The Masques of Ottawa | Page 5

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. It takes a Lincoln or a Roosevelt to be in high office and say things that palpitate in the heart of a crowd. Wilson did; but he was dangerous. You judge a man in high office by words and deeds. Lincoln was great in both. Lloyd George is great in either, but not always in both at once. Macdonald could thrill a crowd with a homely epigram and turn his hand to a vastly national piece of work. We have