ere not raising Old Flag wheat.

How far Clark fell in line with all the doctrines of the United Grain
Growers, I do not know. But one thing clear about this insurgent is that
he has always stood four-square for the British connection--and for all
that it means to Canada. Clark is a Britisher. He still has his English
accent. You would spot him at once as a transplanted Englishman. He is
prouder of being a Briton in Canada than he ever would have been in
England. Clark never forgot--Manchester and Cobden. He stood among the
wheat and saw the Empire.

When the War came and his adopted Province of Alberta for a long while
held the lead in enlistments for war, no man was happier in the grim
outlook than the member for Red Deer. The War to him was a great
emergence of Liberalism the world over when Peace should bring Free
Humanity, Free wheat, Free trade. Why not? His son went to the war--and
he lost him. His speech on the Military Service Act was in many respects
the best of all in that debate, not in rhetoric, but in logical virility.
It was a howitzer broadside, slow, deliberate, but every shot a hit. His
old leader had already declined a belated offer of Coalition and was now
opposing conscription and arguing for amendment by Referendum. In all
his life he never got from a political foe such a searchlight on his soul
as his once devoted follower gave him in this speech.

Laurier had previously executed the Nationalist dodge of taking refuge
behind the Militia Act, asserting that it was right to enforce that Act
calling out the Militia for the defence of Canada; to which Clark replied:

"England is fighting this war wherever she sees the turban of a Turk or
the helmet of a Teuton. She is fighting it in Egypt, Mesopotamia, in
Macedonia, in Belgium--most of all in France. . . . America, whose
independence had been fought in a struggle of blood for sound fiscal
ideas was now immortalizing her reunion with Britain, her old
enemy. . . . If organized labour was opposed to conscription, so much
the worse for labour, whose own trades unions were a form of
conscription; in England he had never named either lord or labour with a
capital L. . . . Canada should be in the war to her last man and her
last dollar. . . . As to the referendum amendment, it was fathered by
the man who down to his attitude on this question had gone into history
as the greatest of all Canadians, but who had applauded Pugsley when he
arg