The Masques of Ottawa | Page 3

an hour. For the eleven seconds that it
was my privilege to be individually sociable with him, he did his best
to say what might suit the case. He seemed much like a worn-out
precocious boy, of great wisdom and much experience, suddenly
prodded into an eminence which as yet he scarcely understood.
I was introduced as--say, Mr. Smith.
"Oh?" he said, wearily. "Yes, I've read your articles. Er--Tom Smith,
isn't it?"
But Tom was not the name, I had scarcely time to say, and it made no
difference. I should like to have shoo'd away the crowd and let him call
me Jake just for a few minutes to get the point of feeling of this young
man--though he is nearly 50--on how it feels to be Premier without a

general election.
There may not be as much finality, but there is sometimes as much
wisdom, in the choice of a leader by a small group as in his election by
the people. Majorities frequently rule without wisdom. In accepting the
gift of an almost worn-out Premiership and a year later entering the
most significant general election ever held in Canada, at least since
1878, Arthur Meighen falls back upon his courage without much
comfort from ordinary ambition. He faces a battle whose armies are
new, pledged to hold what he has against two enemy groups, and to
hold more than John A. Macdonald fought to get, without the sense of
one great party against another such as Macdonald had. No Premier
ever went into a general election with so little intimate support from
"the old party", with such a certainty that whichever party wins as
against the others cannot win a working majority without coalition, and
with the sensation that the party he leads is already what remains of a
coalition.
Whenever I see Meighen I feel like hastening home to "cram" on
citizenship for an examination. I behold in him picnics neglected and
even feminine society deferred for the sake of toiling up a political
Parnassus. In his veneration for constituted authority I can comprehend
something of the Jap's banzais to the Mikado before he commits
harikari.
Whatever there is, or is not, in the character of Arthur Meighen, he has
a draw upon other men. Any public task that he has in hand looks like a
load that challenges other men to help him lift. A really intelligent
camera would show in his face a mixture of wholesome pugnacity,
concentration of thought and feminine tenderness. He feels like a big
intellectual boy who unless mother looks after him will get indigestion
or neurasthenia. Sometimes men pity their leaders. Meighen, with his
intensity and his thought before action looks such a frail wisp of a man.
The last time I saw him in public he was bare-headed on an open-air
stage, a dusky, lean silhouette against a vast flare of water and sky. On
the same spot less than two hundred years ago, that singular, overbuilt
top head and sharply tapering, elongated oval of a face might have been

that of some aristocratic red man, deeply serious on the eve of a tribal
war.
The little blank spots in Meighen's temperament are things that people
like to talk about; when the same idioms in an average man would be
set down as mild insanity. Rumour says for instance that every now and
then he must be watched for fear he go to Parliament without a hat.
Why not? It is only a British custom to wear a hat in the Commons
except when making a speech. A bareheaded, even a bald-headed,
Premier may be a great man. Meighen's negligence in the matter of a
hat perhaps comes of the bother of finding the clothes-brush at the
same time. Since Mackenzie Bowell, Canada has never had a Premier
so naturally oblivious of sartorial style; though his later appearances
suggest that even he has fallen into the mode of well-dressed Premiers.
In his early law days at Portage it is said that one evening when Mrs.
Meighen was at a concert, he was given the first baby to mind, that
when the baby cried he marked a paragraph in a law book he was
reading, stole into the bedroom and took the baby over to a neighbour's
house; that when he was asked later where the infant was he gradually
remembered that he had put the child somewhere--now where was it?
There is some other half forgotten tale of the strange garb in which he
turned up at a friend's wedding, even before he was famous enough to
be able to do that sort of thing with any degree of contempt for the
conventional forms.
If Meighen remains Premier of Canada long enough, no doubt some
really apocryphal yarns will arise