The Masques of Ottawa | Page 5

much to the Premier's joy.
Yes, it was time for a leader. Mr. Rowell was out--and off the ship.
Happily there were no more crows on the tree, or Meighen would have
been forced to hold an election in order to get a Cabinet.
However, the three of them consented to remain in the crew, until
further notice. Thus much was settled. Meighen should lead,--but what?
As yet little more than a hyphenated and quite stupid name, which had
never yet resolved itself into a platform. But the name and the platform

were both as clear as the constitution of the party, in which, under the
political microscope, there was clearly discernible a Unionist Centre, a
Tory Right and a Liberal left.
"Lacks solidarity," mutters Meighen. "Looks like tick-tack-toe. But
wait."
The third disturbing feature was the condition of the country. From his
wheel-house Meighen could see many clouds. The Reds, whom he had
ruthlessly handled in the Winnipeg Strike; the rather pink-looking
Agrarians; the Drury Lane coalition of farmers and labourites in
Ontario; Quebec almost solid Liberal behind Lapointe; Liberals angling
for alliance with Agrarians; Lenin poisoning the Empire wells of India
with Bolshevism; League of Nations every now and then sending out
an S.O.S., interrupted in transit by Lord Cecil or Sir Herbert Ames;
and--not least threatening of storms but if properly negotiated
favourable to this country on the Pacific issue--Mr. Harding busy on a
"just-as-good" substitute for the League of Nations with Washington as
a new-world centre when Mr. Meighen had hitherto neglected to
advocate a Canadian envoy to that Capital.
Having scanned all these weather signals, Mr. Meighen decided that
diplomacy for the present was dangerous and that boldness was better.
In his programme speech at Stirling he divided the nation into two
groups--that of authority and order to which he belonged, and the
heterogeneous group of incipient anarchism to which belonged all
those who did not agree with him.
Having done this with such further definition of his programme as
might be necessary, the Premier took a trip to the West to prepare the
way for Sir Henry Drayton's tariff tour. He went to that land of minor
revolutions as a representative of government by authority, high tariff,
conscription during the war, the Wartime Elections Act, and a
minimum of centrality in the Empire as opposed to a maximum of
autonomy. It was a disquieting outlook. But Westerners love to hear a
man hit hard when he talks. Meighen has often been bold both in
speech and action. In the Commons last session he paid his respects to
Mr. Crerar by calling the National Progressives "a dilapidated annex to

the Liberal party." Which adroit play to the gallery with a paradox
came back in the shape of a boomerang from a Westerner who called
the Government party "an exploded blister." On a previous occasion
talking to the boot manufacturers in convention at Quebec he took a
leap into the Agrarian trench with this pack of muddled metaphors. "I
see the Agrarians a full-fledged army on the march to submarine our
fiscal system."
Epigrams like these do not make great Premiers. But they are the kind
of schooling that Meighen had. In his young parliament days he was an
outrageously tiresome speaker. He heaped up metaphors and
hyperboles, paraded lumbering predicates and hurled out epithets,
foaming and floundering. He had started so many things in a speech
that he scarce knew when or how to stop. Commons, both sides, rather
liked to hear him struggle with his verbiage. Later he developed the
rapier thrust, some snatches of humor, a trifle of contempt. He learned
the value of playing with a rhetorical period that he might later leap
upon a climax. Frank B. Carvell was periodically egged on to bait the
member of Portage. He did it well. I recall once when the member for
Carleton was spluttering vitriolic abuse at the member for Portage that
Meighen muttered, "Oh, you wait. I'll get you." Which he
did--immediately. Young Cicero had his Catiline.
One of Meighen's best speeches now will rank with the best in any
country where dignity has not quite deserted the art of parliamentary
oration. But he is rather too fond of picturesque language to make a
really great speech. He has a strong intellectual grasp of what he wants
to say and a high moral measure of its significance to the nation; but for
a Premier he is too prone to lapse into the lingo of partisan debate
which in Canada--since the battering days of the giants that followed
Confederation--has not been on a very high level. Meighen's best
speeches are temperamentally big, but he has yet made no great speech
which will live, either in whole or in part, as a glorification of his
country.