nt between Canada and the United
States.

THE SPHINX FROM SASKATCHEWAN

HON. J. A. CALDER

The Hon. J. A. Calder has never seen the Sphinx. But he has a looking
glass. He has never been in Egypt. But he has lived a long while in
Saskatchewan. A man who can continue to know as much as he knows about
the confessional side of government, and who can say so little, has
some claim to be considered--Canada's political Sphinx.

Such a reputation is sometimes enviable. The average public man
babbles. Often he talks to conceal thought or as a substitute for
action. The mental energy needed to turn end for end what some of
these garrulous people say, in order to decipher just what they mean,
is usually more than the wisdom is worth. Calder spares us. He tells
us nothing. His silence may be golden, or it may be just a habit; but
from the known character of Calder it is never the omniscience of
stupidity.

A Sphinx in action may sometimes give himself away. It is not usual
for a Sphinx to do anything except to conceal the riddle. Calder has
all his life been a busy man. He is still in middle age. All but
fourteen years of his life up till 1917 he spent in the West, most of
it in the part now known as Saskatchewan. Ten years ago he was
furtively discussed as successor to Laurier. He is now a
Unionist-Liberal. To give him work in the administration commensurate
with his ability--or somewhere near it--a new department was created in
Immigration. Now he is slated for the Senate!

Little was heard about Calder's department. He had a publicity bureau
which did not spend vast amounts of money on diffusing information.
The department is said to contain a moving picture section, some of
whose films probably creep into Canadian movie houses. But nobody ever
saw a picture of J. A. Calder on a screen. He had a Canadian novelist
as chief of publicity. That novelist might have yearned for the chance
to immortalize his chief in a story, but so long as he is in the pay of
Mr. Calder's department he will continue to yearn. And not even he has
been given to understand why when a reconstructed Liberal like Mr.
Rowell left the Cabinet at the appointment of Premier Meighen, the
Minister of Immigration stayed on. One might surmise that the man who,
a decade ago, looked to some people like an Elisha to Laurier, would
run again in Moosejaw as a National Liberal Conservative with the
expectation of re-entering the Cabi