Whatever Michael Clark knows about the benefits of Free Trade and its effect upon the exchanges, he knows peculiarly well the danger of unrestricted reciprocity in sentiment between Canada and the United States.
THE SPHINX FROM SASKATCHEWAN
HON. J. A. CALDER
The Hon. J. A. Calder has never seen the Sphinx. But he has a looking glass. He has never been in Egypt. But he has lived a long while in Saskatchewan. A man who can continue to know as much as he knows about the confessional side of government, and who can say so little, has some claim to be considered—Canada's political Sphinx.
Such a reputation is sometimes enviable. The average public man babbles. Often he talks to conceal thought or as a substitute for action. The mental energy needed to turn end for end what some of these garrulous people say, in order to decipher just what they mean, is usually more than the wisdom is worth. Calder spares us. He tells us nothing. His silence may be golden, or it may be just a habit; but from the known character of Calder it is never the omniscience of stupidity.
A Sphinx in action may sometimes give himself away. It is not usual for a Sphinx to do anything except to conceal the riddle. Calder has all his life been a busy man. He is still in middle age. All but fourteen years of his life up till 1917 he spent in the West, most of it in the part now known as Saskatchewan. Ten years ago he was furtively discussed as successor to Laurier. He is now a Unionist-Liberal. To give him work in the administration commensurate with his ability—or somewhere near it—a new department was created in Immigration. Now he is slated for the Senate!
Little was heard about Calder's department. He had a publicity bureau which did not spend vast amounts of money on diffusing information. The department is said to contain a moving picture section, some of whose films probably creep into Canadian movie houses. But nobody ever saw a picture of J. A. Calder on a screen. He had a Canadian novelist as chief of publicity. That novelist might have yearned for the chance to immortalize his chief in a story, but so long as he is in the pay of Mr. Calder's department he will continue to yearn. And not even he has been given to understand why when a reconstructed Liberal like Mr. Rowell left the Cabinet at the appointment of Premier Meighen, the Minister of Immigration stayed on. One might surmise that the man who, a decade ago, looked to some people like an Elisha to Laurier, would run again in Moosejaw as a National Liberal Conservative with the expectation of re-entering the Cabinet, probably as Minister of the Interior. But he was suddenly and humdrumly designated for the Senate.
Apparently the Sphinx is not a great deal concerned over the fact that his action in the case would throw some light on the sort of government we may expect, and the kind of man we are privileged to conjecture Mr. Calder to be. He seems to take very little interest in what any one thinks about him. He accompanied the Premier on his Western trip. Now and then he made a speech. He was heckled. He was in the land of his critics, where he was unofficially known as "Jim". What did he mean by staying in a Government which was supposed to have finished its work in 1919? Was he coming back as a Liberal? Had he no longer any fellow-feeling for the farmers among whom he had lived for so long? The Sphinx did not directly say. He was publicly and conventionally endorsing the Premier, who was well able to speak for himself on behalf of the administration.
Calder was headmaster of Moosejaw High School when he was twenty-three, in the year 1891. He must have learned reticence then. Up in Edmonton, a few years later one heard considerably of Goggin, the speechmaking educationist of the prairie; rarely or never of Calder, who about that time was Inspector of Schools for the Territories, not yet provinces. The silent young inspector must have looked like the reincarnation of Socrates as he drove—sometimes a four-horse team on a buckboard—through the sloughs of the Northwest. No prairie doctor with a radius of fifty miles, none but a pioneer missionary like McDougall or Robertson, ever had so glorious a chance to study what the life of a new country was going to be, as this inspector toiling hundreds of miles over a land, where, if he stopped at three school-houses a week, he was doing a good average in bad weather.
Regina had no party politics then. All it had was the mounted police and a leg-boot legislature. Every man was then a trailsman. In Calder's time as Inspector, there were only 400 miles of railway north of the C.P.R. main line—the two branches to Prince Albert and to Edmonton. It was only in the last year or two of this buckboard and broncho inspectorate that there were even any Doukhobors in that part of the world to bring back the days of Adam and Eve. He saw all the "nationals" beginning to arrive. He could put his finger on a gaunt anemic map of the Territories and point out just where there was beginning to be some nucleus of a foreign settlement. He could talk a little Cree and he learned the jargon of several countries in Europe. He saw the farmers arise, and railways begin, and little villages dot the skyline, and here and there an elevator, when a box car was looked at by a trailsman as a small boy gapes at a circus parade.