the sword united in one outfit—what about it? Oh, it's a great show, sure enough. I used to think government was a plain, plugshot business of trade statistics, card indexes and ledgers. But I've come to the conclusion that this old town has to make it a good bit of a social compromise and a show, or it can't be carried on, no matter who does it."

CONTENTS

THE UNELECTED PREMIER OF CANADA— RT. HON. ARTHUR MEIGHEN

THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN PREMIER— RT. HON. SIR ROBERT BORDEN

A POLITICAL SOLAR SYSTEM— RT. HON. SIR WILFRID LAURIER

THE GRANDSON OF A PATRIOT— HON. WILLIAM LYON MACKENZIE KING

NUMBER ONE HARD— HON. T. A. CRERAR

THE PREMIER WHO MOWED FENCE CORNERS— HON. E. C. DRURY

EZEKIEL AT A LEDGER— RT. HON. SIR GEORGE FOSTER

A HALO OF BILLIONS— RT. HON. SIR THOMAS WHITE

CALLED TO THE POLITICAL PULPIT— HON. NEWTON WESLEY ROWELL

AN AUTOCRAT FOR DIVIDENDS— BARON SHAUGHNESSY

THE PUBLIC SERVICE HOBBYIST— SIR HERBERT AMES

THE SHADOW AND THE MAN— HON. SIR SAM HUGHES

THE STEREOPTICON AND THE SLIDE— LIEUT.-GENERAL SIR ARTHUR CURRIE

A COAT OF MANY COLOURS— SIR JOHN WILLISON

WHATSOEVER THY HAND FINDETH— SIR JOSEPH FLAVELLE, BART.

NO FATTED CALVES FOR PRODIGAL SONS— HON. SIR HENRY DRAYTON

THE PERSONAL EQUATION IN RAILROADING— EDWARD WENTWORTH BEATTY

A BOURGEOIS MASTER OF QUEBEC— HON. SIR LOMER GOUIN

A POLITICAL MATTAWA OF THE WEST— JOHN WESLEY DAFOE

HEADMASTER OF THE MANCHESTER SCHOOL— MICHAEL CLARK, M.P.

THE SPHINX FROM SASKATCHEWAN— HON. J. A. CALDER

A TRUE VOICE OF LABOUR— TOM MOORE

THE MAN WITHOUT A PUBLIC— SIR WILLIAM MACKENZIE

THE IMPERIAL BRAINSTORM— BARON BEAVERBROOK

CONCLUSION

THE MASQUES OF OTTAWA

THE UNELECTED PREMIER OF CANADA

RT. HON. ARTHUR MEIGHEN

Once only have I encountered Rt. Hon. Arthur Meighen, Premier of Canada by divine right, not as yet by election. I was the 347th person with whom he shook hands and whom he tried to recognize that afternoon. His weary but peculiarly winning smile had scarcely flickered to rest for a moment in an hour. For the eleven seconds that it was my privilege to be individually sociable with him, he did his best to say what might suit the case. He seemed much like a worn-out precocious boy, of great wisdom and much experience, suddenly prodded into an eminence which as yet he scarcely understood.

I was introduced as—say, Mr. Smith.

"Oh?" he said, wearily. "Yes, I've read your articles. Er—Tom Smith, isn't it?"

But Tom was not the name, I had scarcely time to say, and it made no difference. I should like to have shoo'd away the crowd and let him call me Jake just for a few minutes to get the point of feeling of this young man—though he is nearly 50—on how it feels to be Premier without a general election.

There may not be as much finality, but there is sometimes as much wisdom, in the choice of a leader by a small group as in his election by the people. Majorities frequently rule without wisdom. In accepting the gift of an almost worn-out Premiership and a year later entering the most significant general election ever held in Canada, at least since 1878, Arthur Meighen falls back upon his courage without much comfort from ordinary ambition. He faces a battle whose armies are new, pledged to hold what he has against two enemy groups, and to hold more than John A. Macdonald fought to get, without the sense of one great party against another such as Macdonald had. No Premier ever went into a general election with so little intimate support from "the old party", with such a certainty that whichever party wins as against the others cannot win a working majority without coalition, and with the sensation that the party he leads is already what remains of a coalition.

Whenever I see Meighen I feel like hastening home to "cram" on citizenship for an examination. I behold in him picnics neglected and even feminine society deferred for the sake of toiling up a political Parnassus. In his veneration for constituted authority I can comprehend something of the Jap's banzais to the Mikado before he commits harikari.

Whatever there is, or is not, in the character of Arthur Meighen, he has a draw upon other men. Any public task that he has in hand looks like a load that challenges other men to help him lift. A really intelligent camera would show in his face a mixture of wholesome pugnacity, concentration of thought and feminine tenderness. He feels like a big intellectual boy who unless mother looks after him will get indigestion or neurasthenia. Sometimes men pity their leaders. Meighen, with his intensity and his thought before action looks such a frail wisp of a man. The last time I saw him in public he was bare-headed on an open-air stage, a dusky, lean silhouette against a vast flare of water and sky. On the same spot less than two hundred years ago, that singular, overbuilt top head and sharply tapering, elongated oval of a face might have been that of some aristocratic red man, deeply serious on the eve of a tribal war.

The little blank spots in Meighen's temperament are things that people like to talk about; when the same idioms in an average man would be set down as mild insanity. Rumour says for instance that every now and then he must be watched for fear he go to Parliament without a hat. Why not? It is only a British custom to wear a hat in the Commons except when making a speech. A bareheaded, even a bald-headed, Premier may be a great man. Meighen's negligence in the matter of a hat perhaps comes of the bother of finding the clothes-brush at the same time. Since Mackenzie Bowell, Canada has never had a Premier so naturally oblivious of sartorial style; though his later appearances suggest that even he has fallen into the mode of well-dressed Premiers. In his early law days at Portage it is said that one evening when Mrs. Meighen was at a concert, he was given the first baby to mind, that when the baby cried he marked a paragraph in a law book he was reading, stole into the bedroom and took the baby over to a neighbour's house; that when he was asked later where the infant was he gradually remembered that he had put the child somewhere—now where was it? There is some other half forgotten tale of the strange garb in which he turned up at a friend's wedding, even before he was famous enough to be able to do that sort of thing with any degree of contempt for the conventional forms.

If Meighen remains Premier of Canada long enough, no doubt some really apocryphal yarns will arise out of these little idiosyncracies, just as legends wove themselves about John A. Macdonald, and Laurier. I remember that the clothes Meighen wore the day I shook hands with him were dingy brown that made him look like a moulting bobolink; that he had not taken the trouble to shave because a sleeping car is such an awkward place for a razor, and it is much better for a Premier to wear bristles than court-plaster. Some one will be sure to remark that the Premier travels in a private car. Arthur Meighen never seems like that sort of Premier. One would almost expect him to choose an upper berth because some less lean and agile