Читать книгу Ordeal by Fire - Ralph Allen - Страница 12

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SIR WILFRID LAURIER on the morrow of the 1911 election looked a tragic figure—frail, just two months short of seventy, not quite so erect as he once had been, a badly beaten old man. But his own assessment of his position was far more cheerful. He made a perfunctory attempt to resign as leader of the Liberal party but yielded to the overwhelming and partly desperate demands of his supporters that he stay. Very shortly he was boasting to a banquet audience: “I don’t feel ripe for heaven, and at all events I want another tussle with the Tories.”

In this tussle he now had the advantage of being able to choose his weapons. Of the government’s program he could accept what he chose to accept and oppose what he chose to oppose. The selection gave him little trouble. He was far too good a politician not to acknowledge that he had been trounced, and soundly trounced, on reciprocity, and the less said about that for the time being, the better. On the second big issue, the naval service bill, he had been trounced too, but now the very flail that bore his bloodstains lay at his feet, ready for picking up. His late tormentor stood before him, as naked to attack as he himself so recently had been.

For the first time in fifteen years Laurier had the advantages of opposition. He was unencumbered by the grotesquely impossible task of putting into effect a naval policy that could be acceptable to both the Quebec Nationalists and the Ontario Imperialists. He barely waited until the new king was seated before he gave the Damoclean sword a joyful twang. When he rose to reply to the Speech from the Throne, after Parliament had reassembled, Sir Wilfrid wondered wistfully why the speech had made no mention whatever of naval policy. As far back as 1909 the new Prime Minister and his followers had unanimously supported a resolution calling for naval assistance to Great Britain. In 1910 they had proposed to give Britain ships rather than train and equip an autonomous Canadian navy; then they had seen a dire emergency. But now, alas, although the previous government’s naval bill remained on the statutes, it was proposed to do nothing to implement it. What, if anything, was proposed to replace it?

Borden’s task in replying to such untimely questions was not easy. On the very day after his election triumph his uncertain but essential ally, Henri Bourassa, had trumpeted publicly: “We [meaning the Quebec Nationalists] have destroyed one government and we shall destroy yet another unless our principles are respected.” The chill these words had laid upon the first glow of Borden’s triumph was not relieved when, a few days later, he sent Monk to offer Bourassa a seat in the Cabinet and Bourassa politely declined.

At first, in the resumed navy debate, Borden contented himself with repeating the old attacks on the existing Liberal bill without pressing any substitute of his own. Henri Bourassa’s locum tenens, Monk, reminded the House of Commons that Quebec would not accept any kind of naval aid without a plebiscite. On this uneasy note the government shoved the whole navy issue back into its cluttered and faintly noisome pigeonhole.

Borden took part of the summer to go to London to try finding out the real state of the race for sea power. Also he made a systematic attempt to explain to various members of the British Cabinet that the blank-check, my-England-right-or-wrong concept of Ottawa’s duty to London was nearly finished.

In interviews with all the leading politicians of the mother country Borden stressed this new truth again and again. During that 1912 July in London he heard it at last acknowledged when Prime Minister Asquith rose in the House of Commons and said: “Side by side with this growing participation in the active burdens of the Empire on the part of our dominions, there rests with us undoubtedly the duty of making such response as we can to their obviously reasonable appeal that they should be entitled to be heard in the determination of the policy and the direction of Imperial affairs.”

Today the words sound as tame, obvious, and unexciting as the leftover notes of a visiting Rotarian. But they had real meaning in their time and place, and even a certain drama. Only a year before, at the Imperial Conference of 1911, Asquith had unequivocally restated the principle that Britain and Britain alone determined the Empire’s courses in world affairs; it was for the colonies and dominions to follow without asking questions. With Britain’s official renunciation of divine right, Borden now had a practical basis on which to return home and discuss Canadian naval aid in practical terms with his countrymen.

And thereupon, from the strange grab bag of villains and whipping boys who bestrewed and bedeviled the path of Canadian foreign policy, there spilled a new and startling figure. For the next few months he was to loom even larger in the country’s public debates and to arouse at least as much suspicion and displeasure—though not quite so much hatred—as even Taft and Bourassa.

Although still in his thirties, Winston Churchill was already a considerable figure in British politics. As First Lord of the Admiralty, he had naturally been the man Borden consulted most frequently in London about the details of Canada’s contribution to the common naval defense.

Churchill had warned the Canadian Prime Minister that Germany meant “to strike at the first favorable opportunity,” and added that any help for Britain would be welcome, and the sooner and the more, the better. By the time Borden returned to Canada the two men were agreed on two things. Canada would not attempt to build a navy of its own, but would supply Britain with money to build ships for Imperial defense under the Royal Navy. To help Borden sell this policy to his Cabinet and to the public, Churchill would send him two messages—one confidential and outlining all the relevant military facts, the other edited for public comsumption.

In late September the promised Churchill memoranda arrived in Ottawa. Borden prepared a naval aid bill under which Canada would spend thirty-five million dollars to build three dreadnoughts for the Royal Navy. Frederick Monk, Borden’s chief aide and representative in Quebec, promptly resigned from the Cabinet. He did so to the public applause of Bourassa. In the House of Commons, Laurier paid his last respects to what he called the unholy alliance between the Nationalists and the Conservatives and then pressed to the attack. In essence he stood behind his own now comatose naval bill of 1910, which had resulted only in the purchase of two elderly British cruisers, the Rainbow and the Niobe, for training purposes.

Canada should and could build its own navy, Laurier persisted. Canada should man this navy with its own men and send it to the defense of Britain and the Empire at its own discretion. The Borden plan was “a hybrid policy, a cross between jingoism and nationalism.”

To justify vesting the control of Canadian warships in the Imperial government, Borden proposed to demand a voice in the making of Imperial foreign policy. But was this really possible? Was it really desirable? The British Foreign Office was repeatedly involved in matters of high moment affecting the Afghan boundary, the division of Persia, and alien warships cruising off the coast of Africa. Did Canada want to be consulted on what was to be done about these recondite, far-off matters and thus by inference to become a party to what was done? Was Canada to embark on the whirlpool of European politics?

With something close to savagery the usually suave, self-contained Laurier hurled a special taunt across the floor in reply to the hard-pressed Borden’s reassurance that, although the Canadian ships would be under British control, Canadian officers, but not Canadian men, would be permitted to serve aboard them. “Oh, ye Tory jingoes,” Laurier cried, “is that the amount of the sacrifice you are prepared to make? You are ready to furnish admirals, rear admirals, commodores, captains, officers of all grades, plumes, feathers, and gold lace; but you leave it to England to supply the bone and sinews on board those ships. You say that these ships shall bear Canadian names. That will be the only thing Canadian about them. You hire somebody to do your work; in other words, you are ready to do anything except the fighting. Is that, sir, the true policy?”

The harassed Borden, threatened with further defections among his supporters, appealed to Winston Churchill for support again. Churchill, who already had a highly developed confidence in his ability to bring lesser men to their senses with a few well-chosen words, sent two crisp messages late in January, which Borden quickly made public. In them Churchill proved with a maddeningly simple recital of the facts that Canada was incapable of building its own fleet. He proved that Canada was incapable of sailing such a fleet in battle even if built; probably incapable, so far as that went, of preventing it from rusting away in harbor through sheer incompetence and neglect. He added also that for good military reasons Britain wouldn’t be “able to co-operate to any great extent” in managing and sailing Canadian ships in the event that the foolhardy and presumptuous Canadians went ahead and built them anyway instead of giving the money to Britain.

Churchill, of course, was right—dangerously and recklessly right, altogether too right to carry the judgment of a Canada grown touchy to the brink of neurosis by the wild animosities and wilder love affairs of Nationalist and Imperialist, Canadian and Yankee, Canadian and Briton.

One loyal Liberal, H. R. Emerson, read part of the American Declaration of Independence in the Canadian House of Commons. And he pronounced an awful judgment on Churchill’s latest memorandum: “That document is calculated to cause more irritation, to undermine more seriously our constitutional freedom, than any document that has come from authority in Great Britain to any colony since the days of Lord North.” Another member of Parliament called it “the first step in the direction that will ultimately mean the separation of the Dominion from the great Empire of which we are very proud to form a part.” The Ottawa Free Press rumbled: “If Winston Churchill’s special pleading does not have the effect of awakening Canadians to the tremendous assault which the Borden naval policy is making upon Canada’s most cherished possessions—freedom, liberty, absolute autonomy within the Empire—then we do not know our Canada. To us it seems to provide the concrete example up to date of the fatal dangers awaiting a confusing of the interests of Downing Street with those of Canada.”

Dr. Michael Clark, a highly respected Liberal, who was “named” and barely escaped expulsion from the House during the debate, managed to link the naval bill and the tariff by an ingenious feat of guilt by association: “I was brought up under the British flag, which, if it taught me anything, taught me to believe in courage and freedom. There is no courage in sending empty boats to Britain; there is no freedom in saying that we cannot trade with the United States without being annexed.” From the wings the saturnine Bourassa reminded French Canada that the proposed contribution to Great Britain would cost every man, woman, and child five dollars for the relief of the “English lords who are shareholders in the Krupp-Maxim-Vickers trust.”

A Liberal M.P. rose to quote the Liberal Churchill as a witness against himself: “Above all, I think a Liberal is a man who should keep a sour look for scaremongers of every kind and every size, however distinguished, however ridiculous—and sometimes the most distinguished are the most ridiculous—a cold, chilling, sour look for all of them.”

For the British cabinet minister who had inspired these remarks, there were cold, chilling, sour looks in profusion. The Ottawa Free Press returned to the fray to dispose of him once and for all: “Winston Churchill expects the eyes of Canadians to bulge at the idea of 150-ton cranes and a dockyard costing the appalling sum of four million dollars! How could expert workers in steel be found in a country whose sole inhabitants are either trappers or plowmen? Canadians build anything bigger than a harrow or a binder—monstrous dream! What can we wild and woolly westerners, clad in blanket coats and tramping around the bush on snowshoes, possibly know about intricate electric machinery?”

Finding themselves on a far better wicket than they had dreamed, the Liberals decided to stay in until the bitter end. On second reading of the Borden naval bill they stalled. On third reading they launched the longest and most memorable filibuster in Canadian parliamentary history. Through early March 1912 they kept the House in constant session for twenty-four hours a day, two weeks in a row, with only one Sunday off to revive the exhausted.

Like miners working around the clock, the M.P.s, both on the Government and Opposition benches, were detailed to eight-hour shifts. Considering that the navy had now been under fairly regular debate in the House for three years, considering that there was still no sign of a navy (except the two elderly training cruisers), and considering that there was still no money for a navy and no sailors for a navy, it might have seemed inevitable that a truce of boredom and frustration would set in. But this was far from the case. Both parties had been guilty of their full share of cynicism and opportunism in their incursions against and in behalf of the phantom fleet. But now both parties saw themselves as the champions of a sacred cause. Liberals who hadn’t been heard on the floor in years staggered to their feet to mumble phrases from the Bible, the British North America Act, Jane’s Fighting Ships or any other remotely relevant document, to pass the torch to the next bleary-eyed backbencher and totter off to their hotels and rooming houses for a few hours of sleep.

The Conservatives were equally stoic in their silences; after the early stages of the debate hardly a Tory rose at all, no matter how unspeakable the provocation, except to pound a desk or shake a fist or shout “Shame!” The Tory strategy, of course, was to wait until the Liberals dropped of exhaustion. The normally sedate Canadian Commons dozed off, sprang to life with thumping desks, dozed off again, awoke to forests of waving arms and ferocious cries, staggered home for Easter, and came back after the brief respite still groggy, and stalemated.

Laurier now made no attempt to conceal the fact that he was deliberately obstructing. It was his avowed aim to prolong the naval debate so impossibly that Borden would have to dissolve the House and call an election. By now it was apparent both to their deadlocked colleagues and to the waiting nation that if neither man’s will was to crack someone’s body had to. Oddly it was Borden, thirteen years the younger, who first came under a doctor’s care. Through March and early April he had been intermittently forced to take to his bed with a severe outbreak of carbuncles, and in at least two of the recurrent emergencies he had to make his way to the House with his neck heavily bandaged and once with a physician in attendance. Whether he thought that he might be coming close to the end of his tether is doubtful—if so, Borden never admitted it—but in early April he made a drastic, unusual, and mildly distasteful decision. He would invoke closure. To do so involved a not wholly dignified trick of debate for which Borden had little taste. Before he took the fateful step, he read to the House from the twenty-first volume of Carlyle’s Life of Frederick the Great:

“In 1652, the incredible Law of Liberum Veto had been introduced, in spite of John and his endeavors. Liberum Veto; the power of one man to stop the proceedings of Polish Parliament by pronouncing audibly: ‘Nie pozwalam—I don’t permit.’ Never before or since among mortals was so incredible a law. Law standing indisputable, nevertheless, on the Polish Statute Book for above two hundred years; like an ever-flowing fountain of anarchy, joyful to the Polish nation. How they got any business done at all under such a law? Truly they did but little; and for the last thirty years as good as none. But if Polish Parliament was universally in earnest to do some business, and Veto came upon it, honorable members, I observe, gathered passionately round the vetoing Brother; conjured, obtested, menaced, wept, prayed; and if the case was too urgent and insoluble otherwise, the Nie Pozwalam gentleman still obstinate, they plunged their swords through him, and in that way brought consent. The commoner course was to go home again, in a tempest of shrieks and curses.”

And so, having conjured, obtested, menaced, wept, and prayed over Laurier, Borden plunged the sword through him. It happened very quickly. When Laurier next rose to speak on one of his party’s unending amendments to the Borden naval bill, a carefully coached Tory member sprang up to contest the floor with him. Another Tory member, also by prearrangement, then moved that the first Tory and not Sir Wilfrid be heard. Under the rules of Parliament, as mysterious to ordinary mortals as the mating dance of the whooping crane, the subsequent vote—which of course went against Laurier—meant the debate was virtually over. Borden at last rushed his bill through the Commons.

But the mythical though much-quarreled-over navy was still far from a safe harbor. The Borden bill still had to go through the Senate, and thanks to fifteen years of Liberal rule that elderly and appointive body was top-heavy with Liberals. At first Borden held hopes that in spite of this the Senate would see in the Commons’s acceptance of the Naval Assistance Act a reflection of the genuine and proper will of the nation. Not so. With Laurier briefing him from the sidelines, Sir George Ross, leader of the upper house, disdainfully announced that Mr. Borden’s bill was “empty as an exploded cartridge, soulless as its plated sides.” He would have none of it. And neither would his followers. The Senate vote was 51 to 27 against, and the bill was dead after all.

The date was May 30, 1913. A little more than a year later the first great war was to begin. A little more than a year earlier naval news had been building in other parts of the British Empire. Australia was halfway through a sixty-five-million-dollar three-year plan which was intended, with extensions, to produce twenty-three warships by 1918. Even South Africa, though still bearing the fresh scars of the Boer War, was offering aid to the Royal Navy. The Federated Malay States—represented by dark-skinned subject men with such bizarre titles as the Sultan of Selangor and Yam Tuan of Negri Sembilan—had freely offered the mother country a first-class battleship to cost eleven million dollars. Among Canada’s major public men only Henri Bourassa heard the long bleak episode of the Canadian naval debate with unmixed feelings. He quickly claimed for himself “a moral triumph without precedent.”