They are making a new stereopticon for that slide.
A COAT OF MANY COLOURS
SIR JOHN WILSON
After a life of wearing Joseph's coat, Sir John Willison, ex-editor of the Toronto Globe and of the News, finds himself President of the National Reconstruction Association. Programme—to reconstruct Canada, beginning in 1918, after fifty years of Confederation.
A supercilious editor once asked why on such an Association no farmer had been appointed. The answer was simple enough. Sir John was born a farmer. He used to wield a handspike at logging bees in Huron County, Ont. Why no Liberals? But Sir John used to be the leading Liberal of unelected Canada. Why no professor of political economy to represent the great universities who are always supposed to be reconstructing a nation? Simple again. Sir John himself once conducted a university of culture, economics and general information known as the Toronto News. In fact there was no need of an Association at all. Sir John Willison was sufficient unto the day.
One finds it tolerably easy to be sarcastic about Sir John Willison, because for many years he was to some of us the sort of man that compelled a sincere, almost idolatrous admiration. In this also he is more adept than the average man. He himself once idolized Sir Wilfrid Laurier in two volumes; but a few years before he turned all his political guns on the French-Canadian Premier to get him out of power for good.
In all Canada there has never been a more versatile character; never one who after a volte face in politics could turn with such poise and dignity upon any critic cradled in the foundations of belief and ask, "Well, what's new?"
From his crisp manner of speaking and a certain austerity of manner, I used to think that Sir John was in a measure inscrutable. He had such a curt way of summoning a reporter, as once,—
"Never," he began when the culprit had got into the corridor facing the editor-in-chief, "never, when interviewing a man in his own home, say anything about the furniture."
Born a Conservative and a farmer, Willison became on the Globe Canada's greatest unelected Liberal. He conserved Liberalism. On the Globe he held the balance between the Free Traders who believed only in reciprocity and Brastus Wiman, who with Goldwin Smith made Taft a mere plagiarist when he said that Canada was an "adjunct" of the United States. It was Willison's attempt to consider commercial union on its merits that made the Globe seem like a mark for the annexationists, at a time when the high priest of the movement in Canada had the effrontery to remain a citizen of the nation which he was openly trying to sell at a bargain counter. The man who kept the Globe from becoming an annex to Goldwin Smith in 1891 had an experience that would fit any man to become a protection-tariff Chairman of Reconstruction, and to remember the sirens that tempted Ulysses.