in
disaster.

Before he was thirty-five Max Aitken had become a multi-millionaire. He
worked much as clever but humbler men have invented formulae to beat
bookmakers at the races. Having done all this, at so early an age, what
was left? Superficially we should have said--public life. He had the
money, the talent, the leisure. Canada had the need.

But Max Aitken never so much as became a pound-keeper in Canada, not
because he had not the opportunity, but because he had the shrewd sense
to feel that the land where he had made "his pile" was not the land in
which to serve his country. To serve a nation means as a rule to deal
directly with the public. Max Aitken had never dealt with the public.
Neither does he yet--except indirectly through a big daily newspaper of
phenomenal circulation. On his last visit to Canada he was invited to
public functions. He consistently declined; not because he shunned
popularity or hated the limelight, but because he would not have felt
comfortable. In one of his speeches he pointed out that the securities
which he put on the market years ago were all now listed as paying
ventures. It was more comfortable to make that remark as a returned
celebrity than to have made it as a citizen.

His own story of why he went to England, and stayed there, is ingenuous.
He said that he went in order to do business; that he tried to talk
business; that the public men with whom he had conference insisted on
talking politics; that he succumbed and stayed, winning a seat in the
Commons, and almost before an ordinary man could have said "Jack
Robinson", he was hobnobbing with men the calibre of Bonar Law, Lloyd
George, Northcliffe.

Only fragmentary accounts of Beaverbrook's political history in England
have as a rule drifted over here. To show what an amazing story it is,
nothing can be better than to quote a curiously apt summary written for
two Canadian periodicals by Arthur Baxter, who for some years now has
been a sort of Boswell to Beaverbrook.

* * * * * *

In 1910 captured the seat for Ashton-under-Lyne.

In 1912 a vigorous and successful attack on Lloyd George concerning
finance matters in the House.

From 1911 to 1914 he entered parliamentary intrigue and gradually his
home at Leatherhead became a Mecca for puzzled politicians.

During this time somebody made him a Knight.

The Irish situation was more than threatening; the tariff issue was
cau