“I would say to Great Britain, ‘If you want us to help you, call us to your councils.’”
Another time, when talking of Lloyd George’s Budget, W. S. Fielding remarked:
“I have made thirteen Budgets, the only man who ever did such a thing, I should imagine; and I know from experience people always grumble. They grumble at everything and anything. To-day at Ascot (1910) a man was abusing Lloyd George’s Budget. ‘There are a few thousand people in the Royal Enclosure,’ I said, ‘and I should think every one of them disapproves. They are rich, and it hits them. There are tens of thousands of people over there on the race-course. They are poor, and they are glad. Was not Lloyd George right, therefore, to consider the millions?’”
Mr. Fielding possesses an enormous power for work. On one occasion, after a tête-à-tête dinner with me, he went home about eleven, and finding letters and documents awaiting him, sat up till five a.m. and finished them, also deciphering long Government telegrams in code. Next morning he began work at ten again.
Quiet, gentle, reserved, Fielding strikes one as a delightful, grey-headed old gentleman of honest, homely kindliness. He never says an unkind thing of anyone. Toleration is his dominant note, and yet with all that calm exterior he has proved himself the greatest treaty-maker of his age, as well as the most successful handler of budgets and manœuvrer of great Government loans; but he failed over Reciprocity.
This chapter would be incomplete without mention of the late Canadian “Ministre des postes,” M. Lemieux, of whom Fielding said: “He is one of the cleverest men in Canada.”
“Your King, my King, our King, is the most perfect gentleman I have ever met. Il est tout à fait gentilhomme,” so remarked the Hon. Rodolphe Lemieux, K.C., when Postmaster-General of Canada, to me in my little library, immediately on his return from Windsor, when King Edward was still our Sovereign.
Then one of the most prominent politicians in Canada, for he was not only P.M.G., but Minister of Labour for the Dominion, M. Lemieux is another man still in his prime. He was born about 1860. A French-Canadian by birth, he speaks English almost faultlessly, an accomplishment learnt by habit and ear during the last few years, and not from a lesson-book.
When I first met M. Lemieux in Canada about 1900, he hardly knew any English. Six or seven years later he could get up and address a large audience in our tongue with ease and fluency. Yet this art has been acquired during the most strenuous years of his life.
“I’m in London,” he replied to a question one day, “to try to settle the All Red Route cable between Britain and her Colony.”