to exercise governing
power as a revolutionary usurpation of authority."

A minority always leads. Majorities follow. The position of the _Free
Press_ was, that it is only a minority able to command a majority that
should rule; and the Soviet was no such minority--while the _Free
Press_ was.

A clear grasp of this is necessary in the business of judging Mr. Dafoe
and his coming influence upon Canadian affairs. What Dafoe enunciated
about the strike will have a strong bearing in the case upon what he
thinks about the Agrarians. The judge must get a fair judgment. But
of this later.

Dafoe was, so far as we know, the first editor in Canada to advocate
from the beginning of the war a Coalition Government. This was
natural. The _Free Press_ had no faith in the Borden administration of
Bob Rogers, owner of the _Winnipeg Telegram_. By the summer of 1916 it
was into a Coalition campaign. A year later when the Premier came back
from England declaring for conscription and inviting Laurier to join in
a Coalition, the _Free Press_ supported him.

Why this anxiety? We must pull off a bit of the makeup to find out.
The _Free Press_ was a Liberal paper. It supported Laurier in the
West. But the older it grew the more clearly Dafoe and his associates
saw that the man who had created the two new Western Provinces could
not hold them. Other gods were now arising. Their organ was the
_Grain Growers' Guide_; their parliaments were in grain growers'
conventions; their policy was radical Liberalism. The Liberal organ of
a Wheat City could not consistently antagonize this radical movement.
The farmers must be studied. So far as they could strengthen
Liberalism by becoming a Radical wing, they must be encouraged. At the
point where they developed an extreme left away from the party they
must be checked. The _Free Press_ which was yet to fight an economic
revolution must not itself be revolutionary.

This leads up to policy in Empire. The paper had gone against Borden
in 1911. It was against the taxation Navy of Borden even though it
could see the danger of war ahead. It was opposed to the whole
super-Tory idea of a centralized British commonwealth of nations. It
"hung the hide" of Lionel Curtis and his Round Table propaganda clubs
to the Canadian National fence. It argued for "a progressive
development in Canadian self-government to the point of the attainment
of sovereign power to be followed by an alliance with