.
He had started munitions as an arm of war. He did not want a civilian
to take it over as a mere industry. Even that was a sign that the
volunteer system was about done. Ottawa was full of experts now, each
man taking over as a big business something started by Hughes. The
one-man epoch was over. But Hughes refused to admit it. The man who
had started everything was in no humour to admit anything. Yet in the
darkest days Hughes never lost faith in the men who had gone. No man
continued to say more heartening things about ultimate victory. And he
played blind optimist against the cold, comfortless fact that the
Canadian Army was wasting and the reserves were not marching up to mend
it.

Hughes knew that conscription had to come. But he was the very last
man in authority to admit it. Only a few days before Ottawa announced
that compulsory service must be applied, and when Sir Sam knew it was
coming, he said publicly to soldiers in Toronto that Canada, the
freeman's country, would never need conscription. It was most pitiful
to hear him. Sir Sam never seemed to pity himself. His egoism was
game enough for anything. Bigger men than he had gone down. A big man
here or there was nothing now. But what of little men that stayed up?
Hughes probably asked that in silent contempt as he saw the coming of
Coalition. But he knew he would not be there when it came.

By this time the egotism that was so splendid in 1914 had begun to
breed in Gen. Hughes rancours and envies and enmities. Some of the men
he had sent overseas were now more potent figures than himself.

There was still a person at the head of the Militia Department known as
Lieut.-General Sam Hughes, K.C.B. But there was no longer in Canada
any such man as old Sam Hughes. The Fate chickens hatched in 1914 were
coming home to roost. For two years the Government had carried on two
wars, one with the Kaiser Wilhelm, the other with Kaiser Sam. It had
to be determined that whatever defects government may have because it
is a democracy--even such democracy as was left in 1916--it is bigger
than any one man. It had to be conceded that the nation was bigger
than any one political party, and war bigger than all the world's
volunteer armies.

Sam Hughes belonged to the eternal Volunteers. The days of his glory
were the days when Canada of her own accord went to war or stayed at
home. The Force called Hughes dreamed that it was bigger than a
machine ca