The Masques of Ottawa Part 11

Lord Shaughnessy's retirement from the presidency was not sudden. He had reached his zenith. His eyesight was bad. But he had not lost his grip.

The war threw such an unusual load on the system and so changed its complexion that it became necessary to have a younger man. There is reason to believe that the war rudely upset much of the Imperial dignity of the great system. The C.P. was no longer a law unto itself. It was part of the national pool. The President was no longer a sublime autocrat; he was a public agent. The life blood of a globe-girdling system was drained by the war, even while it retained its supremacy as the greatest railway and more than held up its end compared with the railway muddle in the United States. Never again could the C.P. recover its splendid isolation of greatness. Public ownership was being thrust upon the nation by the bankruptcy of the other roads. Shaughnessy had no real fear that it would ever absorb the C.P.R. But he had reason to suspect that a huge Government system would be more or less of a menace to the system which he had spent his life to build up. There was no better way than to retire, leaving the chief administration to a man of his own choice and retaining the post of Chairman along with the room occupied by the old President. Even here the old autocrat survives. The proposal made by Baron Shaughnessy to pool all the railways, except the Grand Trunk, and to put them all under C.P. administration with a guarantee of dividends to C.P. shareholders--was a magnificent play to the gallery. The other roads were undeniably bankrupt, when even the splendid showing made by the management could not make their records palatable to the public. It was a strategic time to advertise once, finally and for all, the unequalled efficiency of the old Transcontinental.

But Canadian railwaydom is dominated by C.P.R. as naturally as tides by the moon. The Railway a.s.sociation, once the Railway War Board, are now a junta of dividendists and of paid chiefs of the Government system, to oppose--whenever necessary--the adverse judgments of the Government's Railway Commission. The road which was the tangible nexus of Confederation was built by two Americans, one of whom became a high-tariff Tory and a knight, the other an Imperialistic baron who believed in Dominion Home Rule for Ireland when the average Canadian considered Home Rule as treasonable as annexation. It is the prerogative of any robust Canadian to oppose either infection from Broadway or domination from Downing Street. But, regarding the strategic position of Canada in the misnamed "British Empire," we might all take a cue from Lord Shaughnessy, who has had all the internationalizing emotions of which any man is normally capable, and can challenge any man to shew where he has ever compromised conscience or country.

THE PUBLIC SERVICE HOBBYIST

SIR HERBERT AMES

Whatever may be done by the Washington Conference to the League of Nations, there still live two men to whom it is and shall be the hub of the world. Lord Robert Cecil and Sir Herbert Ames at least will never admit that the League was a mere Wilson-Democrat device for making the world safe for humanity, and that the alternative is a Harding-Republican expedient for making Washington the new hub of the world.

Sir Herbert is much too cordial a cosmopolitan to begrudge Washington any eminence she can get from imitating the League. He is too charitable even to admit that if Dr. Wilson had stood for peace first and covenant second, no Washington Conference would have been needed. He is also Canadian enough to realize that transferring the centre of the Peace propaganda to the leading Capital of the New World is a good way to remind the Old World that Ottawa has more to do with Washington than even London has. Out of the Washington Conference may arise the Canadian envoy. Whatever happens in the Pacific zone of the world-open diplomacy can never hurt Ottawa---nor disturb the complacent optimism of Sir Herbert Ames, Financial Director of the Secretariat to the League of Nations. The time may come when even Ottawa is considered a better place than London or Geneva for the conduct of world-peace agenda.

When Sir Herbert Ames was chosen Financial Director of the League Secretariat he was chosen less to please Canada than to vindicate his own ability. When he spoke in Canada on how the League works he showed his remarkable optimism by extolling its operations at a time when Europe was more anarchic than at any time since the war.

Every forward nation should have its Ames. This one justified his existence in Canada long before he became a knight or even an M.P. for St. Antoine, Montreal. At one time in his citizenship he was the incarnation of what a large number of people would be anxious to avoid; in the days when he used to pack his grip from Montreal and go forth on lectural pilgrimages over Ontario and other parts. On a platform he always seemed like a long, lean schoolmaster. Sometimes he used a blackboard. One of his pet subjects was prohibition. He looked entirely like it. One could scarcely recollect having heard quite so dry a man on any subject. He looked like the genius of self-denial--like a man who long ago should have gone into a monastery, doing penance for the uplift of the world as mirrored in his own conscience, instead of remaining at large a common Presbyterian and a very uncommon sort of Tory.

I was agreeably startled to find Sir Herbert in 1920 one of the most cordial and amiable men on the roster of Who's Who. He was no longer dry, bigoted, or pedagogical. In fact he was almost benignly human, even humourous. And I concluded that if intimacy with the League of Nations could work such a change in the average man connected with it, there is surely some function for the League as a cheerful solvent for the world.

Sir Herbert Ames' previous work as Hon. Chairman of the National Patriotic Fund of course did a good deal to reclaim him. Of all war work this was among the most destructive of personal bigotry and political prejudice. If Sir Herbert imbibed the real philosophy of the Patriotic Fund he must be, speaking humanly, one of the wisest men in Canada. It was a scientific fact that at a time when men in the army were displaying incredible heroism, certain people at home were exhibiting unbelievable meanness. The people who used to attempt graft on the Patriotic Fund were the kindergarten of the college of national profiteers who came later. They were happily out-numbered by the people who were thankful for all they got and who in the greatest losses that life can inflict showed almost sublime fort.i.tude and patience.

Preparation for some form of public service by doing it as he went along has always been Ames' strongest characteristic. He had eyes for the homely, sometimes mean, job under his nose. There was an evangelism about him. Why? Because he was a citizen. Where did he live? In Montreal. No man can be a reforming citizen in Montreal unless he has plenty of time, and some money. Mr. Ames has always had both. He also has endless patience.

Perhaps the most remarkable proof that he intended to be a practical philanthropist is the fact that for eight years he was one of the feeble Anglo-Saxon minority in the Montreal City Council. An artist in search of contrast could never have found a finer example than a comparative study of the leader of the English section Ames, and the French boss, the late L. A. Lapointe. In the bilingual Legislature of an incorrigible city Mr. Ames spoke two languages. If he had mastered twenty he never could have equalled Lapointe, who in my recollection of a long conversation some years ago could genially and grandly boast that the fad for reforming the City of Montreal would never make much headway so long as he remained boss of the French section in Council. Lapointe was Montreal's Tammany. He held Montreal under his patronage and executive thumb before Mederic Martin had begun to achieve any fame beyond that of a maker of cigars. He knew every cranny of Montreal as intimately as the late John Ross Robertson used to know Toronto. Mr. Ames' knowledge of the big town was fairly complete. But if Mr. Ames and Mr. Lighthall, the genie of civic information in Montreal, could have been one two-headed man, they never could have matched Lapointe in the expert business of knowing where to plant a man to give him a civic job or how to create a job to suit a man in need of it.

Yet for eight consecutive years Mr. Ames with no other desire than to do his duty, to study Montreal, and perhaps qualify for larger service later, remained a member of the City Council. And he did his work there before the English-speaking element undertook to clean up the city--the most genial, sarcastic failure of modern times. He wrote little books about Montreal. He mastered French by studying it first-hand in France.

Those who used to listen to his evangelical speeches in his own tongue sometimes wished he had learned a few nuances and inflexions in English.

He was for some time Chairman of the Munic.i.p.al Board of Health, in a city where infant mortality is such a constant epidemic that babies' coffins are displayed in shop windows. In 1907 he wrote a tractate on the housing of the working cla.s.ses, just on the eve of the period when Montreal began to be the worst city in America for high rents, extortionate charges for moving and intolerable congestion. The publication of his views on the subject, however, showed that he had the courage to point out what was wrong, even though he had no concrete constructive proposal which any munic.i.p.al government in Montreal or any Legislature in Quebec would ever accept as a working basis for putting the thing right. As far back as 1901 he indited a treatise on The City Problem, What Is It? Twenty years later, after all Mr. Ames' burnings on the subject, Montreal has slumped back into sheer mediaevalism in civic government under the wheedling despotism of Mederic Martin, who presided at the public funeral of the only effort the city ever made to establish a real business administration. In that Quixotic eruption of public virtue in 1912, Mr. Ames, after all his publicity on the subject of redeeming Montreal, was not even considered as a candidate for the Board of Control.

On the whole scarcely a public man, or even a reforming editor, in Canada has talked so consistently and so cheerfully for so long a period and to so little apparent purpose, on the need for cleaning up civic government.

The difference between Mr. Ames and the average public-service expert in Montreal on this question is that Mr. Ames has never been worldly-wise enough to become an avowed cynic on the question. He probably knows as well as anybody that to clean up Montreal is in the same category as making Europe safe for the League of Nations; a much harder city to regenerate than even Philadelphia. Muck-raking has no effect, when two-thirds of the population read French papers which never use the rake, and when the boss of three-fourths of the rest is himself often a target for the yellows. Mr. Ames should long ago in this connection have propounded a thesis, Hugh Graham, What Is It? He would then be free to dissect the ethics of Mederic Martin and the late L. A. Lapointe.

Martin rules Montreal in spite of Lord Atholstan, the Archbishop and the International Union, because in his own person he interprets the distinction between Anglo and Franco. In Montreal a dominant minority controls three-fourths of the commercial wealth. A couple of dozen men control big industries, railways, electric and water powers, finance and newspapers. When these men want the City Hall they consult the directory. To them Montreal is a convenient sea-wharfing spot to conduct big business; otherwise a French Canadian city and so, hopeless. The chief common bond between this group and the city at large is the labour market. The elections are a mere superficial disturbance. The old courteous alternative of a French mayor, an English mayor, and an Irish mayor has been discarded. The mayors are all French now. The population is overwhelmingly French. The City Hall is as French as the courts. The civic jobs are given to Frenchmen. As a rule there are plenty of jobs.

It is a fair compromise--that if the Anglos will monopolize most of the big productive business, the civic administration must go to the Francos who are the elective majority.

Sir Herbert Ames, who was born in Montreal and is the only man who has ever undertaken to theorize openly as to its redemption, knows exactly why the place is so absorbing to the cynical mind. He understands that a man cannot have the same geometrical and diligent enthusiasm for Montreal as he has for Toronto. To be a thoughtful citizen of Montreal stimulates the imagination and disgusts the economic sense. For the past ten years Sir Herbert has been too much absorbed in Ottawa and the League of Nations to care much about the city where he spent so much of his earlier zeal for reclamation. The member for St. Antoine has a larger orbit--to negotiate which he has resigned his seat in the House.

One is tempted to consider whether there are not enough secretarial minds in Europe from which to take a man as Financial Secretary for the League of Nations, and let Sir Herbert come back to Canada to finish his work.

He has had world experiences enough to come back and be of some real use to the country. He is not yet sixty. He has ahead of him twenty years in which he could do a great deal more for the Empire about which he is so earnest by working in Canada than by occupying a conspicuous post somewhere in Europe. It is not the fashion for ex-Canadians who have had political or other experiences abroad to come back here for anything but speeches and banquets. Sir Herbert may be permitted to change the fashion. With his versatility in French, his knowledge of Europe, his acquaintance with large public questions of finance and his general _savoir faire_, he seems to be just the kind of man who could head a movement to nationalize Montreal.

But of course he never will do it.

THE SHADOW AND THE MAN

HON. SIR SAM HUGHES, K.C.B.

The career of the late Sam Hughes is a tragic reminder that no man in public life can afford to regard himself as bigger than his suitable job. When a nation has to retire a genius for the sake of enthroning what remains of common democracy the nation's loss is n.o.body's gain.

In the jungle book of our aristocracy Sam Hughes should have been Lord Valcartier. Not that a democratic country cares at all to be given any more lords, even if Parliament had not asked the King to abolish the custom. But while peerages and baronetcies were being handed about for honour, Hughes was the kind of man that should have got his--except that he made it impossible.

However, it is more interesting to record the shortcomings of Hughes than to report the success of mediocrities. Canada had in Hughes a name with which for a year or so to poster almost any part of the Empire, especially England. We are in danger of forgetting at this distance--five years now since he resigned office--just what were the conditions that made him such a tremendous figure.

Sam Hughes, M.P., born in County Durham, Orangeman from the town of Lindsay, editor, soldier, adventurer, school teacher who once taught English and who never could make a speech, though he talked in public--what was there about him up till 1914 to make any nation wonder? The first time I saw Hughes, in 1910, a man whose office he had just left said, as though imparting a State secret:

"There goes the next Minister of Militia."

Up till that moment if anybody had asked me, "Do you know Hughes?" I should have said, "Oh, yes, everybody knows Jim Hughes, the School Inspector."

The story of Canada's Army is immortal. It is yet to be truly told.

When it is told by the right man--whether historian or poet--the name Hughes, as we know it at its best and biggest, will shine out like a great fixed star that tried to play being a comet. On April 22nd, from the sick bed that even he probably knew he never would leave of his own will, in memory of St. Julien, he sent the army boys a brief message, that he still believed in them as he always had.

Simple little message, it meant much. It would have meant a million times more if the "boys" could have flashed back a helio to the wan old General who used to be such a noise in the world--"Same to you, General." The boys somehow liked him. The defects of Sam Hughes were of the sort that soldiers love. He was a man's man.

"Tipperary" was just becoming popular to whistle when a camera man authorized by the Government of Canada took one of the most striking pictures in our part of the war outside the zone of the sh.e.l.l areas.

Gen. Sam Hughes, jack boots and oilskin cape flung back by the gale to show his belt and the flap of his khaki, wide-legged on a rope ladder, coming down forward from a troopship in the Gulf, almost baring his teeth to the October wind; bidding farewell to the First Contingent 33,000 strong, that steamed out of the Gulf into the convoy.

You recognize in such a picture a man who perhaps understood the sensations of Alexander. Sam Hughes had finished his first job for the war. Among all the war achievements that thrilled nations when big men suddenly took hold of them in after years, this one holds its own.

Hughes never could match it again. Here was the greatest army that had ever put out to sea at one time; an army forty per cent bigger in three months than the total force that Gen. Ian Hamilton estimated Canada could send as her whole contribution to a great war. This was Hughes'

answer to Hamilton. Not only were the men Canadian--if not many of them Canadians--but their uniforms, boots, kits, rifles, horses, tents, artillery, machine gun batteries, army waggons, cook waggons, engineering outfits and munitions, were as far as possible produced in Canada. Troop trains and transport steamers were Canadian. The money that paid for the army was Canadian. The pay of officers and men was Canadian. And we know what Hughes was.

But the moment Hughes let go the rope ladder that should have made him Lord Valcartier, he began to undo his own career.

In a misguided speech afterwards Sam reminded Lord Shaughnessy that to raise, equip and dispatch the First Contingent from Canada was a heavier contract than building the C.P.R. The comparison was foolish, but very human. Shaughnessy had provoked it by announcing to the Government that he intended to make a speech in condemnation of Hughes'

methods of recruiting.

The author of Canada in Flanders describes exactly what the work of organizing that Contingent was. A few extracts will do:

"In less than a month the Government, which had asked for 20,000 men, found almost 40,000 at its disposal. . . General Hughes devised and ordered the establishment of the largest camp that had ever been seen on Canadian soil. The site at Valcartier was well chosen. . . ."

"The transformation effected within a fortnight by an army of engineers and workers was a remarkable triumph of applied science. Roads were made, drains laid down, a water supply with miles of pipes installed, electric lighting furnished from Quebec and incinerators built for the destruction of dry refuse. A sanitary system second to none that any camp has seen was inst.i.tuted. Every company had its own bathing place and shower baths: every cook-house its own supply of water. Troughs of water for horses filled automatically so that there was neither shortage nor waste. The standing crops were garnered; trees cut down and the roots torn up. A line of targets 3 1/2 miles long--the largest rifle range in the world--was constructed. . . . . Camp and army leaped to life in the same hour. Within four days of the opening of the camp nearly 6,000 men had arrived in it. The cloth mills of Montreal began to hum with the manufacture of khaki, which the needles of a great army of tailors converted into uniforms, greatcoats and cloaks. The Ordnance Department equipped the host with the Ross Rifle.

Regiments were shuffled and reshuffled into battalions; battalions into brigades. The whole force was inoculated against typhoid. There were stores to acc.u.mulate; a fleet of transports to a.s.semble; a thousand small cogs in the machine to be nicely adjusted."

Sir Max Aitken did not mention the message to "My Soldiers" in every man's knapsack, an imitation of Kitchener's knapsack message to the "Old Contemptibles"; or that he himself had applied to Sam Hughes for a "job" in Canada's army.

Hughes was Minister of War, not a Minister of Defence. In the tramp of battalions down the street he felt Canada to be a young nation, not an overseas Dominion only. Yet the First Contingent was the work of one of the most scientifically unprepared-for-war peoples in the world.

Valcartier was the glorification of Hughes, who was always personally prepared for war; what or where he was not always sure, except that it would involve the Empire, that when it came, the sand-bags of Canada's front line would not be in Canada, and the Canada Militia Act would be as useful in the case as a page from Pickwick Papers.

Allow for the British-born majority in the First Contingent, the patriotic enthusiasm of Militia officers, the commandeering of national resources and the great work of subordinates; the fact remains that had he not been as much his own enemy as he was a soldier born and bred, Sam Hughes should have been Lord Valcartier.

The sad fact about Hughes is that he did not estimate what Canada did and did not in her first impact upon the war. He could not see Canada except as the shadow of Sam Hughes. In the light of the war as he stood in front of it, that shadow of Hughes seemed to him to cover the country. For two years, it seemed to grow. Then it flickered. In 1916 it went out. And there never was in Canada a going out like it.

Hughes was the embodiment of force without power. He began to mobilize a nation, not merely as battalions on parade, but as an army equipped by Canadian science, industry, transportation, intelligence, and citizenship. So far as he carried that out, the editor of the _Lindsay Warder_ and M.P. for Haliburton and Victoria had no superior in organizing force in this country. Up till 1916 he was a patriotic cannon-cracker exploding without any particular objective, except that he wanted a Canadian Army in Canada, not an overseas Contingent, or an Imperial Army. between 1914 and 1916 he was a great organizing soldier, at his best comparable to any men who were doing wonders at the front. As Nationalist as Quebec, he thought of Canada as a unit in the Empire, most of which he had seen for military reasons. Canada could not declare war; but in the mind of Hughes the force that held Canada and other overseas dominions within the Empire was not in trade and tariffs, but in ships, armies and victories.

Sam Hughes failed to translate his force into power because he failed to estimate the elements which carried him to success, and therefore could not measure the energies that would defeat him. He never understood what Bismarck called the "imponderables". Nature gave him the energy; Fate the ambition: Destiny denied him the vision.