114
ƌŽŬĞŶ WƌŽŵŝƐĞƐ
uneasy Union coalition continued to exist in an organizational limbo,
uncertain of leadership, unsure of its future policies, and gradually
many of the Liberal Unionists returned to the party of Laurier. The
lack of direction was partially corrected when Borden chose Arthur
Meighen as his successor in July 1920. The Governor General, the
Duke of Devonshire, wrote of the new Prime Minister that he is “dis-
tinctly clever, keen, and a good parliamentarian and has, moreover,
the advantage of being young and active.” All this was true, but so was
Henri Bourassa’s description of Meighen as a “revolutionnaire à froid.”
Devonshire was not the shrewdest of observers, but he was certainly
correct when he noted that Meighen’s “great difficulty will be in the
Province of Quebec.”
31
Arthur Meighen’s trials with French Canada have been illuminated
by Professor Roger Graham and there is little point in attempting to du-
plicate his efforts. All that needs to be said is that Meighen wasunable
to attract French Canadians of genuine stature to his side (his three
French-Canadian ministers in 1921—Normand, Monty, and Belley—
were certainly not strong men), and lacking an effective lieutenant he
was never able to overcome the bad press he had received in Quebec
during the Great War. To be sure, the Liberals did their best to ensure
that Meighen’s “bloody hands” were not forgotten, but much of the
resentment would have existed in any case. Meighen himself spoke
openly about the issue. “I never try to ride two horses,” he said in Que-
bec. “I favoured conscription. I introduced the Military Service Act.
I spoke for it time and time again in the House of Commons, and in
every province in the Dominion. I did because I thought it was right.”
32
This was magnificent, but it was not Canadian politics, and as one
French-Canadian nationalist writer noted, Meighen “reste attaché aux
principales erreurs qui ont causé sa perte.”
33
Nor was the new Prime Minister helped much by his English-Ca-
nadian supporters. The Toronto
Telegram
was still fighting the war
each day, and one Conservative was moved to write that the
Telegram
thinks “that it is helping to weaken the Liberal Party by picturing it as
one which is dominated by French Canadian slackers ...”; the editors
seem to “overlook the fact that anything it may gain in that direction is
only going to make more difficult the swinging of the French Canadian
block into line on the [tariff] issue.”
34
Nothing, however, could keep the
Orange fire out of Black Jack Robinson’s newspaper.
35
Nor, it seemed,
could anything weaken the distrust that many Ontario Conservatives
had for the Liberals who had joined them in 1917 and who remained
with them still.
36
