“You’ll have to settle with the Doctor, Mr Finlay,” Lorne warned him gaily, “if you talk politics in Knox Church. He thinks he never does.”
“Do you think,” said Finlay, “that he would object to—to one’s going as far afield as I did tonight?”
“He oughtn’t to,” said Lorne. “You should have heard him when old Sir John Macdonald gerrymandered the electoral districts and gave votes to the Moneida Indians. The way he put it, the Tories in the congregation couldn’t say a word, but it was a treat for his fellow Grits.”
Finlay smiled gravely. “Political convictions are a man’s birthright,” he said. “Any man or any minister is a poor creature without them. But of course there are limits beyond which pulpit influence should not go, and I am sure Dr Drummond has the clearest perception of them. He seems to have been a wonderful fellow, Macdonald, a man with extraordinary power of imaginative enterprise. I wonder whether he would have seen his way to linking up the Empire as he linked up your Provinces here?”
“He’d have hated uncommonly to be in opposition, but I don’t see how he could have helped it,” Lorne said. “He was the godfather of Canadian manufacturers, you know—the Tories have always been the industrial party. He couldn’t have gone for letting English stuff in free, or cheap; and yet he was genuinely loyal and attached to England. He would discriminate against Manchester with tears in his eyes! Imperialist in his time spelled Conservative, now it spells Liberal. The Conservatives have always talked the loudest about the British bond, but when it lately came to doing we’re on record on the right side, and they’re on record on the wrong. But it must make the old man’s ghost sick to see—”
“To see his court suit stolen,” Advena finished for him. “As Disraeli said—wasn’t it Disraeli?” She heard, and hated the note of constraint in her voice. “Am I reduced,” she thought, indignantly, “to falsetto?” and chose, since she must choose, the betrayal of silence.
“It did one good to hear the question discussed on the higher level,” said Lorne. “You would think, to read the papers, that all its merits could be put into dollars and cents.”
“I’ve noticed some of them in terms of sentiment—affection for the mother country—”
“Yes, that’s lugged in. But it doesn’t cover the moral aspect,” Lorne returned. “It’s too easy and obvious, as well; it gives the enemy cause to offend.”
“Well, there’s a tremendous moral aspect,” Finlay said, “tremendous moral potentialities hidden in the issue. England has more to lose than she dreams.”