Anglo-American Memories

by George W. Smalley

Nothing seemed to come amiss to him. The social topics of Ottawa have not quite the same range as in London, but to the people of Ottawa they are not less engrossing. Even scandal was not unknown in those days, and gossip floated about, and sometimes politics came to the top, as they will anywhere when they are not too trivial, and even when they are. Ottawa was, at any rate, with its fifty thousand people and its lumber trade, the capital of Sir Wilfrid's kingdom. Parliament was sitting in that finely placed Parliament House crowning the cliff on the river, and all Canada was there, in the substantial persons of its delegates and Ministers. Before I left I came to know all, or nearly all, the Ministers. Lunching one day with Sir Wilfrid at the Rideau Club, I found myself in a group of a dozen or more political personages, all, I think, in office. They struck me as able men with a gift of businesslike talk. But there were not two Sir Wilfrid Lauriers. The long reign of Sir John Macdonald had not proved fertile in new men. Sir John was a sort of Canadian Diaz, and had done for the Dominion not what the President of the great Central American Republic had done for Mexico, but a service not less personal and individual. Both had been dictators. Both had known how to use the forms of representative government in such a way as to consolidate and perpetuate arbitrary personal power, and for something like the same period. In a way, Sir Wilfrid has done a similar thing, only you never could think a Minister of these endearing manners arbitrary. There is a more important difference still. Sir John Macdonald had organized political corruption into a system. Sir Wilfrid is free from any such imputation as that. Charges have been heard against some of his Ministers; never against Sir Wilfrid.

It was perhaps by accident that we began to discuss the Alaska boundary; or perhaps not by accident. I do not know. Thinking the matter over afterward, it seemed possible enough that Sir Wilfrid had shaped events in his own mind from the first. He may have been glad of an opportunity to communicate with Washington indirectly and unofficially, or desirous that the President should know what was in his mind and learn it otherwise than via London. He was very anxious as well he might be. I had lately been in Washington and knew pretty well the views of the President and of Mr. Hay. I had made two or three visits to Ottawa before the Alaska conversations with Sir Wilfrid took place. In the interval Mr. McKinley had ceased to be President. He had been murdered by a foreigner with an unpronounceable name, and while the murderer was waiting in his cell to be executed the American women, suffragists of the militant kind, had sent him, to quote an American writer, "flowers, jellies, books, and sympathy." The discipline of the prison did not forbid these gifts. Mr. Roosevelt had become President. Mr. Hay remained Secretary of State, perhaps with a hand less free than he had under Mr. McKinley, who was aware that he himself was not master of all subjects or perhaps of any subject not essentially American.

When the moment came Sir Wilfrid began casually enough, in a way that would have allowed him to stop whenever he chose. But he went on, and after a talk at Government House one day asked me to call on him at Parliament House on the morrow.

There again the talk continued, and it was followed by one still longer when Sir Wilfrid came back to Government House next day with papers and maps. Over these we spent some hours. There were few details in all the complicated Alaska business which were not familiar to him; and of the whole question he had a grasp which made details almost unimportant. His view struck me as reasoned, detached, with a settled purpose behind it. He was quite ready for compromise. I never knew a statesman anywhere who was not, with the possible exception of the ninety-two statesmen who compose the United States Senate. For myself, I had to look two ways. I was obliged, that is, to understand both points of view, the Canadian and the American, for I was then the representative of The Times in the United States.

When we had gone over the whole matter I said to Sir Wilfrid that I thought I understood his opinions and the policy he desired to follow. But what was I to do? Not a word of what he had said to me could have been intended for print, nor can it be printed now, even after all these years and after the settlement. But some object he must have had, and I asked him if I was at liberty to draw any inference from these interviews. I was leaving Ottawa the next day.

"Are you going to Washington?"

"Yes."

"Shall you see the President or Mr. Hay?"

"Both."

"Well, if you think anything you have heard here likely to interest the President or Mr. Hay, I don't see why you should not discuss the matter with them as you have with me, if they choose."