The Masques of Ottawa | Page 9

to his soul, and the perversities of the wild cucumber--but amiably declined to say a word about the destinies of nations.
Laurier had his flute. Borden should not be denied his wild garden. I used to think, watching the Premier in the House, that he would make a splendid bronze bust of an Egyptian god.
But the man never could dress for the part of leader. He needed too much grooming. He must always be immaculate. A trifle of neglige would have ruined his career.
We never heard of his "iron hand within the velvet glove." He had neither the hand nor the glove. He was an influence; never a power. Even when the stage was all set for a show Sir Robert could not take the spot-light. He did not abhor the calcium; he merely did not know what to do when it was on. During the tour which preceded the triumphal election of 1911 he was strong enough to win the country and weak enough to pose for oratorical photographs of Sir Robert swaying a crowd--on the roof of a Toronto hotel. Those photographs were published as authentic pictures of the Premier in action.
But real action seldom happened to Premier Borden. He never could invent occasions. He had no craft to play the game, no intuition to penetrate into the conscience of a lukewarm supporter or of a man whose policies and programmes might bedevil the union of the party. On his tour in 1915 when, after seeing and hearing more of the realism of war than any other man in the country, he undertook to translate his emotions to crowds of people here, he was compelled to use the tomtom-on-the-Midway performances of R. B. Bennett, at a time when dominating men of both parties put their political makeups into their pockets in order to do honour to the tragic cause of which on behalf of the nation he was the spokesman.
Political history is very largely a chronicle of stupendous noises, of pageants and tumults and shoutings, of strategies and manoeuvres, secret conclaves and cabals, of sinister intrigues and specious platitudes in parliament to cover them up, and of occasional great episodes when the leader feels called to vindicate himself and his followers. Most of these emotional experiences seem to have been denied to Sir Robert.
I daresay it was mainly his lack of imagination. Borden must, "work for the night is coming." The day's work was often bigger than the man.
His advent to the leadership was a moral makeshift. His defeat of Laurier in 1911 was not a triumph for anything that might be called Bordenism. His conduct of the political side of the war was creditable, at times splendid, never consummately wise, never heroic. His exit was as uneventful as his advent. Sir Robert had more than finished his work.
The Conservative party as such carries no indelible imprint from the man who for nearly a quarter of a century led it. He led it by going alongside. He was not a great partisan. He had no overwhelming and audacious bigotries.
Borden was the first Conservative leader of note who never could play the ace of Quebec. The Laurier Cabinet knew how to play politics by imagination. Borden had nothing but a demoralized remnant, which the Liberals pillaged when they discarded Free Trade, helped themselves to a high, virtually protective, tariff for revenue only, took a reef out of the Tory "old flag" monopoly by establishing the British Preference and sent a contingent to the South African War in the name of Empire. Laurier was master in Quebec, in the new West whose two new Provinces he created, in immigration, in great railways, in a deeper St. Lawrence, in flamboyant adventures with great harbours, in the Quebec Bridge. Borden as yet was master of nothing. Such brilliance and success had never been confronted by such a demoralized party and so much drab common sense in a leader.
Sir Robert's Premiership was a desperate inheritance. The direct plunge into the Naval Aid Bill was a badly staged attempt to capitalize the reaction against restricted reciprocity. That first session of the Borden Parliament goes on record as the most complete one-act farce ever inflicted upon a patient country. The Imperial issue was a play to the gallery, and it is the one clear issue that seems to remain of all the Borden idea.
Sir Robert in his whole life never constructed an epigram. His two great predecessors had made several. Epigrams sometimes outlive policies. He never delivered a great passionate speech. He had opportunities but could not meet them. Fine speeches enough, to be sure; many of them instinct with a sort of ethical nobility; but a great palpitating speech, never.
It is not likely that if left to the logic of ordinary evolution Sir Robert ever