Considering the outrageous language he thrusted at the Canadians of the three British races and at our heroic volunteers, it is not to be supposed that he was so tender-hearted as to spare the public men, not only of Canada, but of all the Allied Nations.
When he affirmed that the real and only cause of the war had been, and was still, the voracious greed of capitalist speculators, especially of the two leading belligerents, Great Britain and Germany, united together to profit to the tune of hundreds of millions out of the production of warship building and materials of all sorts, was he not charging all the statesmen and leading politicians of all the peoples at war, of having bowed either consciously to the dictates of traitors to their countries, or of having been stupidly blind to the guilty manipulations of financial banditti?
It would take many pages only to make a summary of the injurious words he has addressed to the Canadian public men of all shades of opinion—with the only exception of the Nationalist—on account of the support they have given, in one way or another, to the Dominion's participation in the war. He qualified as a Revolution the policy by which we willingly decided to take part in the wars of the Empire whenever we came to the conclusion that England was fighting for a just cause.
On the 23rd of April, 1917, he wrote as follows:—
"Very often we have shown the evident revolutionary character of the Canadian intervention in the European conflict."
After repeating his absolutely absurd pretention, according to the sound principles of Constitutional Law, that Canada could have intervened in the war as a "nation" he found fault with all and every one because "we are fighting to defend the Empire." He went on and said with his natural sweetness of language:—
"The politicians of the two parties and the whole servile and mercenary press have applied themselves to this revolutionary work.... For a long time past the party leaders are the tools of British Imperialism and of British high finance."
And not satisfied with having thus slashed all the party leaders, all the chiefs of the State, he turns round, in an access of passionate indignation, and charges not only all the leading social classes, but even the Bishops, the worthy leaders of the Church, as the accomplices of the Imperialist revolution. He thrusts the terrible blow as follows:—
"But what the war has produced of entirely new and most disconcerting, is the moral support and complicity which the "Imperialist revolution" has found in all the leading social classes. Bishops, financiers, publicists and professionals went into the movement with a unity, an ardour, a zeal which reveal the effective strength of the laborious propaganda of which Lord Grey has been the most powerful worker prior to the war."
So that there should be no mistake about its true meaning, he favoured his readers with a very clear explanation indeed of what, in his opinion, has transformed our meritorious and loyal intervention in the war into a guilty revolutionary movement. He wrote as follows:—