Hear what
the present Secretary of the Canadian Council of Agriculture has to say
about the parliaments of the Grain-Growers in 1916:

"Their annual conventions are parliaments of the Middle Western
Provinces. Resolutions and recommendations of all sorts and description
are debated and decided upon. Questions of far-reaching influence,
socially and morally, have their beginning, so far as Western Canada is
concerned, in the Grain Growers' Conventions. Records of these
Associations show that besides recommending the establishment of
co-operative elevators, co-operative banks, co-operative dairies, free
trade, single tax and a dozen other economics reform, the Grain Growers
in convention fathered Prohibition long before it was adopted, advised
and urged woman suffrage many years before that measure was generally
favoured, and were the first sponsors of the idea of direct legislation.
The Grain Growers' Association and their annual conventions are the
source and inspiration of all the commercial activities, and social and
political reforms with which one finds the name of Grain Grower connected
so often in Western Canada!"

This is the reforming political school that has trained the man now
openly discussed as the next Premier of Canada. And for the benefit of
any Canadian Norris who dreams of writing a problem novel about Crerar,
it may be said that he is the most drab and unpicturesque personality
that ever stood in line for any such office in this country. In the
triangle of leaders at Ottawa he is the angle of lowest personal, though
by no means lowest human, interest. Meighen is impressive; King
brilliant. Crerar--is business. He would be a hard nut for a novelist
to crack. A man like Smillie impresses the imagination. Crerar, who is
to the Canadian farmer what Smillie was to the British miner, invites
only judgment.

The first time I met Crerar--at lunch in a small eastern club--he
impressed me as a man enormously capable in business, tersely direct in
his judgments, somewhat satirical and inordinately sensitive. He seemed
wary, almost cryptic in his remarks. Recently sworn in as Unionist
Minister of Agriculture, he had turned his back on Winnipeg, where he was
a sort of agrarian king, and taken his first dip into the cynical waters
of Ottawa, where he was but one of a Ministerial group some of whom were
abler and more interesting than himself. He had not yet appeared in
Parliament. He dreaded t