uch of Meighen's democratic _gaucherie_ about garments was
abandoned at the Imperial Conference. He never could have worn a dingy
brown suit when he got the freedom of London. Upon some State occasion
the Premier may have worn the Windsor uniform. Not without scruples.
That uniform may not misbecome constricted Mr. Meighen more than it did
the spare Mr. Foster, or the lean Mr. Rowell. But the Windsor uniform
spells conformity, colonialism, Empire--not commonwealth. And Mr.
Meighen went to London to represent the Commonwealth of Canada.

We were told by cable that the Premier took part in most of the sports
on board ship, and of course lost most of the events. Well, there is
no harm in a Premier beginning to be whimsically athletic near fifty.
But, unless now and then he could manage to win something it was
obviously only an attempt to make him interesting to the cables, on the
principle that a polar bear is prodded in a cage to make him perform
for the "lidy".

Weeks before he went the Premier foreshadowed the attitude he would
take at the Conference. Again and again it was repeated as he slowly
left the country, even pausing at Quebec to say it again; and
thereafter the cables took it up, repeating it over and over, until the
people of Canada began to suspect that the correspondents were almost
as hard up for news as some of them were during the war. Mr. Grattan
O'Leary knew he had a difficult character to popularize on the cable; a
man who until he became Premier, outside of Parliament was as diffident
as the hero in "She Stoops to Conquer"; at High School in the little
stone town of St. Mary's, Ont., so studious that he never could catch a
baseball that wanted to drop into his pocket; at college immersed in
mathematics, at Osgoode in law; as a young man opening a forlorn office
in Portage, still a sort of lariat town, when Meighen was shy of even a
family saddle-horse.

In Portage Meighen lived in a weather-boarded frame house, during the
time when in bigger Western towns other politicians were putting up
little palaces, causing their electoral enemies to wonder where they
got the money. In Ottawa when he became Premier he lived in one of the
plainest houses, with no decorative fads, no celebrated pictures, not
much music, but plenty of room for the juveniles; described by a
political writer who was there the evening of the appointment as "just
comfortable." He was at home that evening, discussing simply