he ordeal. He had no knowledge of just to what
programme he would be expected to adhere, except the general one of
winning the war. He had little enthusiasm for the Premier, probably less
for most of his colleagues. So far as he had been able to survey Ottawa,
he considered it an administrative mess. His direct ways of doing
business were menaced by a sense of muddle and officialdom. He missed
the breezy, open ways of "the Peg" and the sensation of being general
manager of the biggest commercial concern west of the lakes, the Grain
Growers' Grain Co. Crerar could not business-manage Ottawa. When he
opened his Agriculture door he saw no box cars trailing in from the
elevator pyramids on the skyline; he smelled no wheat; he saw no
"horny-handed" farmers writing checks to cover their speculative
investments in grain which they had not yet sown. No wheat-mining
comrade motoring in from the plains came to thrust his boots up on the
general manager's desk and say, "Believe me, Tom, I paid thirteen-ninety
for those protected articles. What a shame!"

Crerar complained of indigestion. I think his nerves were on edge. I
asked him if he expected to co-relate Agriculture with Food Control and
Trade and Commerce. "Oh, I suppose so," he said wearily. "Nobody in
Union Government knows what he will do yet. I don't like Ottawa. Its
whole atmosphere is foreign to me."

He seemed almost contemptuous. He had made the patriotic plunge in order
to put his particular brand of radical Liberalism at the service of a
Tory-Unionist Government. He did not like it. Of all the Liberals who
entered the Union Cabinet he was the sworn Radical. Both Calder and
Sifton were machine men from governments that still had Liberal labels on
their luggage. Crerar represented the great inter-prairie group of no
compromise and of economic enmity to the Tories. He was rather looking
for trouble; thinking rather hard of how he could get through with such
an uncomfortable job, do it well and get back uncontaminated to his own
dear land of the wheat and his fine office in the most handsome suite of
offices in the Grain Exchange at Winnipeg. The Ottawa that he hated was
the Capital that old line politicians had created. He was looking
forward to some Ottawa of the future which like Canberra, the new dream
Capital of Australia, might be vacuum-cleaned and disinfected of all the
old partisan microbes.

Crerar made his success in a country where