The Hemisphere: In Quiet & Reflection

Whenever the late Prime Minister Mackenzie King had a particularly knotty government problem to untangle, he would retire to the solitude of his study in the attic of Laurier House. There, before a portrait of his mother that was always softly lighted and graced with fresh flowers and a cross, Presbyterian King made most of his decisions. “The profound things of life,” he once explained, “are worked out in quiet and reflection.”

Last week the Ottawa Citizen added a startling footnote to the story of King’s lonely meditations. Mackenzie King, said the Citizen, was a practicing spiritualist who believed that his dead mother helped him with advice from the spirit world.

Full Appreciation. The Citizen’s story, based on an interview with the dowager Duchess of Hamilton,* was taken from the London weekly Psychic News, a leading publication of Britain’s spiritualist cult. A longtime acquaintance of the bachelor Prime Minister and an ardent spiritualist herself, the duchess declared that King “fully appreciated the spiritual direction of the universe and was always seeking guidance for himself in his work . ..”

The duchess went on to name some of the mediums King consulted in Britain and the U.S., and said that King stood 53 high in spiritualist circles in both countries that he once served as an international go-between. An engraved gold watch given by Queen Victoria to a British spiritualist “in acknowledgment of benefits received from mediumship” had found its way to the U.S. Mackenzie King was chosen as the intermediary to return the watch to England, where it was turned over to the London Spiritualist Alliance.

There could be no doubt of King’s faith in spiritualist guidance, the duchess insisted; he tried constantly to “see the vision.” His only reason for keeping his spiritualist activities a secret was because “in his official capacity he couldn’t allow it to be too well known.”

Firm Belief. King’s secret was indeed so well kept that his closest associates in Ottawa last week were unable either to confirm or deny that he was a practicing spiritualist. Some of them knew that King attended seances in London and Paris, but they attributed his curiosity to his religious nature and his firm belief in life after death. None of them could say whether, in the privacy of his study, Mackenzie King actually tried to communicate with his dead mother or whether his spiritualist experiments had any effect upon his conduct of the country’s affairs.

Chances were that no one would ever know. The personal diaries which King kept every day and which might have shed some light on the subject, were ordered destroyed after his death under the terms of Mackenzie King’s will.

*Whose son, the present Duke of Hamilton, was the owner of the estate near Glasgow where Rudolf Hess landed in 1941.