CHAPTER IX
THE PRIME MINISTER
The Prime Minister's visit—Passing of Politics—End to domestic dissensions—The Imperial idea—Sir Robert's foresight—Arrival in England—At Shorncliffe—Meeting with General Hughes—Review of Canadian troops—The tour in France—A Canadian base hospital—A British hospital—Canadian graves—Wounded under canvas—Prince Arthur of Connaught—Visiting battle scenes—Received by General Alderson—General Turner's Brigade—Speech to the men—First and Second Brigades—Sir Robert in the trenches—Cheered by Princess Patricias—Enemy aeroplanes—Meeting with Sir John French—The Prince of Wales—With the French Army—General Joffre—A conference in French—The French trenches—The stricken city of Albert—To Paris—The French President—Conference with the French War Minister—Shorncliffe again—Canadian convalescent home—A thousand convalescents—Sir Robert's emotion—His wonderful speech—End of journey.
"I think I can trace the calamities of this country to the single source of our not having had steadily before our eyes a general, comprehensive, well-connected, and well-proportioned view of the whole of our dominions, and a just sense of their true bearings and relations."—BURKE.
"And statesmen at her council met
Who knew the seasons when to take
Occasion by the hand, and make
The bounds of freedom wider yet."
—TENNYSON.
The news that the Prime Minister had arranged a visit to England and to the battlefield in France aroused great and general interest. Since the commencement of the titanic struggle which is now convulsing the world, the standards by which we used to measure statesmen have undergone great modification. The gifts of brilliant platform rhetoric, the arts of partisan debate, the instinct for a conquering election issue, all these have dwindled before the cruel perspective of war into their true insignificance. It is felt here in England to-day, and not least by some of us who are ourselves chargeable in the matter, that it will be long before the politicians at home clear themselves at the inquest of the nation from the charge of having endangered the safety of the Empire by their absorption in those domestic dissensions which now seem at once so remote and so paltry.
And there is already at work a tendency to adopt wholly different standards in measuring men who, in the wasted years which lie behind us, kept steadfast and undeluded eyes upon the Imperial position; who thought of it and dreamed of it, and worked for it, when so many others were preaching disarmament in an armed world, sustaining meanwhile the combative instinct by the fury with which they flung themselves into insane domestic quarrels.
Sir Robert Borden's was not, perhaps, a personality which was likely to make a swift or facile appeal to that collective Imperial opinion whose conclusions matter so much more than the conclusions of any individual part of the Empire. Modest, unassuming, superior to the arts of advertisement, he never courted a large stage on which to exhibit the services which he well knew he could render to the Empire. To-day it is none the less recognised that Borden has won his place by the side of Rhodes and Chamberlain and Botha, in that charmed circle of clear-sighted statesmen whose exertions, we may hope, have saved the Empire in our generation as surely as Chatham and Pitt and Clive and Hastings saved it in the crisis of an earlier convulsion.
Sir Robert Borden is the first Colonial statesman who has attended a British Cabinet, a precedent which may be fruitful in immense Constitutional developments hereafter.
I wonder whether any of those whose deliberations he assisted recalled the prescience, and the grave and even noble eloquence, with which Sir Robert closed his great speech—delivered how short a time ago!—upon the proposed Canadian contribution to the British Fleet. The passage is worth recalling:—