as
beginning to be some nucleus of a foreign settlement. He could talk a
little Cree and he learned the jargon of several countries in Europe.
He saw the farmers arise, and railways begin, and little villages dot
the skyline, and here and there an elevator, when a box car was looked
at by a trailsman as a small boy gapes at a circus parade.

Calder lived in Regina when politics was born. He shares with Frank
Oliver the memory of the day when Nicholas Flood Davin was the wonder
orator of the West, and when freight-carters from Winnipeg to Edmonton
via Saskatoon, which was then a temperance colony, carried demijohns of
whisky on traders' permits to make everybody at home ingloriously
drunk, including the mounted police. He recalls the day when the first
lieutenant-governor was inaugurated in Regina and what Frank Oliver
said about it. Four years he was Deputy Commissioner of Education for
the Territories up till the inauguration of two new Provinces when,
travelling on a thousand miles of new railway and over the old main
line of the C.P.R., Laurier paid his first visit to the Great West and
discovered as one of its greatest potentialities J. A. Calder, who
under Premier Scott became Provincial Treasurer and Commissioner of
Education.

To people outside Saskatchewan--even in Alberta, he was very little
known--Calder has always been a somewhat nebulous figure; to some
critics, a rather suspicious character; but always--clever. Being a
Sphinx he never courted popularity and seldom got it. Scott was
brilliant, popular and impulsive. His chief executive in Education,
Railways and Telephones and Premier _de facto_ during more than half of
Scott's term, was cold and calculating. The West prefers warm-blooded
politicians. Calder succeeded in spite of his manner, or his mask, or
whatever it may have been; and he did it by a penetrating knowledge of
the country, a superb capacity as administrator and a talent for
keeping out of trouble. He was no man for prima donna scenes. Even
the Education Department, a witch's cauldron of troubles over the
Separate School question in the new provinces, never entangled him in
theatricals. He was unpopular with the Opposition as soon as the new
Government began, because he was regarded as a Civil Service
interloper. What business had a school inspector in politics, and in a
Cabinet?

Calder demonstrated that best when he handed over the educational
cauldron to Scott and became M