t Canada,
beginning in 1918, after fifty years of Confederation.

A supercilious editor once asked why on such an Association no farmer had
been appointed. The answer was simple enough. Sir John was born a
farmer. He used to wield a handspike at logging bees in Huron County,
Ont. Why no Liberals? But Sir John used to be the leading Liberal of
unelected Canada. Why no professor of political economy to represent the
great universities who are always supposed to be reconstructing a nation?
Simple again. Sir John himself once conducted a university of culture,
economics and general information known as the _Toronto News_. In fact
there was no need of an Association at all. Sir John Willison was
sufficient unto the day.

One finds it tolerably easy to be sarcastic about Sir John Willison,
because for many years he was to some of us the sort of man that
compelled a sincere, almost idolatrous admiration. In this also he is
more adept than the average man. He himself once idolized Sir Wilfrid
Laurier in two volumes; but a few years before he turned all his
political guns on the French-Canadian Premier to get him out of power for
good.

In all Canada there has never been a more versatile character; never one
who after a _volte face_ in politics could turn with such poise and
dignity upon any critic cradled in the foundations of belief and ask,
"Well, what's new?"

From his crisp manner of speaking and a certain austerity of manner, I
used to think that Sir John was in a measure inscrutable. He had such a
curt way of summoning a reporter, as once,--

"Never," he began when the culprit had got into the corridor facing the
editor-in-chief, "never, when interviewing a man in his own home, say
anything about the furniture."

Born a Conservative and a farmer, Willison became on the _Globe_ Canada's
greatest unelected Liberal. He conserved Liberalism. On the _Globe_ he
held the balance between the Free Traders who believed only in
reciprocity and Brastus Wiman, who with Goldwin Smith made Taft a mere
plagiarist when he said that Canada was an "adjunct" of the United
States. It was Willison's attempt to consider commercial union on its
merits that made the _Globe_ seem like a mark for the annexationists, at
a time when the high priest of the movement in Canada had the effrontery
to remain a citizen of the nation which he was openly trying to sell at a
bargain counter. The man who kept the _Globe_ from becoming an