decades to make head where the Agrarian
movement took years. The One Big Union of the Reds, anarching against
all Government as it is, merely applied the principle of direct action
which the farmers had taught them by suggestion in the unofficial
parliaments of the prairie. The Agrarian is himself a One-Big-Unionist.
His concern is not with wages and hours, but with exports, imports and
elections. The Agrarian will not strike. Crerar knows that. He must
not tie up communities and stop trade. He must work through Parliament.
His aim is to establish farmerism as the basis of the nation. His creed
is, that no matter what use we make of raw material, cheap power,
manufacturing experience and capital, Canada's greatest revenue and
export production must be in the farm; and that therefore national
legislation must gravitate about the farmer's garage.

This thing came to a head in a part of the country which contains less
than one-sixth of Canada's total population, and more than half of them
Canadians only by immigration. The one biggest man in the whole
movement, besides Mr. Crerar, the man who practically elected the new
farmer Premier of Alberta by appointment, is an American born. H. W.
Wood, the Czar of Alberta, came as a farmer in search of cheaper land
from the Western States. He is a good citizen, and as much entitled to
play strong-arm in our politics as any native Canadian is to enter the
Cabinet of the United States. But as a rule a free people resent men
from other countries agitating for revolution on behalf of an original
small minority in a part of the country where industrialism can never
become more than a sideshow in the business of production. A people of
national consciousness do not relish the idea of a minority group
organized to the last man and the last acre, trying to organize a
nation-wide group in provinces where the factory and the mine and the
fishery are at least as important as the farm.

The whole plan smacks too much of engineering. It is a case of complete,
almost Teutonic, organization masquerading as a sort of democracy, but in
reality a controlled tyranny whose aim so far as at present defined, is
to establish group government under a camouflage of the National
Progressive Party, and by means of the power so obtained or by alliances
with some other group, to upset the whole economic structure which it has
taken fifty years to build up. No true citizen will object to farmers i