le and telling
somebody how it is that west of the lakes neither of the old Ottawa
parties has now any grip on the people.

Dafoe talked that way in 1916. He was beginning to lisp a little along
that restless line of thought in 1910. And in 1940 he may be sitting
in that same sanctum with walls of heavy books on two sides of him,
telling somebody just how it came to be that an economic cyclone on the
prairies once caught up all the Grits and Tories and nothing was ever
heard or seen of them again.

When Kipling wrote, "Oh, east is east and west is west, and never the
twain shall meet," he had never met Dafoe. Some directive angel
planted him at Winnipeg shortly after Clifford Sifton crowded the gate
there with people going in that they might choke it again with wheat
coming out; and while people went in and wheat came out through this
spout of the great prairie hopper, Dafoe dug himself a little ship
canal which as it grew bigger sluiced the political rivers of the West
into his sanctum before he lifted the lock and let them on down to the
sea at Ottawa. The West as he saw it was a place of coming mighty
changes. His own party was pushing the transformations. The prairies
were due to become the mother of great forces. You could not be always
herding people into a land like that from south, east and west and not
come within an ace of fostering some revolution.

And of all cities west of the lakes, Winnipeg was the clearing-house,
as much for policies and programmes as for wheat and money and people.
No political cloud ever gathered on the prairies that did not get blown
into Winnipeg before it burst. Dafoe stood ready for them all. He
believed that no change had happened yet to the Liberal party
comparable with the changes yet to come. He saw that party chaining
itself to tariffs and big interests and he said:

"Believe me, that won't forever do. There's something just short of a
revolution going to happen to this party before the West gets done with
it; and if the party isn't ready for the West, so much the worse for
the party."

Just to get ahead of mere chronology, the bane of many a good man's
life. In 1919 the most complete imitation of a little Moscow ever seen
on this continent was set up in Winnipeg. For many weeks it looked to
some hopefuls as though the Wheat City would reconstruct the whole
economic structure of the nation to suit the ideas of a violent
minority. The main recorded issue was