press notices. Even the Premier took nearly two years to
convince London that he was much more than the civilian colleague of
Gen. Hughes. Sir Sam was idolized from the beginning; at times when
generals at the front were baffled, discouraged and beaten, and when
patient old Kitchener was enduring red tape and making perfunctory
reports to the Lords, knowing that the war was bigger than his
knowledge of it.

Hughes may not have been wise enough to estimate the real value of this
idolatry; but he was probably shrewd enough to know that it would soon
be over. He knew that much as had been done to make Canada a war
nation, the first two years had done less than half the work. 87,000
troops went overseas in 1915. That was natural. The majority of the
men were in camp. In 1916 the number was almost doubled, from the
enlistments of 1915. In 1917 the number sent overseas dropped to
63,536, proving that the enlistments of 1916 had been about half those
of 1915.

Hughes knew this better than anybody. He knew that the voluntary
system, in which he believed, was going to break down. We had no
national register. A country as big as twenty Englands, with a
population about one-fourth as big, had also Quebec--and the farmer.
The Canadian census was five years old and useless for anything like a
national register of resources of war. Camp Borden in 1916 helped to
stimulate recruiting and to give Hughes something resembling in a
feeble way the sensations of 1914. But Camp Borden was not Valcartier.
General Lessard, whom he had ignored in 1914, was sent down to Quebec
to encourage enlistments. He went too late. Wrong men had gone
earlier. Hughes had never tried to placate Quebec. But in 1916 he
himself went down to see Cardinal Begin. For an Orangeman like Hughes
that was a desperate measure. He got what he expected--cynicism.
Begin afterwards issued a letter to the press in which he tried to set
the clergy above the law of conscription. No doubt the Cardinal came
at Hughes with the twaddle invented by the Nationalists and later
adopted by Laurier, about enforcing the Militia Act which provided for
nothing but defence.

Canada had now four divisions in the field. The problem was how to
keep them up, and how to send a fifth. The fifth never went. But it
stands to the immortal credit of Sam Hughes that the four did, and that
he had sent them.

The affair about the Chairman of Munitions was to Hughes a sore blow