It is not likely that if left to the logic of ordinary evolution Sir Robert ever would have recreated his party even on Imperial issues; or convinced the West that Conservatism was not merely anti-agrarian; or shewn Quebec that Conservatives in the second decade of the twentieth century are better Laurentians than the Liberals by preserving better the anti-continental idea. Such things call for leadership by imagination and a Cabinet of strong men. Sir Robert had neither. Even in the House he was not the party leader. Conservatism established by Macdonald as a great system of damnation to the Grits, was on the low road to extinction. It was not in the power of Robert Borden to save it. The country was swept by a new Liberalism that by astute manipulation had kept sympathetic both manufacturers and radicals.
Long before the war came, Canada recognized in Mr. Borden a Premier who knew the meaning of moral caution so well that he knew not boldness at all except that his cause was right. Borden had the ethical stolidity of Asquith without the latter's personal weaknesses or his powers of oratory. He needed somebody with him as stage manager and makeup artist. Even his virtues might have been advertised with effect—though as a rule, except in characters like Lincoln, it takes the perspective of time to put those into a poster. So eminently respectable; so high in honour; so fair in judgment; so irresolute in action; so defective in imagination; so content to be overshadowed by lesser men in his own party even though he never was intimidated by bigger men in the Opposition: such, so far as we could see him before the war, was Sir Robert Borden.
Platitudes lay in wait for the Premier to utter them. Only by an effort of will could he lift them to a plane of high interest. He could sketch great issues with the solemn hand of a great preacher pronouncing a benediction; but he never could utter an aside, or crack a joke, or tell a story, or forget that once upon a time Fate had picked him to be a leader and so help him he would go through the motions of shepherding while the other men were the real collie dogs of the flock. If only Borden could have broken some bucking broncho, or worn some new kind of bouquet, or invented some imitation of a brazen serpent to hold up, the people and the party might have got hold of him and followed him.
Such was Premier Borden before the war, and so he remained, but under a magnifying glass, afterwards. The war was a godsend to the Government. It drove out alleged dissension in the Cabinet and gave the party which had met defeat in the Naval Aid Bill a chance to perpetrate something which no Parliament would dare try to defeat. Sometimes I almost think Borden was for short periods in the war a truly great man—in the eyes of the angels. He had known the war was coming; he had said so. There was a secret plan of action on file in the Archives months before it came. Not his to exult in I-told-you-sos to the leader opposite who had mitigated the menace. He rose to his programme of duty. He did not even wait till Britain declared war, but cabled assurances of aid on August 2nd, 1914. Special Parliament was assembled. The hour had struck. A Halifax writer present at the Khaki Parliament says:
"Sir Wilfrid easily bore off the honours in oratory. It was a great occasion and he rose to it. . . . Sir Robert is no orator, but he spoke in straight man-fashion of the great crisis. The climax of his speech was a solemn warning of the dark days to come 'when our endurance will be tried.'"
Had the Premier issued a referendum in that first month of Canada's going to war he would have wept at the amazing number of Noes from the Province in which Laurier was born, and the provinces in the Far West which he had created; in the one, obvious indifference whatever the cause; in the other enmity from the Nationals whom Laurier had imported to make Liberal voters. Even in the rural areas, traditionally the stronghold of Liberalism, indifferentism was the rule; and in the city of Kitchener where Laurier had politically baptized Mackenzie King, his successor, there was almost a state of civil war.
But the fervour of the Hughes programme prevented the Premier from taking stock of the nation. He permitted Hughes to treat Quebec as an automatic part of Canada at war—which it was not; and he failed to use even the Machiavellian energies of Bob Rogers in getting a line on the psychology of the West, supposed to be useful only in elections. Sir Robert had long known of the menace of Germany, and his Naval Aid Bill was one proof that he knew. But he did not understand the menace of disunited Canada. There never was in Ottawa any informing vision of Canada at war. Canada, in fact, was not at war. Political feuds were indeed forgotten; thanks to a noble-minded Premier that was natural enough. But had there been a national poet then big enough to translate into great verse the true spiritual state of Canada, he would have written with poignant sadness about Quebec; perhaps a few verses on the overwhelming British-born majority in the First Contingent. He would have explained that being a native son of Canada, whether you were English or French by extraction, did not of itself lead to enlistment in the ranks. The Premier should have known whether Sam Hughes was awarding patronage by making officers from the Conservative party or whether according to his own statement he was doing just the opposite. In fact it was the Premier's business to see that the Minister of War pursued neither policy.
But with the Hughes flares all about him it was hard for the Premier to see the nation; most of all Quebec. In this matter of the two Canadas, Sam Hughes saw his opportune duty and he did it. Sir Robert saw his and shrank from it, not weakly but blindly. Quebec should have been the instant objective of all the wisdom in Canada's Cabinet. Except for one or two grand battalions and a minority of broad-minded French-Canadians, Quebec was not at war, as part of united Canada. Banging the drum and blowing the bugle in Quebec was as wrong in strategy as to send Bob Rogers down to exorcise, as he did in 1915, the phantom of conscription. Sir Robert knew that even in civil times his Government was electorally ignored on the St. Lawrence. How much more in a time of unpopular war? Was it not clear that every hurrah for the Empire in Ontario, every fresh battalion mustered and drilled in Toronto, every troopship down the St. Lawrence, was a nail in the coffin of Quebec's potentiality in the war?
Yes, Sir Robert Borden knew that. He knew that Laurier was sulking like Cassius in his tent; that he was gnawing himself over the failure of his own predictions about the peace welfare of the world as well as for his own defeat in the election of 1911; that the man of the "sunny ways" was becoming a reactionary and a cynic, an old leader of great power, which he was willing to use to the utmost for the prosecution of the war had he been in office, but in opposition was manacled by a sense of futility against forces in Quebec which he understood and feared far more than did the Premier.
No doubt the Premier traversed all this, many a time and in great concern. And it may be that he saw so sharply into the sad hopelessness of it all that he decided not to ask Laurier for advice, or even suggestion. Such is lack of imagination.