The eminent headmaster of the Manchester School in Canada is one of the few M.P.'s who know how to build a wheat stack. He farms in the spot north of Calgary where the poplar bluffs begin to mark that you are in the black loam of wonderful crops at a maximum distance from Liverpool. It is an art to build a wheat stack. Michael Clark—so we believe—knows exactly how many tiers to lay before he begins the "belly"; how to fill up the middle so that the butts of the sheaves droop to run off the rain; and how high to go with the bulge before he begins to draw in with the roof. All day long as he worked on his knees, not in prayer, he had mental leisure to think about one vast, fructifying theme; which of course is Free-Trade as they had it in England; unrestricted trade according to the Manchester School. And when he got his stack done he could tell to a ten-dollar bill how much tariff the railways and steamships would levy on that stack by the time the wheat got to Liverpool.
During the War, Clark was a win-the-war Liberal. He broke away from Laurier on conscription, which he openly supported. In July this year he was scheduled in the press—another of those wish-father-to-the-thought news items—to join Messrs. Drury and Crerar in an anti-tariff tour of Ontario. He did not go. He probably never had the slightest intention of going. Michael Clark had other wheat to stack. An Alberta election was coming. It came. When it was all over Alberta was in the grip of the Agrarians. Liberalism by constituencies was swept out as clean as a barn floor at fanning-mill time. And Michael Clark sat down to think it over. He had half expected that tornado. But he refused to like it. The farmers had stolen his own programme of free trade and by means of it had stampeded his Province for the sake of using it as a spring-broad to make the grand jump into the Federal arena. The apostle of free trade, himself as good a farmer as any of them, was now regarded as a chip on the Agrarian stream at high tide.
Wherefore Michael Clark, after certain "conversations" with Mr. Crerar, wrote the letter which, if Mackenzie King is as wise as he is hopeful, will be used to flood the country. Hoardings and electric signs in the interests of true-Liberalism should blazon abroad such sentences as these:
"The House of Lords, the Family Compact, the Manufacturers' Association and the junkers and militarists of Germany are each and all examples of group government."
"Class consciousness is none the less class selfishness, and therefore doomed to die, because it suddenly appears in Farmer and Labour parties."
"The apostles of progress must unite upon common principles, sincerely held to resist reaction, which is ever present like a dead weight to drag down the aspirations of the race for freedom, justice and democracy."
"These were the things for which sixty thousand Canadians died in the recent war. . . . I have been fighting 'class' for forty years. It would be quite impossible for me to turn my back on my past and the right in this election."
Our political history contains no declaration of independence more significant, manly and sensational. Repudiation of the Free Trade, group-governed, National Progressives by Michael Clark, the farmer and the apostle of Canadian Free Trade, is the first truly emancipating note that has been struck in all this pre-election barrage of group against group. Michael Clark may be no bigger as a Canadian for such a stand, but he is true to his own form as one of the rarest and manliest Radicals that Canada ever had. And his declaration should be of immense value to the Government, which confesses that its real fear is, not of Liberals, but of Agrarians.
The headmaster of the Manchester School in Canada has had a multitude of pupils; none more brilliant than Mr. Crerar, who seems to have made Free Trade a species of bondage. In no other land could Michael Clark so well have demonstrated the virtues of Free-Trade. On those plains, buffaloes worth multi-millions of dollars in trade annually migrated across "Parallel 49" into Montana and back again into the Territories. The prairie schooner trekked northward over the border carrying migrants in search of homes when there was no government official to turn them back or to question the terminus of their travels. The freight wagons creaked up from the south into MacLeod and past it into the valley of Saskatchewan, carrying goods made and bought in the land of the Western Yankee long before the great antidote to Free Trade, the Transcontinental Railway, put those crooked trails out of business.
Clark was spouting free-trade on the prairies at a time when many men in the West scarcely knew that trade had any restrictions except in the matter of beverages. He was an apostle of Cobdenism almost before the Territories were baptized into party politics at all; when Regina was the home of a Territorial County Council that had neither Tories nor Grits. He was farming and prophesying commercial union before James J. Hill began to compete with the protective C.P.R. for trade north and south instead of the long-haul east and west. Before ever a real Agrarian began to head out on the plains he was contending like a tribune of the plebs, that unrestricted reciprocity between two halves of a great productive continent, of which one-half contains nine-tenths of the people, was not a prelude to annexation away from the grand old Empire. And when he got into Parliament the voice that had been so mighty in the trail-side school houses and the little town-halls became more potent than ever as "Red Michael" went full tilt in the House against the high protectionists.