net, probably as Minister of the
Interior. But he was suddenly and humdrumly designated for the Senate.

Apparently the Sphinx is not a great deal concerned over the fact that
his action in the case would throw some light on the sort of government
we may expect, and the kind of man we are privileged to conjecture Mr.
Calder to be. He seems to take very little interest in what any one
thinks about him. He accompanied the Premier on his Western trip. Now
and then he made a speech. He was heckled. He was in the land of his
critics, where he was unofficially known as "Jim". What did he mean by
staying in a Government which was supposed to have finished its work in
1919? Was he coming back as a Liberal? Had he no longer any
fellow-feeling for the farmers among whom he had lived for so long?
The Sphinx did not directly say. He was publicly and conventionally
endorsing the Premier, who was well able to speak for himself on behalf
of the administration.

Calder was headmaster of Moosejaw High School when he was twenty-three,
in the year 1891. He must have learned reticence then. Up in
Edmonton, a few years later one heard considerably of Goggin, the
speechmaking educationist of the prairie; rarely or never of Calder,
who about that time was Inspector of Schools for the Territories, not
yet provinces. The silent young inspector must have looked like the
reincarnation of Socrates as he drove--sometimes a four-horse team on a
buckboard--through the sloughs of the Northwest. No prairie doctor
with a radius of fifty miles, none but a pioneer missionary like
McDougall or Robertson, ever had so glorious a chance to study what the
life of a new country was going to be, as this inspector toiling
hundreds of miles over a land, where, if he stopped at three
school-houses a week, he was doing a good average in bad weather.

Regina had no party politics then. All it had was the mounted police
and a leg-boot legislature. Every man was then a trailsman. In
Calder's time as Inspector, there were only 400 miles of railway north
of the C.P.R. main line--the two branches to Prince Albert and to
Edmonton. It was only in the last year or two of this buckboard and
broncho inspectorate that there were even any Doukhobors in that part
of the world to bring back the days of Adam and Eve. He saw all the
"nationals" beginning to arrive. He could put his finger on a gaunt
anemic map of the Territories and point out just where there w