"To thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man."
Mr. Rowell is one of our most encouraging types of what is called the self-made man. Any Oxford professor hearing him make a typically good speech in London on "The Commonwealth of Nations under the Union Jack," would infer that he had taken a post-graduate course in political history after graduating as a B.A. But Mr. Rowell never even attended a High School. He went from the farm as a lad to be a parcel boy in a London, Ont., dry-good store. The class-meeting and the sermon and the Mechanics' Institute gave him a taste for serious literature. He came up in the oratorical county that produced G. W. Ross and J. A. Macdonald. He must have regularly read Tannage's sermons. He was a youth when the Y.M.C.A. movement invaded Canada along with baseball. He made the choice. He passed into the Law School, somehow dodging all the good brethren who advised him to go into the ministry. And through the opportunity afforded him by the successful practice of law and Liberalism on a large scale he has been able to preach his sermons to much bigger audiences than he ever could have found in the Methodist Church.
If some of the advanced radicals of these days would con over the outlines of a career like this, they might get rid of some of their fantastic notions about State-devised equality and emancipation. Mr. Rowell instinctively reached out by industry and enthusiasm for the forces that would better his condition. In so doing he spent a large part of himself upon the betterment of society. The result is an intellectual, moral and financially successful character of which any community might be proud—so long as the community contained but one of the kind.
Rowellism is a good salt. It is not good porridge. The average unprofessional Christian man cannot live on the levels where Mr. Rowell breathes so easily.
Time and again have we heard the equivocal remark about this man; if such, and however so. Why not take the man as he is and make the best of him? Surely by now he has proved that he has a definite and uplifting leverage on public life. It is of no use to complain that he never was cut out to be a leader in anything but ethical ideas of statesmanship. It was political makeshiftery to make such a man the leader of Ontario Liberalism, which did not ask to be led but to be cajoled and tricked up for the carnival. It was fatuous to imagine that he could ever become a chief of the National Liberal and Conservative party to which he now inextricably belongs. If secret ambition ever spurred him to indulge that dream—which seems incredible—sober reflection at the looking glass should have corrected the strabismus. Mr. Rowell is not a leader of men, in action; never was and never could be—without some drastic transformation in his outward character such as he has never shown.
The last time I observed Mr. Rowell he was in the lounge of a club where he had just finished lunch. All about him were scores of men in groups, each group animatedly intent upon some topic from baseball to high finance. A few weeks earlier that same club had given a public dinner to Mr. Rowell and Sir George Foster, when each seemed to overdo the other in gripping those present by the presentation of a world theme backed by a striking personality. In the lounge Mr. Rowell, our best authority on the ethics of the Empire and the League of Nations, went about alone, unobtrusive, drab-coloured, almost insignificant. He spoke to nobody and few men as much as noticed him. He nodded gravely now and again, but never smiled. Both hands in his trouser pockets, he seemed to be gazing at some vagabond blind spot in the room. He almost seemed to be whistling to himself like a lad in a forest. Presently he wandered out.
By no exercise of imagination could one conceive such a man as a Canadian political leader. If there is anything in an aura he has it not. A halo would have suited him better.
Three elements conspire to make Rowell:
Conscience; oratory; opportunity.
Most men have trouble enough with any two of the three. Mr. Rowell continues to hold our respect in spite of the whole trinity. Too much conscience always on duty at a peak load is no way to attract a vast variety of people who relish a degree of sinfulness now and again. We do not repudiate the value of conscience in public affairs. The public man without it provides almost the only sane argument for the preservation of the gallows. But when one man carries so much of it, a number of others may be excused for carrying less. This is an age of specialties.