CANADA: New Viceroy; General Election

(See front cover)

We Present The Literary Works of JOHN BUCHAN

—The Brilliant Historian, Novelist and Governor-General. . . .

Canadians will shortly have the honor of welcoming this distinguished man of letters to Rideau Hall. We are sure they will feel they know him better, if they meet him first, through his brilliant pen. . . . Oliver Cromwell $5.00 The Massacre of Glencoe 1.50 History of English Literature. . . 3.25

NOVELS

Greenmantle Cloth Bound, Path of the King 90¢ and $1.25 Thirty-Nine Steps Leather Bound, Three Hostages $1.75 Gap in the Curtain

Telephone Adelaide 8411 S I M PS O N ‘ S

TORONTO

Not only Simpson’s of Toronto but every other Canadian bookseller was last week piling up royalties for the arriving Governor-General, and the Dominion will pay him directly $43,799 per year.

Jocularly Canadians were remarking that John Buchan’s new title, Baron Tweedsmuir, “sounds like some new kind of suiting,” but most of them were in a mood to greet indulgently the smallish, sharp-nosed, pucker-lipped Scot. Due to land at Quebec on Oct. 24 from the Empress of Britain, Lord & Lady Tweedsmuir were the prey of seafaring autograph hunters this week. Bandied merrily were the Scottish jokes which the brilliant historian, novelist and Governor-General is so adept at working in at a captain’s dinner:

¶ Lord Tweedsmuir is easily reminded of the Presbyterian divine who, when asked what he thought of Fielding’s robust novel Tom Jones, replied, “Lads, it’s grand stuff for taking the taste of the Apostles out of your mouth!”

¶ War anecdotes are often capped by His Excellency with the one about the Scottish soldier from the village of Rothie-murchus who was asked where he was wounded during General Sir Stanley Maude’s campaign in Irak. “I was wounded,” he replied, “about a mile on the Rothiemurchus side of Baghdad.”

¶ The new Governor-General, who for two years acted as King George’s personal representative and Lord High Commissioner to the Assembly of the Church of Scotland (TIME, June 5, 1933), quotes as his best joke what was said by a sturdy churchman in bitter-end objection to the union of the Scottish churches: “It is unconstitutional. It is impractical. It is illogical and absolutely idiotic! But I hae no doot it is God’s will.”

”Who Knows What Kings?” John Buchan’s useful mission is to redeem the Governor-Generalship from the slough of Canadian distaste into which it sank under his predecessor, the Earl of Bessborough. If Canadians are to go on paying $43,799 a year to an official from overseas whose legal status is “the Person of the King in Canada,” then they want to get something for their money. Admirers of the first Baron Tweedsmuir, while generous in their tributes to John Buchan’s intellectual gifts, single out his extreme flair for effective flattery, conveyed with canny Scottish tact and disarming Scottish directness, as the mainspring of his jack-in-the-box bounce to Viceroyalty.

Jack Buchan, in his romantic novels like The Path of the King, successfully flatters his middle-class public and also their beloved sovereign with such turns as: “We may all of us have King’s blood in our veins. The Dago who blacked my boots in Vancouver may be descended in some roundabout way from Julius Caesar. . . . And we fools rub our eyes and wonder when we see genius come out of the gutter! It did not begin there . . . Shakespeare . . . Napoleon . . . who knows what kings and prophets they had in their ancestry?”

People who cite insomnia as their reason for reading John Buchan’s romances and detective stories are flattered and disarmed by Lord Tweedsmuir’s story that he also devotes his serious working hours to historical biographies, business trading and politics. Troubled with insomnia himself, he scribbles his novels in the wee hours to put himself to sleep. His reason for entering politics is that after the War he felt that every able man should put his best abilities at the disposal of King & Country for Reconstruction. Said he in 1920: “It looks as if some kind of politics was going to be my duty.” Lady Tweedsmuir, a moneyed kinswoman of the richest Duke (Westminster), burrows tirelessly in libraries, relieving her husband of much work, ever since he has been too busy himself to dig up details for his historical biographies and romances.

In his Silver Jubilee book on the Empire & King, Mr. Buchan achieved his final masterpiece of subtle flattery. When Canadian Premier Richard Bedford Bennett then advised Buckingham Palace that “Mr.” Buchan would make a fine Governor-General (part of Canada’s reason being that, after 14 peers, the Dominion wanted a commoner), His Majesty proved so oversold on the nomination that he not only made Commoner Buchan his Governor-General but enthusiastically dubbed him Knight Grand Cross of the Most Distinguished Order of St. Michael & St. George, then capped this knighthood and vexed many Canadians by raising him to the peerage as Baron Tweedsmuir (TIME, Aug. 19).

Idealist of War. On the afternoon of his appointment as Governor-General, plain John Buchan M. P. was having tea in the House of Commons when the division bell rang and a waiter warned him that he should go in and vote. For the merest instant a flicker of pride played on His Excellency’s bloodless lips. “I ceased to be a member of this House,” he told the waiter, “at 3 o’clock this afternoon.”

Resumed at once was the impenetrable mask of words behind which John Buchan lives. Tendered a congratulatory dinner in London by 600 Canadians and the Dominion High Commissioner, he flattered them directly for half an hour, then provoked them to pleased mirth by this witty hyperbole: “In one sense Canada is Britain’s senior. Constitutionally, all the ‘autonomous units’ of the Empire are to-day equal sovereign States under one king. They are ‘Dominions’ and of these Dominions, Canada is the oldest and Britain the youngest.”

As the new Governor-General approached this week, Canadians rattled off to each other the astonishingly various milestones of his career: Born to a cousin of Gladstone; prizeman at Glasgow Uni-versity and Oxford and President of the Oxford Union; member of the “Balliol Kindergarten”;* secret service operative and organizer of the Foreign Office’s propaganda bureau during the World War; writer of a World War history in serial form which patriotic parents still give children in the United Kingdom; Director of Information under Prime Minister David Lloyd George (1917-18); M. P. since 1927 for the Scottish Universities; twice (1933 & 1934) Lord High Commissioner to the Church of Scotland; 32-time novelist and lifelong apologist for War, the meat of many of his romances. Writing weightily upon the great Tolstoy’s philosophy of Peace, Jack Buchan roundly postulated: “War, too, has its idealism.”

Paradoxically, as the new Governor-General was about to leave England last week, profoundly peaceful Canadians were voting in a general election so hectic and confused that one of the loudest platform issues was supposed to be “WAR.”

Conservative Cornered. The next U. S. election may evoke a major third party, but last week Canadians, accustomed for generations to be governed by either Conservatives or Liberals, had for the first time several genuinely vigorous and bouncing alternatives.

Month ago the Depression-made hair-shirt of popular disgust formerly worn in North America by Herbert Hoover was transferred to Canada’s rich and pious Conservative Premier Richard Bedford Bennett, an able and aggressive businessman who neither drinks nor smokes but has been seen by intimates to extract furtively from the bottom drawer of his desk a chocolate cream. In desperation good Mr. Bennett attempted briefly to ape President Roosevelt’s New Deal (TIME. Jan. 14) but this was dead in Canada last week and all but forgotten. From the first, Canada’s alert voters sensed that the Bennett Deal, like the Roosevelt, was in many respects unconstitutional and unworkable, the Dominion’s constitution being the British North America Act which aggressively protects provincial rights from encroachment by the Federal Government.

Liberal on the Loose. Since Canada’s Liberals under onetime (1921-30) Premier William Lyon Mackenzie King stand at bottom for the very same Dominion fundamentals as do the Conservatives, they have been more than afraid that an anti-Bennett landslide would not be sufficiently pro-King. In a hysterical hashing up of blatant issues which have no real existence, Mr. King has charged that a vote for Bennett was a vote to conscript Canadians to fight the battles of the League of Nations and the Mother Country, while Mr. Bennett in alluding to Japanese cut-price dumping and Liberal low-tariff talk, has thundered nonsensically, “My opponent is on the side of Japan!”

Under either King or Bennett there is little doubt that Canadians would fight in any popular Empire war and would not fight in one for which they felt distaste. Under Bennett or King no great reduction of Canadian tariffs is conceivable, nor any major change in the capitalist setup. For that, restive Canadians were looking to other parties.

C. C. F. Not a new party, but this year for the first time giving the old ones headaches, are Canada’s Socialists, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation led by that poor organizer but “Great Humanitarian of the Prairie Provinces.” Mr. James Shaver Woodsworth. Opposed to violence, but favoring a non-bloody Canadian revolution in the sense that the State would nationalize all property except farms and homes, C. C. F. ran 118 candidates last week in Canada’s 245 constituencies, offering the nation its choice of Socialism.

Reformists. Next, with 174 candidates running last week, was the Reconstruction Party of a Conservative turncoat, the Hon. Henry (“Harry”) H. Stevens who was a member of Premier Bennett’s Cabinet until he became convinced that “something is wrong” (TIME, Nov. 5). Not gifted with any great powers of analysis, Mr. Stevens was vastly shocked when, as the most active member of a Government commission on Canadian business practices, he learned that these practices are those of laissez-faire. Because big Canadian firms, when Depression enabled them to slash wages, squeeze marginal producers and crush competitors, did all these things ruthlessly, Mr. Stevens raised a great howl, founded what he calls the Reconstruction Party. It offered voters their choice of mild reform measures to be carried out by the more sympathetic wing of the Old Gang.

Social Credit. Forty-seven candidates were run, exclusively in the West, by the not-yet-national Social Credit Party of Alberta’s new radiorating Premier William Aberhart, a great admirer of Father Coughlin, a restive disciple of the calm British originator of the Social Credit theory, Major Douglas, and a political bigot who makes his followers take vows to read nothing and listen to nothing uttered by anyone against either himself or Social Credit (TIME, Sept. 2 & 16). The Aberhart party, victorious in Alberta, offered to pay all Canadians $25 per month in credit if and when a Social Credit Government is established inOttawa.

The Reds.

Since Premier Bennett has for years been more alert to Communist preparations for the World Revolution of the World Proletariat than any other North American statesman, Canadian voters know that the Comintern of Moscow is not that funny kind of Russian cabbage soup with sour cream in it. Exceptionally enlightened as to Communists, Canadians were offered a chance to elect Red M. P.’s last week by Incendiary Tim Buck who rushes about trying to win workmen’s votes by showing them cablegrams of encouragement received from the World Communist Party Congress in Moscow (TIME, July 29, et seq.). Presenting candidates in only 15 ridings last week, the harried Communists offered Canadians a small chance to vote Red.

Unsolved Problem. Where Canadians stand in the Empire and their attitude toward King George & Queen Mary as symbolized in the Dominion by Lord & Lady Tweedsmuir may be shrewdly guessed from a major pronouncement during the campaign by Premier Bennett. Though pro-English, a personal friend of the King, and with the warmest feelings for the Mother Country and her aristocracy, Mr. Bennett on the stump felt obliged to say to Canadians: “The Motherland is still vigorous and powerful, but it is no longer the directive machine of our national life. . . . Relationship between Canada and Great Britain still constitutes an unsolved problem.”

Toward solving this problem the Governor-General will contribute with his canny words, while Canadians grapple with the real problems of unemployment, loss of markets, higher taxes, the dole, and whether Canada’s two great duplicating railway systems, one State-owned and the other private, are to be merged and if so, whether under the state or private capital. None of these issues definitely crystallized in last week’s general election, a depressing orgy of muckraking, boos, catcalls, rubber razzberries, fist fights, suits for libel and bombastic broadcasts.

Even before ballots were counted it was evident that to a large extent they could provide no clean-cut solution, so vigorously is Canada in ferment. Assuming, as most Canadians did before the count, a substantial victory for Mr. King & Liberals, they likewise assumed that he or any other Canadian who could conceivably become Premier now in coalition must steer a tortuous middle course: on one side are established bourgeois elements who still cast most of the ballots, and on the other the restive toilers who do not know what they want but are broadly out to soak the rich, raise the dole, nationalize railways and public utilities and probably amend the British North America Act, since this is apparently a brittle bulwark against change.

As returns came in Reform Conservative Stevens was seen to have split and disorganized his party’s vote, turning the expected defeat of Premier Bennett & friends into a massacre which left the Conservatives this week with the smallest representation they have had in the history of the Dominion.

The Reformists, getting nowhere themselves, seemed likely to elect only Mr. Stevens. Hour by hour Mr. King & Liberals forged ahead on the crest of Canada’s “against-the-Government” reaction to Depression, until ultimately they found themselves topping the Liberal landslide which gives Mr. King the largest majority his party has ever had, makes him Premier-presumptive, to be installed in a few weeks.

The count virtually compiled: Liberals, 174; Conservatives, 40; Social Credit, 18; all others, a bare dozen.

The Significance: Slight, except that it shows Canadians have not gone radical. The Liberals can be compared to pre-Roosevelt Democrats in the U. S., but just as President Roosevelt turned his party upside down once he gained the White House, so, as Premier, Mr. King must make sweeping leftward motions. His first reaction was to promise this week to set up a national commission to grapple with unemployment, spread public works. Cried he:

”We have been attacked on all sides, and have won on all fronts. The people of Canada shall not be betrayed.”

*Smith African term for the entourage of exquisite and esthetic voting Oxonians who accompanied the late Lord Milner to his post of South African High Commissioner after the Boer War and profoundly astonished the colonists.