ere are few empty cradles or idle factories or wasting farms.

All these things Gouin, growing stout and somewhat heavy of face, loved
to behold; and out of that grew all the vision he seemed to have. In
this enormous prefecture within the Empire he beheld a far more
comfortable State than the Nationalist dream of a separative Quebec;
glad when he could find time to motor grandly and amiably out among the
villages and be greeted as _le grand seigneur_ of politics, even when
he lacked the grand manners of the eminent patrician.

At any conference of Premiers in Ottawa he held himself somewhat aloof,
studying the lot, respecting them all, cordial with all, anxious to do
all that constitutionally in him lay to further co-ordination. But
Gouin always sagaciously knew that there was no Premier in the pack who
already had so much, with so little to ask, from Federalism as he. His
was the pivotal province of Confederation, the grand compromise of Old
Macdonald with Cartier; the basic sixty-five members of Parliament,
unchangeable except by ripping up the B.N.A. Act, an instrument of
Empire. He could wink the other eye and reflect that from the
political concessions of the Act in official bilingualism and a fixed
representation, in the outlet of the St. Lawrence, in the possession of
the historic city, in the control of ocean navigation, in a solid
clergy, in fundamental virtues of thrift and an established
peasantry--he and his had more than any of the others could ever ask.

"Ah!" he said eloquently, with a fine twinkle of his eyes to the
interviewer at Quebec, "you have not seen our Province? Then you must
come down again, when I am not busy, and let me take you to see--all we
have down here!"

A POLITICAL MATTAWA OF THE WEST

JOHN WESLEY DAFOE

First impressions are always tyrants. The first time I heard John
Wesley Dafoe talk he was in his large sanctum of the _Manitoba Free
Press_, in the summer of 1916. He was without a collar, his shirt
loose at the neck, and his hair like a windrow of hay. He reminded me
of some superb blacksmith hammering out irons of thought, never done
mending the political waggons of other people, and from his many talks
to the waggoners knowing more about all the roads than any of them.
The wheat on a thousand fields was baking that day, and the 'Peg was
roasting alive. Since that I have always pictured Dafoe sweltering,
terribly in earnest, whittling the legs of the Round Tab