rmers telling old parties to go to
the devil--Liberal gov'ts in prairie province mere annexes of new radical
group which is now bigger nationalist force than Quebec ever was, ready
to march upon Ottawa----

On this basis the novelist builds his political fabric of Crerar, who
began life as a Laurier Liberal, became a Free Trader of the Michael
Clark school, and ten years ago gave symptoms of pushing the economic
side of the agrarian movement to a point where it aimed to become the new
Liberalism of the prairies. He was the business head of a revolutionary
movement of which other men became the ardent, flaming crusaders, both in
and out of Ottawa. Crerar calmly evolved his practical evangelism out of
the ledger of exports and imports. Nothing excited him so deeply as
comparative statistics. He never trusted to the moral or emotional side
of the case. His crusade was in the national ledger. His church was the
elevator; his economic Bible the Grain Growers' Guide.

Since 1914 or thereabouts this man has kept his balance at the head of a
movement that split again and again into local factions only to come
together again in the head offices of the Grain Growers' Grain Co. and
the Canadian Council of Agriculture. He represented multi-millions of
investment in land, agriculture, co-operative commercial enterprises and
speculation. On the ground floor of the Grain Exchange he was at the
head of the greatest organization in the world speculating in visible
supply wheat. The grain that Crerar's cohorts bought and sold was either
just sown, or heading out, or being threshed, or it was crawling to
Winnipeg in miles of box cars on its way to Fort William. In wheat he
put his trust; in railways and steamships never; in centralized banks and
eastern manufacturers not at all; in old parties at Ottawa still less--if
possible.

Crerarism was becoming power to act. Behind Crerar was a sullen but
optimistic reformation of such varied emotional character that none but a
quiet, steady man could have controlled it in Winnipeg. The novelist's
prairie farm was now a power in the land. It was Agrarianism; that had
bolted like an ostrich both old parties in the West, and now offered a
new one supposed to contain as a new National Policy a general and
itemized contradiction of the old N.P. of 1878--The National Progressive
Party.

No economic crusade had ever been so rapid, gigantic and revolutionary.
Trades unionism had taken