The Canadian Forum/Editorial/1921-06

The Canadian Forum/Editorial 1921-06 written by [[|]]

The Genesis of the United Farmers

"My imagination is unable to conceive how there could be any improper motive," were the words of the Prime Minister of Canada in referring to a letter written by Mr. Wigmore. Mr. Wigmore is a minister of the crown. He is also a member of the firm of Nagle and Wigmore of St. John, N.B. In his dual capacity of administrator and money-maker he had communicated on government paper with a French firm mentioning the fact that he was Minister of Customs and soliciting business for Nagle and Wigmore. Mr. Wigmore is comparatively new to public life. His entry into the government was a part of Mr. Meighen's reconstruction of the cabinet on his elevation. The innocence, of political youth, however, does not excuse his offence. No man fit for public life could for one moment have thought of doing such a thing. But more serious even than the writing of the letter is the fact that its publication was not attended by his resignation but rather was condoned by his leader, the first citizen of Canada. So long as a minister of the crown can remain in public life for twenty-four hours after having abused his oath by such conduct we can expect neither honest business nor honest politics in Canada.

The Fordney bill is about to become law. Even before its passing farm products in Canada are showing a marked decline in price. Now that its best and most convenient market is fenced off Canadian agriculture faces the prospect of very serious readjustment. It is not for us to criticize our neighbours. Their act injures us; in the end it will probably injure themselves no less. The hampering of the farmer and the increasing of costs for the manufacturer will make for stagnation in American industry and commerce. For ourselves we cannot complain. In 1911 we decided to reject partial reciprocity when it was offered, although we had frequently asked for it. In 1920 by order-in-council we placed an embargo on the shipment of sugar out of Canada, and thus allowed the abrogation of contracts amounting to many millions made by our sugar companies with American firms. Neither affront was excusable by the exigencies of war-time. The former was a combination of bad policy and bogus patriotism; the latter an example of the repudiation of international contracts in the interests neither of good will nor of good business. In the present instance our only course is to wait till Mr. Harding and his friends have learned their lesson; and in the meantime to exert ourselves to sell our surplus products in Great Britain and elsewhere.

Failure on the part of the Canadian Government to make use of the findings of the Tariff Commission raises the question as to the real purpose of the whole inquiry. We were promised a revision of the tariff following a thorough investigation of the facts. The inquiry was made at great public expense and greater private expense. For months three members of the Government toured the country, hearing witnesses whose evidence was taken down verbatim and whose memorials became public documents. Business firms and associations throughout Canada for the time being forgot their buying and selling and spent weary days in preparing each its particular plea. A scientific tariff was to be the result. The mountain laboured and produced less than a mouse. This much, however, was accomplished. Considerable protectionist propaganda resulted through newspaper publicity given to the proceedings of the commission. Day after day, week after week, the people of Canada learned what a tender plant is Canadian business and how soon it would wither if a breach in the tariff wall should expose it to the chilling breeze of foreign competition. Now that Sir Henry Drayton has failed to make use of the voluminous information secured, we cannot but wonder whether propaganda was the sole object of the sittings of the Commission; or whether the failure merely indicates intellectual infertility in the government; or whether it may be, and to this explanation charity inclines her head, that a moribund government hesitates to plunge the country into tariff changes, with an inevitable dislocation of business, and the certainty that all would be overturned within two years at most.

It often happens that reforms come easily and quietly when their time is ripe. This fact is again [p. 260] demonstrated in a piece of legislation which has been placed on the statute books of the Province of Ontario with little editorial notice, if any. Direct legislation has been the subject of the keenest controversy in the United States and has been incorporated in the constitutions of a number of states after long and vigorous campaigns against equally determined opposition. Apparently public opinion has ripened in Ontario of itstelf^(sic!) without any organized campaign. The determination of Mr. Drury to allow tax-payers in the municipalities the privilege of managing their own financial affairs has provided the occasion for the introduction of the Initiative and Referendum in its simplest form. At its first session the Government had given municipal councils the right to lighten the taxation on improvements upon a favourable vote of the rate-payers. This measure, known as the Drury Act, was found inadequate owing to the strong representation which real estate interests regularly hold in municipal councils and the consequent difficulty of getting a by-law submitted. At the recent session the Act has been amended so that now a vote is compulsory on the presentation to council of a petition signed by ten per cent, of those persons entitled to vote on money by-laws. If the vote carries the council is compelled to put the measure into force. In order to avoid the dislocation of sudden change the rate of exemption is limited to twenty-five per cent. per annum, and a period of from four to ten years is required to secure total exemption. At any time by a similar method of petition and voting the process can be reversed.

Two years ago, the peacemakers of Versailles completed their task. How the creators, in their hearts, regarded their collective handiwork there is no means yet of telling. Each in his own way declared his satisfaction; but only one of them, M. Clemenceau, the cynic and the realist, ventured to indulge in prophecy; for him "the next fifty years of history would revolve within the framework of Versailles." To-day M. Clemenceau in enforced retirement may console himself with the thought that nothing can ever erase the declaration, inscribed by a grateful nation upon the walls of every school in France, "Le citoyen Georges Clemenceau a bien merité de la Patrie." But the framework of Versailles is already splintered and broken beyond repair. The Treaty rests upon force; the entente between Britain and France alone can furnish that force; and the entente is steadily becoming weaker. What makes the Silesian difficulty unique is that it constitutes the first occasion upon which the British Government has openly announced its opposition to French policy. The pretence of unanimity, of identity of interest, has for the first time been definitely and officially abandoned, and that will make the gap harder to close than it has ever been before.

It is strange that this crisis should have followed so closely upon the settlement of the reparations dispute, and it is strange that Mr. Lloyd George who was so compliant then should be so determined now. The explanation that is being advanced by such papers as the London Observer, inspired, it is said, by Mr. Lloyd George's immediate following, would, a few months ago, have been ridiculed by all but a few radical journals. That explanation is that the military party in France, which seemed until a few days ago to control through fear the government of M. Briand, having been deprived by the German surrender of its cherished plan to occupy the Ruhr last month, deliberately stirred up the Polish nationalists so as to provoke German resistance and create a fresh pretext for occupying the Ruhr; for the aim of this party is not resettlement, not even reparations, but the total destruction of the German Reich. True or not, no other explanation has been advanced that fits the facts; and, as for the dispute itself, Mr. Lloyd George was probably right when he said that in this matter he has behind him the public opinion of every civilized country in the world. It looks as if the French chauvinists and their Polish protégés have gone a stage too far. In his recent speech to the Deputies, M. Briand has read them a lesson that they will not forget and may not easily forgive.

The Manchester Guardian celebrates its centenary this year. No English newspaper has quite the literary charm of the Guardian, and none carries, in spite of its limited circulation, quite so much political weight. The literary quality can be traced to the pleasant foible of the proprietor who insists that practically none but university graduates shall be on its staff. C. P. Scott likes the Oxford "Greats" man. There is a legend that the paper once had on its staff seven fellows of colleges in Oxford, but the story is probably apocryphal. Be that as it may, the best liberal thought of England is expressed in the best literary style in the pages of the Guardian. Its political influence is due to its sterling honesty and fearlessness. The Manchester Guardian supported Free Trade when Free Trade was far from popular. It supported Lloyd George and the Boers in the Boer War, although its policy caused the circulation, always to be reckoned in tens rather than hundreds of thousands, to sink below ten thousand. In later times it has had the temerity to advocate friendship with Sinn Feiners and with Bolsheviks. Fearlessness and honesty has paid the Guardian, as it pays any newspaper in the long run. "What Manchester thinks to-day England thinks to-morrow" is truer than many Canadians would suspect, simply because of the sanity of outlook of the Guardian. Some features of the Guardian like the Miscellany Column are unique. The column is contributed locally and the best of the stories floating around the [p. 261] city are recorded in it. If the Guardian undertakes to publish photographic illustrations, or a History of the War, or a Weekly Edition, one may be sure that each of the jobs is done just about as well as it could be. Among the well known names of its efficient staff are to be found those of C. E. Montague, S. K. Ratcliffe and Ernest Newman, while practically every writer of note in the Anglo-Saxon world has contributed to its pages.

Recent controversies have made conspicuous certain defects in the overseas correspondence published in our own press. The coal strike in England is an event of the utmost importance to Canadian as well as to British industry. There has been no peace in the British coal areas for many years. The men are profoundly dissatisfied with a system in which the direction of the whole industry is ordinarily vested in the holders of mining stock. The miners insist that they shall share control of it. Probably there will be no peace at the mines till the Sankey Report is adopted. In any case a permanent solution of the coal controversy in England may indicate the direction of social evolution generally for many years to come. Since this is so, we may well ask our newspapers to give impartial and complete accounts of the dispute. Our own industrial future depends no less on knowledge, than on the good feeling which is the basis of community. But those readers who supposed that the Press would supply them with what they needed have been continuously disappointed. Correspondents in England cabled the strike news to their papers — dwelt on its importance — dilated on the woes of the householder — congratulated themselves in a paragraph or two on knowing so much more about it than their fellow men — and ended their despatches. Readers were obliged to take on trust the statement that the correspondents knew so much; for if they did they kept their knowledge to themselves. We question if the ordinary Canadian workman or employer has any real idea of the issues involved in the coal strike, of the many plans for nationalization, partial or complete, or of the possibilities. But if Canadians do not know the facts of the case, they have at least a right to know them; and they may legitimately ask why the Press cannot provide itself with correspondents, who will divulge as well as gather news.

A great new industry has sprung up in our midst. It is a modest industry, shrinking from the limelight of advertisement, making no boast of its gourd-like growth, never calling upon the public to witness its methods or results. Yet it must be an industry of considerable importance, for it has agencies wherever the wheels of industry go round; it must render valuable service, for it enjoys the patronage of many of the greatest corporations; it may even be a "key-industry," for some of its employees were in the U. S. exempted from the draft on grounds of national service; and it is certainly profitable, for a single organization — one out of many — paid in one year an income tax of $258,000. The industry in question is that of the "labour spy," whose workings have been revealed in one of the most unhappily significant investigations of the times, made on behalf of the Professor of Social Ethics at Harvard University and recently published as a series of articles in The New Republic. The investigation, which is well-documented, shows that the spy business is a most curious as well as pernicious parasite on the industrial community. It lives to "promote industrial harmony," which it does by creating universal suspicion. It believes strongly in the "make-work" principle. One detective, for example, buys up a labour paper in Columbus to foster the street railway strike he is employed to break, in order no doubt to make the job last out. Another is found working with great catholicity for employer and miner in the same strike. A common principle appears to be the stirring up of bad feeling wherever it can be made to pay. That any intelligent employer should resort to the services of the mean, uneducated, back-biting parasites of this class seems incredible. The whole system is a bastard progeny of folly and a belated individualism. We sincerely hope that the revelations now afforded of its working will bring a realization of the ominous stupidity of the business, and that Canadian employers will be slow in future to follow the bad precedent set in this respect by their fellows across the line.

A recent Act of the California Assembly, which is likely to be copied elsewhere, embodies the general condemnation in an eminently practical form. One of its provisions (we quote from The New Republic) expressly states that "Any person or corporation who shall employ any other person for the purpose of joining any union of working men to secure knowledge of their activities on trade-union matters, or to foment strife among the members, or to agitate them to commit offences against the public peace, shall be guilty of a misdemeanour," which is punishable by a fine of $250, or three months imprisonment, or both. Doubtless the clause as it stands is capable of evasion: but it is a promise that this evil will receive attention. In Canada, we believe that legislation against the "labour spy," whether federal or provincial, would in any case be valid. Probably the demand for such legislation will express itself earlier in the provincial field, than in the federal. We shall in any case be wise to deal in good time with an evil which if left unchecked can only poison the relations between workmen and employers.

The sons of a modern generation, doubtless remembering the occasion when Joshua bade the sun [p. 262] stand still in the Valley of Aijalon, have decided once more to advance the clock: and daylight saving is again upon us. For the average man the difference is but small, but for the mother and children it is a more serious question, especially when the children are of school age. It is difficult enough under ordinary circumstances to get children to bed and to sleep on the warm summer evenings: but when the evenings are lengthened by an hour and the unhappy little creatures lie awake and listen to the joyous shrieks of their more fortunate brethren, it naturally becomes much more difficult. If we must have daylight saving (and there is much to be said in favour of it), why cannot school time be advanced an hour, to give the school children an opportunity of making up in the morning the sleep which they lose at night? Lessons from 10 o'clock to 1, and from 2.30 to 5 p.m. would surely be an improvement upon the present system. We should be glad to hear from parents what they think of this suggestion.

Once more the medicine man is among us, and the modern rain-maker, with a splendid contempt for all legislative decrees that this country shall be dry, is calling down copious streams of moisture from the sky upon the arid plains of Alberta. It is unfortunate that the magician seems unable to effect his miracles unless the sky is cloudy, but doubtless he will soon succeed in perfecting his apparatus and bringing rain from a cloudless sky. Whether by reversing his gear he will be able to make the sun shine upon the just and the unjust, though a difficult question, "is not beyond conjecture." In the meantime we must live in hope that the Deluge of Noah will not be repeated on the plains of Western Canada. We understand that the farmers of Alberta are already a little anxious and are now imploring the rain-maker to give them a brief lull for seeding. It would indeed be a pity if the zealous philanthropist should flood the country through excess of zeal.