s! it is
now engaged in the unpardonable effort to merge the Liberals with the
National Progressives as a greater Liberal Party.

Inconsistency may be the evolution of greatness. Inconstancy never. The
_Globe_ of a certain date in June, 1921, contained a front page display
of the Agrarian bye-election victory in Medicine Hat. On another date
there was an editorial once again advising the Agrarians to make common
cause with Liberals against the common enemy, Meighenism, or as it might
be said, Willisonism.

Perusing the _Globe_ in his Reconstruction office, Sir John glances
up--leisurely at a spot on the wall, next to the portrait of Sir John A.
Macdonald. Like Macbeth's dagger, he sees a cold, organizing face
smiling like Mona Lisa, fair at Sir John; the face of T. A. Crerar.

The Levite of Reconstruction shakes his fist.

"Down with you," he mutters. "Avaunt! I'll have none of you. There's
nothing under Medicine Hat--except what Kipling said, 'all hell for a
basement,' Natural gas, Crerar, not a test case at all. Oh, no. Too
near the border."

Sir John yawns and peruses a proof of the 745th pamphlet issued from
Reconstruction, total of nearly seven million copies paid for not by
taxation of the people, but inferentially by tariffs. Probably a very
patriotic minority read these Willison bulletins aiming to reconstruct
the country by putting a crimp in the exportation of the Canadian dollar,
looking after welfare work in factories, women and children, grappling
with unemployment, helping to change over industry from war to peace,
aiming to "stabilize" the nation, to curb that team of wild horses,
Bolshevism and Agrarianism, and generally to keep Canada from going to
perdition.

In spite of Sir John, in 1919 and 1920, people bought Canada almost
bankrupt on the exchanges. Hence among the items in the cheapening list
may be placed the Canadian dollar which is now worth about 89 cents in
New York. That is what happens to the dollar when it goes away from home
and plays prodigal son. What Sir John works to see is Canadian
commodities crossing the border and the Yankee dollars coming back in
exchange.

Here is one of the greatest moral issues of the age for this nation.
Even the preachers, if they could see us put up the barriers against
luxury imports from the United States--said to be such a wicked
nation--would breathe more easily. People so often buy sin done up in
dutiable packages. For the fiscal