The Masques of Ottawa | Page 8

about Medicine Hat,--'all hell for a basement.'"
"You don't worry about the Hat just because there's going to be a bye-election while you're away?"
"No,--for I know pretty well that I won't hold that seat. What worries me is the fool use that some people will make of a freak election as a forerunner of doom. However, as I was saying about the Conference--I hope to get such a reasonable endorsation of Canada's stand on the main issues that our party here can work to victory advantage in the next election. I may as well be honest. Arthur Meighen, Premier, has not yet been elected. But he intends to be, because he ought to be, because the party he leads can do this country more good for the next few years than anything else in sight; because the party which carried the war and the re-establishment has been given a new lease of life, at least some vision, and a vast deal of experience which Canada is going to need from now on more than she can ever need the wholesale patent nostrums of millennial doctors who think the plough-handles are a sign manual of a new efficiency in government. We all know what is happening to Russia. I'll be perfectly frank, and say that I fear this young nation may be induced to scrap experience for experiment--which above all times would at present be the inauguration of an economic system for which the nation is not prepared, for which it has not been educated, and because of which it cannot afford to take for its education the bitter experience which too often succeeds glittering experiment. What the world needs to-day is economic justice, not economic revolution. No nation in the world has a better chance than Canada for sound economic justice to all that makes her the world's young leading democracy. But economics isn't everything. Good-night."

THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN PREMIER
RT. HON. SIR ROBERT BORDEN
Here is a modest, honourable man who saw his duty to the nation and the emergency never more clearly than he knew his own defects. Canada never before had a mediocrity of such eminence; a man who without a spark of genius devoted a high talent to a nation's work so well that he just about wins a niche in our Valhalla--if we have one. It was the war that almost finished Borden; and it was the war that made him.
Canada has been governed by strategy, imagination, and common sense. We have had Macdonald, Laurier, and Borden. The first finished his work, the second wanted to, and the third had finished his work two years before he resigned office.
Sir Robert Borden was the only man in the world Premier both when the war began and when it ended. Of all Premiers of Canada he was the least like a Canadian, and he achieved European fame with less title to personal greatness than either Laurier or Macdonald. For the crowd there never was an inspired moment in Sir Robert's life, nor ever one when he did not try to do his whole duty. He never interested the people and did not always hold the profound allegiance of his party. Yet there never was a public man in Canada to whom the average politician would as soon take off his hat in absolute respect for his moral purpose, integrity, fair-mindedness and sense of honour. There was enough morality wasted in the equipment of R. L. Borden to have supplied the lack of it in some of his heterogeneous followers. But it was morality that he could not transmit except by silent influence.
Other celebrated Premiers had governed by the personal method. The moral law was written all over Borden. He was a walking decalogue. He worked for the good of the country without detriment to the Conservative party. But there never was any Borden Mount of Transfiguration. He never could lead except when he was considered by the Majority to be right. In the war he took refuge in the nation, and its patriotism. But for the war one doubts that Sir Robert would ever have won any title to fame.
The man's whole makeup is a sort of righteousness. He had no use for the mirror more than to adjust his necktie and his hair, of which a woman writer said:
"That wonderful hair of his must have brought the unctuous fingers of many masters, spiritual and otherwise, down upon it in commendatory pats. . . . I daresay that it was his mother's pleasure in it and the way she enjoyed running her fingers through it that made him realize--subconsciously at least--that his hair was a very magnificent asset." The writer also described the garden of the Premier--his wonderful roses; how he talked about the personalities of the wild flowers so dear