The Masques of Ottawa

by Augustus Bridle

This can be remembered from his five years of misfit rule in Queen's Park when many of his good offices there are mainly forgotten. It was rather pitiful to observe how incapable Mr. Rowell was of giving vent to his great talents in that Legislature. He did not understand the lingo. Most of it was too piffling and small. He knew Ontario better from the angle of corporation law. He made a poor showing as leader, for there were no great issues in which he could lead; though he did initiate a great deal of useful welfare legislation. He made one heroic effort to understand New Ontario in the rough when he donned overalls and went down in some of the mines. But it was all too much in the rough. One imagines there must have been many a moment when he wished he had never taken that leadership with so precious little to lead, and yearned for some larger way. But it was a long, long trail. And Laurier was now a strange old man. Whichever way he looked he was in a blind alley.

The Coalition gave him a way out. The old chief's attitude towards the war made Laurier Liberalism still more unpalatable. Rowell was deeply stirred by the war. He could see in the upheaval of old and new world ideas the sort of grand realignment which he could understand; the assertion of true Liberalism in true democracy. Any average speech of his during the war demonstrates that he was among those few leaders of thought whom the struggle lifted into a larger conception of manhood in the State.

Again, honesty to himself suggests that Mr. Rowell did not suffer such pangs at his severance from Laurier as did men like Carvell, Guthrie and Clark, who had fought under the old man in Commons. At the Liberal Win-the-War meeting in 1917, he threw off all disguises and fervently proclaimed that he had chosen to take office under "the greatest Premier in the world." The statement smacked not so much of insincerity as of a sense of emancipation. Mr. Rowell was no longer labelled a Laurier Liberal. He was a free agent in a new great conflict of force. He was stirred as never he had been. Of all the Liberals who took oath under the new administration he was the strongest, and the most difficult to assign a competent task. He was made President of the Council and Minister of Information. The peculiar advantage of the latter was that as real information was the last thing that seemed to be wanted by anything resembling a Government, there was very little for Mr. Rowell to do at his desk and very much time for him to be absent where he felt much more at home, in Europe. As President of the Council he had great ability.

This one year of Ministry before the end of the war gave Mr. Rowell an opportunity to survey forces of whose operation he had no knowledge while he remained a mere Liberal. He became officially familiar to London and as the constant companion of the Premier came very near to the elbows of the great, when he did not suffer by comparison.

But it was the Peace Conference that gave him his real work. During the war any nation got the prestige that it could win, either by its own efforts or in league with others. All nations on each side were more or less animated by the one great purpose. Suddenly the golden grip of union was off. The second war began around the Peace table. In this new and more precarious conflict of pour-parlers and old secret diplomacies under the dangerous flare of the self-determination torch, national selfishness rushed to the front of the stage. Every pocket of people in Europe hemmed between a river, a mountain and a dialect claimed the rights of a nation, when more than half of them should have been conveniently merged into workable groups having some form of government with which nations of experience could deal.

In this clamour of the voces populi the voice of Canada was not to be disregarded. We had reason that it should be heard. We were in sudden danger of being overshadowed at the Conference by the vast figure of the other half of North America. Mr. Rowell has never been an anti-Yankee. He has too much fine sense ever to pull feathers out of the eagle in retaliation for twisting the lion's tail. He knows as well as any man the strategic and moral necessity of Canada being the real House of Interpreter to the two leading Anglo-nations. He knew it at the Conference. But he knew also that in proportion to service and sacrifice in the war, Canada in the Council of Peace had a right to be heard and considered as the voice of a nation occupying the northern half of North America.

There was great sense in the estimate of a leading London correspondent that among the four most impressive and masterful personalities at the Geneva Assembly of the League, Rowell the Canadian was at least the fourth. This was not merely a personal or natural compliment. It was the sincere recognition of a fact.

Mr. Rowell had the gift and the energy of will to translate the Peace into Canadian language. He gave Canada a voice in Europe. He did try so far as one man might to play up to the voice given to Canada by the dead in Flanders. In the big occasion when great tumult of forces were rushing to a climax Rowell rose to the opportunity—as he always has done—and he earned the lasting gratitude of his country. We needed just that intellectual power and that moral audacity, not only in Europe but in Washington.

Yes, N. W. Rowell has made a big use of opportunity. He has even created it. But it was seldom the little simple thing at his door that roused his great qualities. It was the bigger issue that lay out among the mountain tops. He was overwhelmingly eloquent for the universal eight-hour day when he attended the International Labour Conference in Washington. The League of Nations had recommended it. But what of the cheap-labour competition in the Orient? And what did Mr. Rowell know about Industry and Democracy at all?

Mr. Rowell made a bold bid for recognition as a statesman of international repute. And he got it. His speeches on the Empire were consistently a greater voice than Borden ever could have had. The colleague of the Premier became his Imperial master because he had the power which Borden lacked, of making the British world-Commonwealth live in great public utterances.