e coalition of farmers and labourites in
Ontario; Quebec almost solid Liberal behind Lapointe; Liberals angling
for alliance with Agrarians; Lenin poisoning the Empire wells of India
with Bolshevism; League of Nations every now and then sending out an
S.O.S., interrupted in transit by Lord Cecil or Sir Herbert Ames;
and--not least threatening of storms but if properly negotiated
favourable to this country on the Pacific issue--Mr. Harding busy on a
"just-as-good" substitute for the League of Nations with Washington as
a new-world centre when Mr. Meighen had hitherto neglected to advocate
a Canadian envoy to that Capital.

Having scanned all these weather signals, Mr. Meighen decided that
diplomacy for the present was dangerous and that boldness was better.
In his programme speech at Stirling he divided the nation into two
groups--that of authority and order to which he belonged, and the
heterogeneous group of incipient anarchism to which belonged all those
who did not agree with him.

Having done this with such further definition of his programme as might
be necessary, the Premier took a trip to the West to prepare the way
for Sir Henry Drayton's tariff tour. He went to that land of minor
revolutions as a representative of government by authority, high
tariff, conscription during the war, the Wartime Elections Act, and a
minimum of centrality in the Empire as opposed to a maximum of
autonomy. It was a disquieting outlook. But Westerners love to hear a
man hit hard when he talks. Meighen has often been bold both in speech
and action. In the Commons last session he paid his respects to Mr.
Crerar by calling the National Progressives "a dilapidated annex to the
Liberal party." Which adroit play to the gallery with a paradox came
back in the shape of a boomerang from a Westerner who called the
Government party "an exploded blister." On a previous occasion talking
to the boot manufacturers in convention at Quebec he took a leap into
the Agrarian trench with this pack of muddled metaphors. "I see the
Agrarians a full-fledged army on the march to submarine our fiscal
system."

Epigrams like these do not make great Premiers. But they are the kind
of schooling that Meighen had. In his young parliament days he was an
outrageously tiresome speaker. He heaped up metaphors and hyperboles,
paraded lumbering predicates and hurled out epithets, foaming and
floundering. He had started so many things in a speech that he sc