Labour promptly returned the courtesy, and of its own free will turned its parade into a guard of honour, which lined the fine Rideau and Wellington streets for his progress between Government House and Parliament Square.
As far as I could gather Labour decided upon and carried this out without consulting anybody. Streets were taken over without any warning, and certainly without any fuss. There seemed to be few police about, and there was no need for them. Labour took command of the show in the interest of its friend the Prince, and would not permit the slightest disorderliness.
It was a remarkable sight. Early in the morning the Labour Parade appeared along Rideau Street, mounting the hill to the Parliament House. The processionists, each group in the costume of its calling, walked in long, thin files on each side of the road, the line broken at intervals by the trade floats. Floats are an essential part of every American parade; they are what British people call "set-pieces," tableaux built up on wagons or on automobiles; all of them are ingenious and most of them are beautiful.
These floats represented the various trades, a boiler-maker's shop in full (and noisy) action; a stone-worker's bench in operation; the framework of a wooden house on an auto, to show Ottawa what its carpenters and joiners could do, and so on. With these marched the workers, distinctively clothed, as though the old guilds had never ceased.
When the head of the procession reached the entrance of Parliament Square it halted, and the line, turning left and right, walked towards the curb, pressing back the thousands of sightseers to the pavement in a most effective manner. They lined and kept the route in this fashion until the Prince had passed.
It was thus that the Prince drove, not between the ranks of an army of soldiers, but through the ranks of the army of labour. Not khaki, but the many uniforms of labour marked the route. There were firemen in peaked caps, with bright steel grappling-hooks at their waists; butchers in white blouses, white trousers, and white peaked caps; there were tram-conductors, and railway-men, hotel porters, teamsters in overalls, lumbermen in calf-high boots of tan, with their rough socks showing above them on their blue jumper trousers, barbers, drug-store clerks and men of all the trades.
Above this guard of workers were the banners of the Unions, some in English, some proclaiming in French that here was "La Fraternité Unie Charpentiers et Menuisiers," and so on.
It was a real demonstration of democracy. It was the spontaneous and affectionate action of the everyday people, determined to show how personal was its regard for a Prince who knew how to be one with the everyday people. As a demonstration it was immensely more significant than the most august item of a formal program.
As the Prince rode through those hearty and friendly ranks in a State carriage, and behind mounted troopers, the troopers and the trappings seemed to matter very little indeed. The crowd that cheered and waved flags—and sometimes spanners and kitchen pans—and the youth who waved his gloves back and forth with all their own freedom from ceremony, were the things that mattered.
When, at the laying of the corner-stone a few minutes later, Sir Robert Borden declared that, in repeating the act of his grandfather, who laid the original corner-stone of Canada's Parliament buildings, as Prince of Wales, in 1860, His Royal Highness was inaugurating a new era, the happenings of just now seemed to lend conviction that indeed a new phase of history had come into being. It was a phase in which throne and people had been woven into a strong and sane democracy, begot of the intimate personal sympathy, understanding and reliance the war had brought about between rulers and people.