hat?

These are some of the unpredictables. Even the answer Beaverbrook
himself might give to-day might be challenged by his action of to-morrow.
But this man has always succeeded in finance when a country was
prosperous, and in politics when the nation was confronted by emergency.
He is still too ambitious to adjourn permanently to Leatherhead, Surrey;
too young to write his memoirs. England is a new world. And it may
be--unless he has already alienated his personality from his genius--that
one of its picturesque discoverers will be Lord Beaverbrook.

Meanwhile he remarks that most of his friends are in Canada. One misses
at least a fumbling guess, if in the days to come he will not value those
friends, whoever they may be, more than he ever did when he was making
millions here or merging politicians over there. Such a man seldom moves
his forces just for parade. As Aitken used this country to get himself
preferment in England on account of the Empire, so it may be suspected
that he has used England--not impossibly--to reclaim in this country
whatever credit he lost some time before he left it.

Meanwhile until the Government of Great Britain finds some better
function for this phenomenon, we recommend that he be made the official
economic investigator of the Empire. Up to the present this has been a
pastime for leisured travellers like Lord Southesk, Sir Charles Dilke,
and Rider Haggard. A man with Beaverbrook's ability to analyze economic
conditions and gain the confidence of men in high positions could be of
incalculable value in getting a thorough survey of the commercial and
political resources of a commonwealth which as yet nobody seems to
understand. After that the Government might well make him Viceroy of
India, where he might apply his talent for group-coalition to the great
problem of constitutional Home Rule.

CONCLUSION

A Canadian newspaperman once flippantly asked the late W. T. Stead:

"What do you think about continentalism in North America?"

The answer came just as flippantly:

"Every nation has a right to go to the devil in its own way. Canada
should not be denied the privilege."

There was a blunt candour about the reply that even from an egotist like
Stead meant infinitely more than the soothing-syrup idealism dispensed by
some of the visiting prophets to this country. Stead did not mean that
in establishing independence of the United States, Canada should cut the
painter