Page images
PDF
EPUB

GREATER BRITAIN

CANADIAN AFFAIRS

1

CANADA is profoundly interested in the General Election, and, it may be added, somewhat surprised by the Unionist victories. The average Canadian had been deceived by the Radical "guff” into believing that the Asquith Ministry would be enthusiastically supported by the country in its attack on the House of Lords, and his Liberal newspapers did their best to foster this delusion. Probably nine in ten of the professional politicians were of opinion that the rejection of the Budget was a tactical blunder of the first magnitude, because they did not believe that the people of the Mother Country would look beyond the constitutional issue and render an interim verdict—a political injunction, so to speak-on the all-important question of Tariff Reform v. Free Trade. It has always been easy to make a constitutional question the chief issue in a Canadian General Election, and the professional politicians, who have no means of studying the tendencies of British opinion, naturally thought that the same thing could be done in Great Britain. Here it should be pointed out that those who run the Party "machines" in Canada and the United States regard the Mother Country Liberals as far more able and astute in the business of organising their forces than the Unionists. The former, so I was told a year ago by a competent authority in such matters, always work along democratic lines, know how much can be done by means of a catchy cry (a thing that sticks in the memory like the burden of a comic song), do not refuse to employ ridicule as a political weapon or to make use of the picturesque myth, and above all are always looking out for clever young men with ideas and the gift of the gab to act as

regimental officers in the battalions of the Have-nots. On the other hand, so I was assured, the Unionists appear to think that money and family influence count for more than brains and eloquence, that nobody is fit to become a Unionist candidate until he has at least one foot in the grave, that elections can be fought in kid gloves by sprinkling one's opponents with rose-water, and so on and so forth. There is some truth, no doubt, in such criticisms. The Unionist organisation is more in touch with the masses of the electorate than it was in 1906, but it would be folly to assert that the work of "democratising" it has been carried to completion. And in the matter of using young men with a genius for politics (for which journalism does not always provide sufficient scope), but without much money or family influence, the Unionist Party shows itself decidedly less sagacious than the opposing army, in which every private has a captain's epaulets in his knapsack. Fas est et ab hoste doceri. As to the rest of the professional machinist's criticism, it is probably more profitable in the end to avoid reliance on cheap catchwords, effusions of the serio-comic muse like the "Land Song" of Mr. Lloyd George's hooligans, and the many inventions of the unspeakable Mr. Ure. The height of mendacity was probably reached when the suggestion was made in the present campaign that Canada hoped for the success of the Liberal-Labour-Nationalist-Socialist coalition. Such fictions are boomerangs which miss the mark and smite the thrower with unabated force. But a master of the ridicule that kills, like Mr. F. E. Smith (whom a Canadian friend considers the wittiest and wisest of Unionist speakers), is a great asset. in a political campaign which, after all, must be largely fought out with the edged tools of rhetoric.

I am convinced that, with the exception of the anti-Imperialists of Quebec and a few cranks like the editor of the Toronto Globe (who grossly insulted the people of Sheffield in one of the articles he wrote on his return to Canada), every Canadian rejoices. that the door banged, bolted, and barred by Mr. Winston Churchill is now a door ajar. Yet it must be admitted that Canadians, though they sympathise with the objects of the Tariff Reform movement, are not in the fullest sympathy with the personnel of the Unionist Party. The same may be said of

the peoples of the other Dominions. The plain truth is that they do not regard it, as at present constituted, as fully representative of the democratic force that was enlisted and set marching on the road to victory by Mr. Joseph Chamberlain. In Birmingham and in the neighbourhood of that faithful cityfaithful to a great democratic ideal and a great democratic personality-Unionism is the people's creed, and its leaders are of, not merely in, the democracy itself. In Birmingham Unionists are in the majority in every class, from the bottom to the top of a society without castes. In Birmingham, in a word, the Party is the people and the people is the Party-a logical result of the free operation of the vitalising principle of Tariff Reform, a true national policy. In other foci of British industry-in Sunderland, for example-the same conversion of the whole community has been accomplished by the same means, the dedication of a democratic personality to the progress of a democratic ideal. Gravesend, to take a lesser example, has been held, is held, and will always be held (even in days as dark as those of 1906) by Sir Gilbert Parker, who was born into the Canadian conception of the proper method of creating and maintaining a Party organisation. Elsewhere, however, Unionism is still a Party of privilege-an inverted pyramid liable to be upset at any moment by a stirring down below. Until the Birmingham system is universal, until Unionism is completely democratised, it will not be in a position to carry out the reconstruction of England and the Empire, because until then it will not have the full confidence of the Dominions. For, let it be clearly understood, Canada will not give all she could give for the improvement of the Mother Country's commercial position until she is convinced that the Party which negotiates with her is permanently rooted in English life, and not liable to vanish for a time in a débâcle comparable with that of 1906, which ought to have been, but was not, the end of the Unionism of privilege and position, in which none may lead, or even command, a regiment except he be a member of a family that has reigned or one of those attached to its fortunes. If they have the ability of an Earl Percy, the inheritors of great names will, of course, have their place in the new aristocracy of talent. If not, they must not.

Of course, no Canadian student of British politics would for a moment suggest that the Unionist Party should refuse to avail itself of the services of members of those families in which the arts of administration are a tradition. Indeed, the lack of a "leisured class" able and willing to make a vocation of public life is one of the political disabilities of Canada, as of every other young country (including the United States), and is regretted by all who wish to see Canadian politics purged from the corruption which is the inevitable result of professionalising politicians by the payment of sessional indemnities and by allowing them to profit indirectly by the operation of a "spoils system "—a system which, by the way, Liberals in the Mother Country are anxious to introduce for the benefit of its hungry, angry members and horde of office-seekers, for whom so many thousands of small places have been created in the last four years. Nor is the instructed opinion of Canada in favour of ending the House of Lords, though the belief is general that the exclusion of palpably unfit persons and the creation of life peers (some of whom would represent the Dominions, as Lord Strathcona does in such an admirable manner) would add considerably to the prestige and efficiency of a body which, in the opinion of a Harvard professor, "represents England, whereas the House of Commons represents only the current opinions of Englishmen." Only the other day Sir Wilfrid Laurier, whose Liberalism cannot be questioned, declared his belief in the value of the House of Lords as, on the whole, the best of existing Second Chambers. Time was when the "hard-shell Grits" (the Canadian equivalents of our "philosophic Radicals") regarded the abolition of the Canadian Senate as a desirable form of national economy, but the vast majority of Canadian Liberals have long since abandoned that point of view, and would like to see their Senate (which is at present a house of refuge for the has-been and the must not-be) strong enough to oppose the Lower House on occasion. As yet the Canadian Senate is not a Second, but a Secondary, Chamber; never once has it had the courage and patriotism to appeal to the people against the House of Commons when the majority there was putting through some scheme of Party aggrandisement. Mend, but do not end, your House of Lords-such is the reasoned opinion of all Canadian students of British politics, whatever the

nature of their Party allegiance. But there is also a general feeling in Canada and in the other dominions that both the House of Lords and the Unionist Party would be stronger and more efficient if they were less intimately connected than is the case at present. A greater disposition to enlist the services of young men of ability and character, who do not happen to be connected with the peerage, and of working-class candidates would be looked on as a sign that the House of Lords was ceasing to be the great entrenched camp of Unionism, that the Party of practical Imperialism was reorganising itself along democratic

lines.

2

In the course of the General Election hardly enough attention has been paid, except in the counties, to the question of Imperial Preference, which, in the judgment of Canadians, is the better part of the Tariff Reform policy. The mere fact that Canada's warships are to form a "separate" Navy is a proof that until the Empire is placed on a business footing Canadian statesmen are bound to consider the possibility of the disintegration of our world-wide polity. Canada and the other Dominions have no desire for a greater measure of independence than that which they now possess. They do not wish to be as independent of the Mother Country as the Latin American republics are of Spain and Portugal. But it is the function of statesmen to consider the possibilities as well as the probabilities of the future, and until we have an Empire in being-an indissoluble union of sovereign States bound together by all the ties of a community of interestssuch, for example, as that which unites Massachusetts and California, Montana and Florida-the statesmen of the Dominions must weigh the possibility of being forced by some future emergency to depend entirely on their own resources for the preservation of their territorial integrity and their commercial interests. Deep down in the minds of all the statesmen of the Dominions with whom in the last twenty years I have discussed the future of this so-called Empire of ours (at present a little more than an alliance of autonomous communities, much less than a State) is this inevitable idea-the Empire must be put on a business footing without undue delay if the foundations of a strong Imperial polity are to be well and truly laid. Otherwise the

« PreviousContinue »