n eminence which as
yet he scarcely understood.

I was introduced as--say, Mr. Smith.

"Oh?" he said, wearily. "Yes, I've read your articles. Er--Tom Smith,
isn't it?"

But Tom was not the name, I had scarcely time to say, and it made no
difference. I should like to have shoo'd away the crowd and let him
call me Jake just for a few minutes to get the point of feeling of this
young man--though he is nearly 50--on how it feels to be Premier
without a general election.

There may not be as much finality, but there is sometimes as much
wisdom, in the choice of a leader by a small group as in his election
by the people. Majorities frequently rule without wisdom. In
accepting the gift of an almost worn-out Premiership and a year later
entering the most significant general election ever held in Canada, at
least since 1878, Arthur Meighen falls back upon his courage without
much comfort from ordinary ambition. He faces a battle whose armies
are new, pledged to hold what he has against two enemy groups, and to
hold more than John A. Macdonald fought to get, without the sense of
one great party against another such as Macdonald had. No Premier ever
went into a general election with so little intimate support from "the
old party", with such a certainty that whichever party wins as against
the others cannot win a working majority without coalition, and with
the sensation that the party he leads is already what remains of a
coalition.

Whenever I see Meighen I feel like hastening home to "cram" on
citizenship for an examination. I behold in him picnics neglected and
even feminine society deferred for the sake of toiling up a political
Parnassus. In his veneration for constituted authority I can
comprehend something of the Jap's banzais to the Mikado before he
commits harikari.

Whatever there is, or is not, in the character of Arthur Meighen, he
has a draw upon other men. Any public task that he has in hand looks
like a load that challenges other men to help him lift. A really
intelligent camera would show in his face a mixture of wholesome
pugnacity, concentration of thought and feminine tenderness. He feels
like a big intellectual boy who unless mother looks after him will get
indigestion or neurasthenia. Sometimes men pity their leaders.
Meighen, with his intensity and his thought before action looks such a
frail wisp of a man. The last time I saw him in public he was
bare-headed on an open-air stage, a dus