The Canadian Forum/Editorial/1921-09

The Canadian Forum/Editorial 1921-09 written by [[|]]

Assassins——and Other People

Mr. Meighen has done the courageous thing. It took courage to incur the displeasure of many of his followers in the House and even of some of his Cabinet Ministers, and in the trough of an economic depression to appeal to the people. Seldom, indeed, does a Government survive an appeal in such time. All it gains is an escape from burdensome financial responsibilities. In the clear terms of his speech at London, in which the election was announced, the most interesting features were the small regard he paid to the influence and honesty of purpose of the Liberal Party, and the tribute he paid to the earnestness and strength of the Agrarians — while in the same breath he sought to convict them of economic stupidity. Mr. Meighen makes the tariff the issue. He has no word to say which may stir up racial or religious strife. For once we may have an election fought on real issues and in good temper. The Prime Minister pictures the farmers as out-and-out, immediate free-traders. For this, however, he has no warrant. Not a single official statement supports this interpretation of their policy. Indeed he himself must convince the public that he has not forgotten economics in the school of politics. He has yet to show that production can be permanently stimulated by placing more fetters on our commerce.

The report of the Commission appointed by the Ontario Government to investigate the projected radial railways has been given to the press. After almost a year spent in gathering evidence from experts and others, and in hearing the arguments of opposing lawyers, the Commission has definitely advised against the Province pledging its credit to the municipalities to construct their railways. The city press has not been slow to criticise the government and the Commission. Objection has been taken mainly on two grounds: the cost of the inquiry and the shifting of responsibility by the government. It is true that the investigation was prolonged and productive of many words. But it is claimed that more than half the expense was incurred by the Hydro Commission responsible for the project, in securing information which might well have been available before the scheme was recommended. At any rate an expenditure of half a million does not appear extravagant in testing the feasibility of a project involving one hundred times that amount. Our editors might reflect that in the simple operation of buying a house it is usually thought advisable to employ an agent who charges three per cent. of the purchase price, and a lawyer who may charge something more. An expenditure of one per cent. is not necessarily excessive when an undertaking is vast and involved, and when it is sponsored by engineers capable of estimating at $10,000,000 the Chippawa Power Development, which actually promises to cost seven or eight times that amount. Further to charge that the Government "side-stepped" the question, as the Mail and Empire does, is hardly a just argument. Royal Commissions of Inquiry are sound in principle. Government and parliamentary committees cannot always safely dispense with experts. Criticism by the press would have more weight were it directed to the character of the Report, and this it has omitted to analyze or discuss.

A decision of the Trades and Labour Congress of Canada to cancel the charter of the Canadian Brotherhood of Railroad Employees brings to a head the clash between national and international trade unionism. There is a growing feeling on this continent, and especially in Canada, that all is not well with organised labour. The Congress itself is the Canadian mouthpiece of the American Federation of Labour. For many years past the parent body has been elaborating its organisation, stabilising its finances, and extending its control over local and trade issues. For more than a generation it has been directed by one man, whose impress it bears indelibly. It has restlessly fought for the control of organised labour wherever its members came in contact with unionists outside the Federation. When it covers a field so wide there are grave dangers in centralised authority. Every successful church has had to face them and most successful states. The American Federation of Labour owed its earlier success to recognition of these dangers. Unlike the Knights of Labour, it made allowance for local circumstance and [p. 356] for differing craft interests. It aimed at reconciling local autonomy with the wider need of union. But devotion to the ideal of organisation by crafts, which in an earlier generation was a safeguard of the workers' freedom, bounds and limits it to-day. The changing industrial structure demands its counterpart in a changing form of labour organisation. The growth of large integrated industries can hardly fail to stimulate a parallel growth of industrial unions. Meanwhile, the political labour movement is becoming a reality. Its life depends on the provision of a common meeting-ground for all organised labour, whether international or not. So long as the Trades and Labour Congress is no more than a mouthpiece of the Federation its political significance will be restricted, for there are almost 80,000 unionists in Canada with whom the Congress has nothing to do, and it is adding to their number. Sooner or later the question must be faced, whether the national or the international interests of Canadian labour are paramount. No matter which prevail it appears that one of them must suffer.

The adoption of a report in favour of unemployment insurance by the Trades and Labour Congress may or may not be significant. Much depends on the the forthcoming meeting between the Congress representatives and the Federal Minister of Labour. A series of such resolutions may be found in the files of Canadian labour organisations, and they count for very little. Fundamentally the trouble has been a disinclination for study. If and when a working plan for unemployment insurance is adopted it will represent much hard thinking and an immense amount of actuarial work. The mathematics of insurance are not for the layman, but the hard thinking, which is an essential preliminary, must be done by labour leaders, if labour resolutions are intended to produce results. There are no signs at present that the leaders of the labour movement (or the newspapers which support them in this matter) have ever seriously faced the difficulties that confront them. Elsewhere in this issue we print an article from the pen of Mr. J. S. Woodsworth, which is a vivid reminder of the hardship and distress which winter must bring to scores of thousands. It is already plain that our present makeshift arrangements for relief are hopeless. The need for something in the nature of insurance against trade depression was never more obvious and urgent. Who, then, is ready to bring forward a scientific scheme?

During the first week in August the Supreme Council met to decide the fate of Upper Silesia. There arose a not unforeseen deadlock, and the Supreme Council finally decided to refer the Silesian problem to the League of Nations, with the request that the League make settlement without delay in the interests of peace and good feeling. The press on both sides of the Atlantic received this as a vindication of the League, but it may be no more than the Supreme Council's confession of the insolubility of the problem. In other words, it is perhaps an august example of the familiar device known as "passing the buck". This is never an act of friendship, and it remains to be seen how the League will emerge from the thorny path into which it has been propelled. It is long now since the plebiscite, itself almost two years overdue, resulted in a substantial majority in favour of maintaining the connection with Germany. This somewhat unexpected result really created the problem of partition; for it can hardly be doubted that, had the vote been reversed, the province as a whole would have gone to Poland. If that would have been both an injustice and an act of political folly — and it is difficult to imagine how any person could maintain the contrary — the allocation now of the entire province to Germany could hardly be regarded in a different light. There is, it is true, a strong economic case for Germany's retaining Upper Silesia in its integrity; but such a plea cannot be reconciled with the political doctrine of self-determination or, though this is probably not as serious an obstacle as it would seem, with the ethnographical situation in Silesia itself. One of the fundamental difficulties is, of course, that the industrial and mining districts, which are so essential to the economic life of Germany, are, generally speaking, the districts that showed a majority in favour of union with Poland.

But the practical point is, that whether inherently necessary or not, some form of partition is now almost inevitable; for the fate of Upper Silesia, like so many other important questions that have arisen since the Armistice, has become involved in the jealousies and conflicts that constitute for the most part the politics of post-war Europe. It is this conflict of policies that makes the partitioning of Silesia at once so difficult and so vital a problem. It is now realised by all except a negligible class in England, and by none so vividly as by the financial interests, that the last way to serve their own cause is to reduce Germany to the condition of a second Austria. Yet this is exactly the object that a very powerful party in France pursues and, moreover, succeeds with only occasional rebuffs in forcing the French government to pursue. It seems as if the best that can be hoped for, even now, is a bad compromise — a compromise that might conceivably be followed or even anticipated by a militarist coup at Berlin. There is, however, some hope to be gleaned from the way in which the situation is developing in Silesia itself. There, it is said, Korfanty is losing his influence so rapidly that another call to arms on his part might well prove ineffective. There is talk, too, of a rapprochement [p. 357] between the German and Polish workingmen's organisations with a view to promoting agitation for an independent Silesia. Such an agitation would probably be of too recent an origin to impress either the Supreme Council or the League of Nations, but it might by promoting a spirit of co-operation point the way to an equitable settlement.

A recent issue of The Farmers' Sun declares in large headlines "Spy System to Catch Farmers in Any Error re Income Tax is Latest Development at Ottawa". It appears that the Finance Department, as in duty bound, is checking the returns of income made by farmers, as well as those of other people. Why farmers should be more exempt than city dwellers from the common frailties of mankind The Farmers' Sun does not explain. In resenting application to the farmers of a scrutiny which belongs to citizens as such The Farmers' Sun is acting indefensibly. Farmers are entitled to no special privilege. Their leaders have gained a large measure of public confidence by their steadfast opposition to privilege. Their programme involves the support of direct as against indirect taxation. They know that for years past there has been a good deal of evasion, both deliberate and accidental. Their policy depends for its execution on the success of the Finance Department in dealing with evasion, and before that policy is adopted they will have to secure the support of many thousands of urban electors. Nothing is better calculated to repel an urban electorate than this.

Sir Henry Drayton has replied to the charge of discrimination made by the U.F.O. organ, in that income tax inspectors are requesting from millers and others certified lists of all purchases from farmers, while at the same time the new stock dividend of twenty per cent. declared by the Canadian General Electric Company has been pronounced free from income tax. He makes the same distinction between capital and income that the British Treasury has made for many years, and points out the singularly small amount which farmers contribute by way of income tax. The Farmers' Sun and the Progressive Party have in the income tax returns their hardest argument to meet. Disliking indirect taxes, they do not yet in general pay direct taxes. They must explain the reason for this, and in explaining it they will probably find that farmers themselves quite honestly have been doing pretty much what the General Electric Directors have done. They have been applying to improvements, as wise farmers should, what might have been set down as cold income, just as industrial concerns may from time to time add to their equipment and declare stock dividends accordingly. Mr. Meighen's gage of battle makes it more urgent that those who differ from him on the tariff should devise a system of direct taxation, equitable in its incidence, which will be collected.

Civic and national pride alike are stirred when the Canadian National Exhibition opens at Toronto. During many years the largest and most successful enterprise of its kind it attracts an attention that is almost world-wide. It reflects our virtues — and sometimes our faults as well — in an unsparing light. Doubtless not all are agreed on the merits of the pageant which graced the first evening of this year's Exhibition. The military man will find in it poor comfort for his feelings. But others, to whom things warlike are anathema, will agree with the daily press which labelled the spectacle "inspiring". For if we have not yet beaten our swords into ploughshares (and there is a poor market for ploughshares with wheat at $1.39) we have done something not very different. We have produced, for Exhibition purposes, what our late enemies would be justified in describing as an ersatz soldiery. Like most ersatz products it is, of course, a good deal different from the real thing. His Majesty's Foot Guards are still old-fashioned enough to wear the pipe-clay belt. But our ersatz Foot Guards do not wear belts. Real Horse Guards wear the cuirass over their respiratory organs — and, no doubt, at times it is rather cramping to the lungs. But our Exhibition Horse Guards follow the more hygienic, if somewhat less imposing practice, of using the cuirass to cover their digestive organs. Real South African infantry march in step; and even Anzacs do so. But our ersatz infantry preferred as a rule each to follow his own gait. Et cetera. . . . The men in charge of the pageant might have obeyed a very natural impulse and induced some Toronto regiment to find real soldiers for them. They did go so far as to place in the foreground a quartette of maimed veterans, who struck a note of sober courage very different from the rest of the spectacle. But that was an isolated appeal to reality. They felt, doubtless, that the war is over — that men are changing swords for ledgers — that in peace other virtues than precision are demanded — and they staged a performance which was sui generis. Most people seem to have voted it a great success.

In these days of individualistic selfishness, when every man is occupied with his own salvation and recks but little of his neighbour's, it is comforting to learn that the true missionary spirit is still alive. Recently a group of Puritans, alarmed for the possible future of the President of the United States, addressed to him an impassioned appeal to refrain from the pernicious habit of cigarette-smoking. We heartily endorse this generous attempt to pluck a brand from the burning (even if it be in reality only a brand of cigarettes), and we rejoice to think that the President, who is but a weak, erring mortal, is compassed and [p. 358] guarded on every side by the cohorts of the children of light. It should not be difficult, we imagine, for a man who must be in the habit of asking an acquaintance to "give him a light", to omit that single objectionable word and to implore his true and disinterested counsellors to "give him light" instead. We hope, therefore, that Rumour is not true when she reports that the President has answered this modest petition by a request to know whether his self-constituted advisers themselves abstain from those dangerous stimulants, tea and coffee. What is to become of the vaunted liberty of the citizen if the President is to be allowed to poke his nose into the private concerns of the American people?

We print in this issue a large extract from the Canadian war play. The P.B.I. or Mademoiselle of Bully Grenay. It was first produced at the Hart House Theatre, Toronto, in March, 1920, and later at the Princess Theatre, Toronto, with considerable success in both places. Subsequently it made a tour of the province. It is the opinion of many who served in France that the play "rings true"; and it is chiefly for this reason, for its documentary value, that we think it suitable for publication. As a play The P.B.I. has little to commend it to Aristotle, and it has a Bairnsfather feather in its tail, but it has also a vivacity of dialogue which cannot be manufactured from lamplight, and which make it a cheerful oasis in that vast desert of war-books which we have inherited from the second decade of the nineteenth century. When "the pens of the nations were mobilised" in August, 1914, the future authors of our play had other fish to fry. As it is uncertain at this time whether the play will appear in book form, we believe that we are justified in presenting it in an abbreviated version. Three more extracts of approximately equal length with the present one will appear in successive issues. The whole will comprise fully half of the complete play and will include the major episodes.