recent great strike, an itinerary planned on purpose that the son of John D. Rockefeller might get a first-hand knowledge of what conditions actually were, what the labour leaders thought, and what sort of people they might be. With graphic interest he described the young financier's reception by the miners, the speech he made, the big dance in which he took part, the camps and mines he visited; a picture of capital conciliating labour such as seldom comes to notice outside the pages of a novel. He made no effort to eulogize himself. He was absorbed in generous admiration for the other man and with enthusiasm for the glorious chance that Rockefeller seemed to have to make a new Magna Charta of brotherhood between Capital and Labour. In this he was a tremendous idealist. In many respects one was forced to regret that the world somehow did not seem quite so full of brotherly intention as Mr. King said that it was.

"The common ground of both capital and labour is humanity," he said over and over in various form. "The antagonism of each will be forgotten when both unite in an effort to forward the interests of the whole community without which neither can prosper."

"Right!" I felt like screaming, had there been a moment to do so. "Bravo!"

The idea found expression in his book which he was then engaged in writing. And it is doubtful if any book on the subject of political economy was ever the source of greater happiness to its author than "Industry and Humanity" was to Mackenzie King. On the merits of democratic statesmanship as revealed in that book, Mackenzie King should be Premier of Canada in 1922. Alas! men are often greater in what they say than in much they are able to do. Mackenzie King is a species of rather emotional idealist. He has studied economic humanity somewhat at the expense of his perception of human nature.

During the evening King talked with equal gusto upon his intimate knowledge of a certain popular song writer in Chicago, the story of whose life he told with vivid strokes of descriptive pathos; and upon his still more intimate acquaintance with the late William Wilfred Campbell, poet, whom he had seen in the same moment feed his pigs in a near suburb of Ottawa, and create a line of poetry--which King quoted--"The wild witchery of the winter woods." He was seized with the idea that a Foundation such as the Rockefeller should subsidize poets and song-writers. The pity of it always is that the world is far too desperately cynical in high places to accommodate such generous impulses. Mackenzie King's fervent advocacy of a reform sometimes creates more antagonism than the cold attacks of an adversary. His passion for the betterment of humanity often outruns his judgment. His statements smack of exaggeration even when they are absolutely true. He lacks a sense of proportion and a capacity for restraint. "Better is he that ruleth his spirit than he that taketh a city." But a political leader must do both.