The Masques of Ottawa Part 6

He unb.u.t.toned his shirt and got on the top rail, He hung his straw hat on the stake, And he smiled to the hickory leaves' rustling tale, As he gazed at that berry-bush brake.

Till chuck! went the scythe on a piece of old rail That lifted clear out of its bunk; And he said what he never had read in a tale, To that innocent, rotten old chunk.

And then he heard something that never was sung, That no bobolink could have said, That never was rendered by pen or by tongue; But it made his heart thump in his head,

As he let the scythe drop and he picked up the chunk, And sneaked up as soft as a breeze, And poked at the noise in that rotten rail's bunk Till out came a b.u.mble of bees.

Oh! the jug it was cool and the berries were red, And sweet was the bobolink's strain; But b.u.mble-bee cups in a rotten rail's bed Make a jug and a bobolink vain.

By noon at the nest there was only one bee, And only one berry to pick, And only one drink in the jug at the tree: But that boy was as full as a tick.

They have torn the old zig-zag clear out of its snake, And the bushes have gone up in fire; The hickory stands but it's only a stake To hold up a fiddle of wire.

The wires are strung tight for the fiddle is new, And straight as a beam of the sun: The plough slides along it, the wind whistles through, And the fence-corner blue-gra.s.s is done.

The old mossy rails and green ivies are gone With fifty gra.s.s crooks in a row-- But the bobolink sits on the wire and sings on-- The music he sang long ago.

And now 'mid the jostle and rush of the street, That boy has his dreams in the day, When he sits on the rail 'twixt the clover and wheat, And mows out the fence-corner hay.

Whenever E. C. Drury whetted a scythe mowing fence corners he was, so far as can be reasonably surmised, thinking about the tariff and the waters of the Red Sea that swallowed up Pharaoh. It may be a coincidence, but it seems like fate, that he was born in the same year as the National Policy; the indignity of which was so great that he vowed to spend his life living it down. He went to sleep with blue books and the Bible under his pillow. He gave way to both. He has never gone back on either. The iniquity of a tariff to him was part of the moral law. The more he exhorted at revival meetings and local-preached and led cla.s.s-meetings, the more deeply he was convinced that tariff-Tories are in constant need of economic salvation. At threshing bees I can fancy this broad-faced, dreamy-eyed, large-mouthed young "Reformer" who never was born to take life mentally easy, saying to himself as he shoved the stack straw past his boots, that the old boys talking so hard about elections knew nothing about economics; and he wished to heaven that barn was all threshed out, so that he could get back home to read some more tariff statistics.

The Drury farm, hewn from the bush by his grandfather, cost the young man nothing but taxes and upkeep. It gave him leisure in which to study the ills of farming. What a blessing all farmers have not leisure! Travelling up and down that peninsula between Huron and Erie, constantly at some sort of "Meeting," Drury could see "Hard Times" on almost every telegraph pole. The average farmer had a small lot, a heavy mortgage and a large family; scrub cattle, thin horses and poor hogs. No doubt Drury read, when it came out, that amazing pamphlet of Goldwin Smith--Canada and the Canadian Question, in which the writer alleged that the Canadian farmer sold the best he produced and ate the culls. Well, with hogs at $3 per cwt., oats 20 cents a bushel, hay $7 a ton, and wheat under a dollar, from stumpy little fields--the farmer in Drury's youth did well to escape cannibalism.

To know Drury, one must understand the oddly interesting epoch and region in which he came up. The men with whose sons he went to the village school were manufacturers first, farmers second. Their raw material was the hardwood bush; their factory the saw mill; their common carrier the Yankee schooner. In my own bush days a few counties further down in that same peninsula, I recall heaps of white oak slabs in the forest which I was told were the remains of the timber-men who had gone through buying and cutting out the oaks for square timber that floated away in rafts, probably to build tramp steamers in England.

The bush farmer hired to wield the broad-axe on that oak was as much an industrialist as any moulder in a foundry. He would have fought with his naked fists any agitator who proposed to interfere with that wages revenue.

After the oak was gone came the elm buyers, shrewd Americans who paid as much for a thousand feet of prime swamp elm as the pork buyer twenty miles away paid for a cwt. of dead hog. Mr. Drury must have known something about those friendly but n.i.g.g.ardly Yankee dollars that saved many a bush farmer from being sold for taxes. He may have seen bolt mills go up and young men betwixt haying and harvest swagger down to the docks to get 25 cents an hour loading elm bolts into the three-mast schooners. He probably saw stave mills arise in which hundreds of youths got employment while their fathers at home fought stumps, wire worms, drought and the devil to get puny crops at small prices. He saw the wagon-works and the fanning mill factory and the reaper industry come up out of these timber products. While he was a youth the farmers were the first promoters of bigger towns, because the big town meant more jobs for the young men whose father's acres were too few for the families, and bigger markets close at hand for perishable products.

The farmers of that day would have tarred and feathered any revolutionist who came preaching that a good market town was a wicked conspiracy of _bourgeoisie_ and should become a deserted village.

Yankee money and Canadian industries were the economics of Drury's boyhood. If he was as good a Canadian then as he is now he must have had more faith in the Canadian factory than he had in the American paymaster, or sometimes even in the Ontario farm. There never was a bush farmer who would not have voted for a tariff that increased the price of timber for the saw-mill.

By the time Drury was old enough to consider being a candidate for Parliament, heaps of sawdust marked the grave of many a vanished saw mill. Young men who could not get work in the near-by town drifted to High School, to college, to law and medicine and the pulpit; they went to the big cities across the border and got high wages; to the Canadian West and got cheap land. The counties of Western Ontario began to decrease in man wealth as they increased in the wealth of agricultural industry. The schools that used to have boys sitting on the woodpile by the box stove shrank to about four scholars in a cla.s.s.

Congregations dwindled. Little towns lost their mills and began to feel like Goldsmith's Deserted Village. Then came the age of farm machinery, when the big towns had more overalls than the farms, and every good farm began to be a sort of factory.

All this was meat and drink to E. C. Drury, who came to voting age with the solemn conviction that though the fathers had worked hard, the sons were not prosperous. They paid too much for what they had to buy and got too little for what they had to sell; a fate which seems to overtake most of us in varying degree. With stagnant local towns the markets for perishable products declined. In the open markets of the world, reached by long railway and steamship hauls, the Canadian farmer's staple products were in compet.i.tion with nations of cheap labour. Across the lake a nation of twelve times our population was retaliating against our protective tariffs by duties on Canadian grain, cattle and hogs. The Tory party and the Canadian Pacific and the Bank of Montreal and the Canadian Manufacturers' a.s.sociation were becoming British at the expense of the Canadian farmer. At the back of all the G.o.ds of things as they are and ought not to be, stood the d.a.m.nable, desolating tariff that fattened the town and starved the farmer in order to bloat the banks and the manufacturer and the railways--under the cloak of patriotism! Heaven deliver us! Was it not a Tory manufacturer of stoves who said in Toronto that he would build a tariff "as high as Hainan's gallows?" Was it not a Tory President of the C.P.R. who said he would have a tariff as high as a Chinese wall to keep out the Yankees? Was it not the President of a great Canadian bank who deserted the Liberal party when it sought to enact a measure of reciprocity?

On all hands Mr. Drury could see the evidence of a master conspiracy against the farmer, who was to become the helot of civilization. He could see it in his own barn as he reckoned the cost of his machinery, and over against that the price of what he had in the bins of his granary and on the hoof outside. That thousands of farmers voted and talked Conservative proved the astonishing power of heredity. That all farmers did not become Liberals and make the Liberal party a solid rural party proved that even a man's depleted pocket cannot compete with the traditions of his family. Drury looked to Laurier to emanc.i.p.ate the farmer. In vain. Laurier created more farmers, thousands of them in the West; but he only enslaved them with the voters' lists; the very party over which Drury had almost wept with joy when at the age of eighteen he had felt them like the armies of Israel sweeping out the scoundrels of the National Policy.

Thus his hope was no longer in Laurier, who knew nothing about the farmer, nor dreamed that in the very West which he had put on the political map with his prosperity of imported people and borrowed money, there was arising a race that would repudiate him and his.

Drury had a weather eye on the West. There were farms in Simcoe county now worked by old men whose sons had gone to that Promised Land. In the constant drift of the hired man and the farmer's son to the town and the city for shorter hours, higher wages and more amus.e.m.e.nt, he saw the fluidity of labour, the first evidence that there was some common ground between the farmer and the labour cla.s.s. Working in his own fields, driving his own teams, operating his own machinery, this capitalistic labour-unionist of the soil said to himself that the farmers of Canada were ent.i.tled not merely to representation in Parliament, but to the organization of a cla.s.s interest that should take hold of the country's economic horns and turn it on to the right road.

In the lonely furrow of the farm a man often thinks out conclusions that are gloriously right in themselves, but in the chequered and cynical experiences of men in office tragically impossible. Mr. Drury was no stranger to Ottawa. He had been there on deputations; and on tariff commissions; and each time he came back he had a stronger determination to go there some day as the voice of the more or less united farmer against the tariff that had sterilized the Liberals.

Drury was a rural Liberal. He saw in the reciprocity campaign of 1911 some glimmer of hope that Liberalism might succeed without a revolution. The election settled that. From then on to the war the philosopher of Crown Hill bent himself to the deeper study of the one force that now seemed to him to be left capable of breaking the nation's bondage. He no longer had the fervent desire to see a new town grow among the farms that he had when he was a youth. Every bigger town, unless it had industries that could widen the farmer's low-cost market, was a mitigated menace. Every foundry and implement works and furniture factory and boot industry making goods more or less from imported material, considerably with imported labour, and selling to the consumer at a normal price plus the duty, roused in Mr. Drury as much hostility as a natively kind and Christian character would permit.

And at last he saw the predicted slump begin to come in the year 1913, when the boomster dodged the boomerang of inflated and speculative values; when east and west the farmers, crimped by high railway rates and cost of materials, machinery and labour, ceased to be the backbone of Canadian buying.

And then the War.

Whatever may be traced to the normal development of this Ontario Cincinnatus, it was the War which made Drury. But for the war he would have bided his time to be elected to Ottawa on a straight tariff issue.

The war, backed by the man's religion and his tariff theology, drove him to the Premiership of Ontario.

There were times during the war when, if Mr. Drury was as honest with himself as he is about government, he must have reflected that the Canadian farmer was getting pretty well paid back in part of one generation for the wrongs and adversities suffered by generations ago.

Pork at $20 per cwt., oats at $1.50 a bushel, wheat fixed by the Government at $2.40 to keep it from bulling to more than $3--none of these could have been economically justified by Mr. Drury except as an act of compensating Providence. The farmer of all people as a cla.s.s benefited most, when he was driven to the worst labour hardship he ever had by the terrific prices paid for war work, which robbed him of hired help almost at any price. The higher the price and the scarcer the help, the more the Government clamoured for production. The Ontario farmer responded to the call. He was no more a patriot to do it than a man was to buy Victory Bonds. He was simply a profitee (we leave off the r).

And this was the first call of the war to which the farmers as a cla.s.s made a hearty response. No doubt most farmers were better servants of the nation in the furrow than in the trench. But the time came when they had to leave the furrows. On top of the Government's most frantic call for more production by the farmer came the Military Service Act, which refused to exempt him. The call to the plough-handle came before the election of 1917. The call to the bayonet came afterwards in a crisis unforeseen at the time of the election. Drury himself had been defeated as a conscriptionist Liberal candidate in 1917. No farmer could be in khaki and overalls at the same time. There was no reason given for the drastic change of face except the message from the front that more men were urgently needed or the West front was doomed. It was not even reckoned that a farmer conscripted after seed-time in 1918 could not possibly be of use in the trenches till long after the time when the fate of the West front would have been settled anyway.

Hence the ire of the agriculturist, driven now to become an agrarian.

The Ontario farmer made no distinction between the Unionist Government that had conscripted the farmer, and the Ontario Conservative Government which supported Ottawa. The farmer made up his mind wherever possible to defeat both the old line candidates.

Premier Drury was the chief result. He never would have been offered the post but for the cleavage caused by the war. The U.F.O. were not unanimous, and Drury was not anxious. He had his eye on Ottawa. But there was n.o.body else who could unite the group with labour. Drury had himself been the first president of the U.F.O. and secretary of the Canadian Council of Agriculture; he was a thinker, something of a scholar, a futurist, and a good deal of a radical; and he could speak well.

He picked a Cabinet mainly of farmers. He occupied more time drafting his Cabinet than most farmers take to harvest a crop. He was in a hurry, but he wanted n.o.body to suspect it. He said little; wisely.

There was no occasion. He had no mandate from the people. He wanted sure-enough colleagues. The men he chose were all novices. The old line critics watched him with affected contempt. They said Agriculture and Labour never could mix. Drury went along. No Cabinet had ever been so prayerfully hand-picked. Labour must not get the idea that it was merely being sopped for the support of twelve men in a House majority of one. There must be concession; common aims understood, even ahead of experience, when there was as yet no common policy.

Mr. Drury had been only a few hours sworn Premier of Ontario when he was summarily turned out--not, however, from Office. In company with a farmer author friend who had been given the freedom of a certain small but desirable Club and who wanted to show Mr. Drury one place where he could have a quiet time of an evening, he went to have dinner. As neither of the gentlemen was known to the housekeeping department a member of the Club--a well-known newspaperman--was asked to inquire their ident.i.ty. The result was that the Premier of Ontario and his friend left the Club, without dinner.

The next day the newspaperman looked over the shoulder of his editor-chief in office and said,

"Who is the important-looking man in the photograph?"

The answer came, "Hon. E. C. Drury, Premier of Ontario."

"Great Scott!" he said huskily, "that's the man I turned out of the Club last night."

Drury had the sense of humour to regard the matter as a joke on both the newspaperman and himself.

The opening of the new Legislature was a spectacle. Dignitaries and judges, professors and generals stood about the farmers--led by the farmer-in-chief, morning-coated, carefully groomed, plainly nervous but sustained by the dignity of it all. His voice was firm; his manner that of a very circ.u.mspect bridegroom. The old smug strut and case-hardened pomp of legislature inaugurals was lacking. An undercurrent of deep sincerity stayed many a tremorous hand. Drury was the least nervous of all. I imagine that in the morning he had sung to himself some good old fortifying hymn, like "Rock of Ages."

Since that day the Premier has learned that practical politics is a game that taxes all a man's technique in Christianity. Autocratic Hydro and Mackenzie the loosening octopus; New Ontario preaching up the old plaint of secession; better roads and prodigal Mr. Biggs; what to do with Education that Cody had not started to do; how to stave off commissions on reform of the school system; the constant queues of moral reformers; the new menace of the movies and the censorship farce; the timber stealers; disconcerting Dewart and redundant Ferguson; returned soldiers and khaki members; the Reds and the plain clothes men; bl.u.s.tering Morrison, and the tyrannical U.F.O.----

Until the Premier, plain, homespun gentleman that he is, longed for Friday evening and the Crown Hill farm and the quiet little church in the village, because one week at his desk took more out of him than a month in overalls. And then to relieve his surcharged soul he made that speech at Milverton in which he boldly proclaimed that he was going to head, not a mere group called the U.F.O., but a People's Party. For this "broadening out" speech he got clods thrown at him by Morrison, and Burnaby put rails on the road to upset the Premier's buggy, and the _Farmers' Sun_ tried to change the wheels on his rig so that he would not be able to get home. Worse than any the _Onlooker_, that virile organ of no advertising and of the Meighen Government, said:

"The U.F.O. chose this man and dragged him out of his rural obscurity.

In common grat.i.tude he should have stuck to their colours. He should have given fair warning of a change of heart, and indeed we think he ought to have resigned. When a man joins a political party he agrees to subordinate his ambitions and activities to the common good of that party, and failing to do so honour demands that he should leave it."

In spite of the fact that the Premier of Ontario twice made an appointment by request from the writer of this for the purpose of getting a statement for the press as to what he meant to do about this whole business of "broadening out," twice failed to keep the appointment and later came out with the Milverton p.r.o.nunciamento, we have no hesitation in pointing out that:

Mr. Drury was not in rural obscurity. The U.F.O. had no colours which Mr. Drury had not helped to paint, for he was the first President the U.F.O. ever had. He had no change of heart, because when he made an unstable coalition of the U.F.O. and the Labour party he entered into a pact and covenant which the U.F.O. had never considered; he had already "broadened out" to drive Labour and Agriculture as a team and had pretty well succeeded in doing it. Mr. Drury did not join a political party. The U.F.O. was not a real party because it went into the election of 1919 without a leader, and in order to get its platform translated into party it had to have Mr. Drury or somebody like him.

And if Mr. Drury should resign from the head of the two groups which he alone has made into the semblance of a party, he would be recommended by Mr. Crerar to let his guardian take him to a lunatic asylum.

Drury has done much better than his critics expected he would do. He has been bold enough to keep Adam Beck from being the unelected Premier of Ontario, which is more than Sir William Hearst ever could do. He has made Government cost more than it ever did, though it is only reasonable bookkeeping to believe that part of the cost was incurred by a Government over which he had no control. He has begun to build public highways which being originally a farmer's job should have been done well, but up to the present has been on a smaller scale as bad a case of wasting the public money as the railways of Canada ever perpetrated. The cost of administration being a matter of either experience or graft, it is probable that the Coalition will cut down the cost when they get more experience. The Chippewa Ca.n.a.l is one glaring instance of high labour cost which a Farmer Premier with Labour colleagues did not presume to regulate. If anybody knows what a day's work is it should be the farmer; but the farmer in this case was not absolutely free to express his opinions, because he depends upon Labour for his voting majority in the House.

In the matter of referendum Mr. Drury has been an advocate instead of a judge. He and his--notably the church-ridden Mr. Raney, who does not even smoke--are a dry lot. They wanted Ontario to be bone dry and therefore preferred to have the people vote either foolishly for the iniquitous O.T.A. or fanatically for absolute prohibition. Mr. Drury should have taken the spark plug out of his Methodist car long enough to reflect that what keeps a man contented is going to keep him from stirring up trouble. If the Government of enlightened and moral Ontario had brought in a measure to create a referendum on the alternative of prohibition _vs._ effective government control of reasonable liquors, it might have less cause to be panicky over Bolshevism.

The legislation to exempt from taxation houses costing less than a certain amount looks like a pretty straight play for the Labour vote, and the propagation of a semi-Bolshevistic principle that unless checked somewhere will exempt the many at the expense of the few.