The Masques of Ottawa Part 22

A barrage of propaganda had been set up--and kept up.

Legitimate Trades Unionism itself in Britain had subscribed to The Aims of Labour put forth by Arthur Henderson, who foreshadowed barricades and bayonets in London streets if the proletariat did not get their "rights".

Canada did not surely escape. We had the Winnipeg flare-up, which was watched by legitimate labour across the border. The A.F.L. was challenged for authority in this country. It came to the peculiar pa.s.s, that in order to maintain the solidarity of Canada as const.i.tuted by Government under the Old Flag, the legitimate leaders of labour had to fall back upon the one continental organization which makes brotherhoods, not across the seas, nor so much across Canada, but across the border.

It was Ontario's opportunity; the steady old Province of some bigotry, great industry, many labour unions, and more or less fixed ideas regarding the function of Government. The office of Tom Moore is in Ottawa. There the President of the Trades and Labour Congress is in close touch with the Labour Department, with the _Labour Gazette_, with the Government in Council. We shall never know just how much of the steady conservatism of Moore at the first Congress following the Winnipeg strike, as well as at other Congresses later, was developed and held steady by a.s.sociation with Government.

But whether or no, even though it was nothing but loyalty to the established brotherhoods of the A.F.L. or a deeper loyalty to his own ideas of the case, the rock-steady influence of Tom Moore at the conventions was the one biggest hope of the indirect action element winning out. He was not opposed to Socialism. He has to work with Socialists--of many sorts. The whole basic idea of the Federation of Labour is a degree of Socialism. But it was the Marxian brand of Socialism born in Germany and transplanted to Russia to which Moore was opposed. He saw no field for this in Canada. He believed that Canada had a right to freedom of action. At least if it came to a choice between authority from the Gompers organization in the United States, and the Lenine tyranny in Russia, the course was clear. Time and time again he was bombarded and machine-gunned by the Red elements in Congress and Convention. As often he solidly stood his ground, based upon the older idea of labour getting its rights through negotiation and later through the ballot.

"Row, brothers, row, the stream runs fast, The rapids are near----"

But the daylight was not yet past for this Tom Moore. He could see ahead.

"I have seen Moore," says a close observer of him for two years, "faced by labour opponents in a number of Western cities. In all the howling he has never lost his temper or his dignity."

It would have been so much easier for this man to lose his temper, except that he knew it would be harder at the end when he had to face his own steady rank and file accusing him of poor chieftainship. It would have been so much easier to compromise with the preachers of glittering formulae, except that in the settling up he would have to justify himself to those who suspected him of defection.

Moore stuck to the commonplace business of wages and hours and agreements. He had no head for the poetry of Utopias. He knew, as he knows, that wages are the chief item of cost in all commodities, and that no matter what form of capitalism you choose, whether embodied in a Soviet or in a close corporation of dividends, wages of labour must be paid. He knows that prices of living and of labour are almost convertible. Amid all the howling and paeaning for a better day, for the new life, for the heaven upon earth, for the glorification of the proletariat, he could stand hard and fast by the common necessity of sticking to an agreement and as fast as possible bettering conditions.

We have heard independent observers say that the Reds have always shown a grasp of the new life, while the Trades Union men were crawling along with the uninspired programme of wages and hours; that the Reds were the sacrificing idealists and the Unionists the selfish Tories who wanted nothing more than to slowly improve their condition. Well, the logic of events seems to show that in the long run the Moores have the gospel. One scarcely cares to think what might have happened in Canadian industry and common living had Tom Moore given way to the Reds who came at him from almost every quarter.

At the 1920 Congress Moore had the old-fashioned courage to ask the new Premier of Canada, Arthur Meighen, to address the delegates. Of all men, the man who prosecuted the leaders of the Winnipeg Strike was the last to say anything to organized labour about milleniums or about anything more Utopian than a common agreement between labour and capital for the good of all. Moore had no fear. He believed that he was right. Had he invited Mackenzie King he would have got a speech with more in it about the philosophy of Industry and Humanity, and perhaps more to the point in the practical study of the labour question. By inviting the Premier, Moore paid respect to government.

Even Mr. Crerar might have made a more sympathetic speech. But in the Moore philosophy there is no radical connection between Crerar and Labour. In the organization of the Drury coalition between Labour and the Farm he can see one way of getting the rights of each incorporated into legislation.

But the Government is the final thing. Statesmanship is bigger than programmes painted on the clouds. There's a vast deal to be done yet in this country for the enfranchis.e.m.e.nt of labour in industry as it is franchised in government. There are pig-headed Tories of industry who will have to ill.u.s.trate tombstones before some of the old spirit of repression of labour will die out in the nation. But the die-hards are fewer every year. Some wages had to come down to get everything else down. But we believe also, as Moore probably does, that wages which are the chief item of cost in all commodities ought to be as high as production will stand and pay reasonable profits on investment; that collective bargaining is sound as applied to individual industries, but a form of bigoted tyranny when extended to the whole group or to the sympathetic strike; and that the slogan, "Union is Strength", does not mean levelling efficiency to the lowest common denominator.

The day may come in the recorded minutes of Trades and Labour Congresses in Canada when a man of broader and more constructive vision may be needed to build the brotherhood out into labour statesmanship.

But for the past few years, and for the few to come, Canadian labour and common weal may well arise to thank Tom Moore, who, when the rapids were near and the rocks were under the rapids, kept his craft rowing into safe water. Tom Moore of Ireland was a poet. Tom Moore of Canada is not. The play on the names is only an accident. The parallel holds. May we never again need such a man in this country to be sure that labour does not run us all on the rocks under the Red rapids.

A MAN WITHOUT A PUBLIC

SIR WILLIAM MACKENZIE

A few years ago, before Stefansson reported on the blond Eskimos, the first Eskimo movie ever taken was shown in Toronto to a small audience who waited an hour for the film, which did not begin until a thick, grizzly man with shrewish, penetrating eyes came in with his party.

"Sir William Mackenzie, late as usual," whispered one. "He never arrives on time at a public function, often sleeps at a play, and sometimes when his family invite musicians to his home he plays bridge in a distant room so as not to hear the music."

"Oh, yes," nudged the other; "but Sir William, you see, owns this film.

It was taken by his own exploration party."

"Oh! Then the last scene will probably be Eskimos laying railway ties."

"Oh, no. Digging up mineral deposits. Iron--Sh!"

It was a wonderful film full of epical energy and primitive beauty; picturing one of the few kinds of people in Canada that Mackenzie had never been able to link up to civilization. The room was hung with costumes, curios and weapons of these folk, all of which were afterwards presented to the Royal Ontario Museum by Sir William, who was never enormously interested in ethnology. And that exploration of the far North was the last act in the complicated drama of William Mackenzie's great discoveries in Canada.

A study of Mackenzie is useful under the head:

WHAT DID YOU--NOT--DO TO WIN THE WAR?

He was appointed in 1915 on an "Economic Commission" which seems to have practised a rigid economy on what it did for the country, because it was never heard of again. However, it was No. 1A of the 46 war-time commissions, and because Mackenzie was a member it should have a memorial.

There is one man in Germany something like William Mackenzie, who makes money almost by magic out of utilities and buys up concerns in other countries with money which he made in his own. His name is Hugo Stinnes. Mackenzie is a bigger man and a higher type than Stinnes; but each man regards his country as a commercial a.s.set to be developed; each is a wizard of a species of applied finance. For years Mackenzie was of speculative interest in Canada to people who had never even seen his photograph. He was the man who had a second headquarters in Ottawa and a branch office in every provincial legislature except Prince Edward Island. We almost had Provincial Premiers lullabying to their Cabinets:

"Hush ye, hush ye, do not fret ye, The Black Douglas shall not get ye."

Mackenzie seemed to arise about twenty-five years ago from some magic mountain and to stride down upon the plains with the momentum of a Goth army. He was a contractor who became for ten years a demiG.o.d.

Sometimes before the war when people saw him on the street they paused to watch him walking as though a black bear had suddenly wandered down from Muskoka.

"By Jove! Mackenzie's back again."

"And is that William Mackenzie?"

"Did you never see him before?"

"No, sir, I never saw him before."

"Well, take a good look. He's just going to lunch. That man brought back sixty million dollars this time from Threadneedle Street. A gang of reporters met him at Montreal to get the good news---more money for Canada. Great game! He got forty millions a year ago or so."

"Who's that benign man with him?"

"That's a Provincial Premier. His province wants more railways and the Government has to guarantee more bonds----"

"Oh, then he sells bonds with Provinces for security?"

"That's the big idea. Why, what's wrong with it?"

"Oh, I guess it's all right."

"Of course it is. Railways can't be built out of earnings of lines built last year. Traffic's too thin; has to be developed. Mackenzie's building lines for a real population Canada, my boy, is a terrific country to railroad. The C.P.R. got land and cash grants. Mackenzie takes Government-guaranteed bonds. The whole country is on the same road. We import people on to homestead land and we have to borrow money to set the people up so that they'll become real Canadians----"

"Yes, especially at election time. But tell me--who finally owns these railroads?"

"Well, you've got me. n.o.body has figured that out yet. Everything is too new. All I know is that Governments are behind Mackenzie, and the people elect the Governments, and the people want the roads, and if they don't get 'em the Government probably goes out. Anyhow I take off my hat to Sir William Mackenzie as a great man."

Nine-tenths of Canada used to think that Mackenzie was a great man.

The more he borrowed in England on Government-guaranteed bonds, and the more he invested in Mexico and South America, and the greater number of street railways, power plants, transmission lines, ore mountains, new towns, smelters, docks, ships, whale fisheries, coal mines and land companies that he and his able partner Mann were able to octopize, the greater the country thought both these men were--and especially Mackenzie.

Toronto Board of Trade once gave a dinner to these men to celebrate the fact that by the building of the new line to Sudbury at a cost of about fifteen millions, Toronto was at last actually located on a Mackenzie road and had a right to be made the headquarters of the system. A deer in some places could have jumped from that line to the new line of the C.P.R. built at the same time--and about the same cost. There was no farmer in Ottawa to prevent the C.P.R. from getting a charter to double-track this line. It was the same year that Mackenzie inaugurated the Canadian Northern line of steamships, the two Royals, and for lack of tidewater was compelled to dock them at Montreal under the shadow of the C.P.R., who of course did not join in the civic welcome. And in the same year people were talking--as they are now again--about Toronto and Port Arthur becoming ocean ports. The wonder was that Mackenzie did not see to it. But he was fairly busy, tying Halifax to Vancouver by the Yellowhead Pa.s.s, and giving Provincial Cabinets new ideas about government.

Without a doubt William Mackenzie had a mandate from this country to do a great work--and he overdid it. Bankers and other financiers agreed that he had found new ways of investing creative money. Scarcely a teacher of geography but admitted that Mackenzie was changing the map of this country so fast that a new one became necessary every three years. New towns sprang up at the rate of a mile a day of new railway built by Mackenzie. Every new town became a monument to this man's faith in the future of Canada. Even the old city of Montreal, preserve of the C.P.R., lent its mountain to Mackenzie for a tunnel and a "Model City" on the hinter side.