ELEVEN
The Candidacy of Mr. Smith
"Boys," said Mr. Smith to the two hostlers, stepping out on to the
sidewalk in front of the hotel,--"hoist that there British Jack over
the place and hoist her up good."
Then he stood and watched the flag fluttering in the wind. "Billy,"
he said to the desk clerk, "get a couple more and put them up on the
roof of the caff behind the hotel. Wire down to the city and get a
quotation on a hundred of them. Take them signs 'American Drinks' out
of the bar. Put up noo ones with 'British Beer at all Hours'; clear
out the rye whiskey and order in Scotch and Irish, and then go up to
the printing office and get me them placards."
Then another thought struck Mr. Smith.
"Say, Billy," he said, "wire to the city for fifty pictures of King
George. Get 'em good, and get 'em coloured. It don't matter what they
cost."
"All right, sir," said Billy.
"And Billy," called Mr. Smith, as still another thought struck him
(indeed, the moment Mr. Smith went into politics you could see these
thoughts strike him like waves), "get fifty pictures of his father,
old King Albert."
"All right, sir."
"And say, I tell you, while you're at it, get some of the old queen,
Victorina, if you can. Get 'em in mourning, with a harp and one of
them lions and a three-pointed prong."
It was on the morning after the Conservative Convention. Josh Smith
had been chosen the candidate. And now the whole town was covered
with flags and placards and there were bands in the streets every
evening, and noise and music and excitement that went on from morning
till night.
Election times are exciting enough even in the city. But there the
excitement dies down in business hours. In Mariposa there aren't any
business hours and the excitement goes on all the time.
Mr. Smith had carried the Convention before him. There had been a
feeble attempt to put up Nivens. But everybody knew that he was a
lawyer and a college man and wouldn't have a chance by a man with a
broader outlook like Josh Smith.
So the result was that Smith was the candidate and there were
placards out all over the town with SMITH AND BRITISH ALLEGIANCE in
big letters, and people were wearing badges with Mr. Smith's face on
one side and King George's on the other, and the fruit store next to
the hotel had been cleaned out and turned into committee rooms with a
gang of workers smoking cigars in it all day and half the night.
There were other placards, too, with BAGSHAW AND LIBERTY, BAGSHAW AND
PROSPERITY, VOTE FOR THE OLD MISSINABA STANDARD BEARER, and up town
beside the Mariposa House there were the Bagshaw committee rooms with
a huge white streamer across the street, and with a gang of Bagshaw
workers smoking their heads off.
But Mr. Smith had an estimate made which showed that nearly two
cigars to one were smoked in his committee rooms as compared with the
Liberals. It was the first time in five elections that the
Conservative had been able to make such a showing as that.
One might mention, too, that there were Drone placards out,--five or
six of them,--little things about the size of a pocket handkerchief,
with a statement that "Mr. Edward Drone solicits the votes of the
electors of Missinaba County." But you would never notice them. And
when Drone tried to put up a streamer across the Main Street with
DRONE AND HONESTY the wind carried it away into the lake.
The fight was really between Smith and Bagshaw, and everybody knew it
from the start.
I wish that I were able to narrate all the phases and the turns of
the great contest from the opening of the campaign till the final
polling day. But it would take volumes.
First of all, of course, the trade question was hotly discussed in
the two newspapers of Mariposa, and the Newspacket and the
Times-Herald literally bristled with statistics. Then came interviews
with the candidates and the expression of their convictions in regard
to tariff questions.
"Mr. Smith," said the reporter of the Mariposa Newspacket, "we'd like
to get your views of the effect of the proposed reduction of the
differential duties."
"By gosh, Pete," said Mr. Smith, "you can search me. Have a cigar."
"What do you think, Mr. Smith, would be the result of lowering the ad
valorem British preference and admitting American goods at a
reciprocal rate?"
"It's a corker, ain't it?" answered Mr. Smith. "What'll you take,
lager or domestic?"
And in that short dialogue Mr. Smith showed that he had
instantaneously grasped the whole method of dealing with the press.
The interview in the paper next day said that Mr. Smith, while
unwilling to state positively that the principle of tariff
discrimination was at variance with sound fiscal science, was firmly
of opinion that any reciprocal interchange of tariff preferences with
the United States must inevitably lead to a serious per capita
reduction of the national industry.
"Mr. Smith," said the chairman of a delegation of the manufacturers
of Mariposa, "what do you propose to do in regard to the tariff if
you're elected?"
"Boys," answered Mr. Smith, "I'll put her up so darned high they
won't never get her down again."
"Mr. Smith," said the chairman of another delegation, "I'm an old
free trader--"
"Put it there," said Mr. Smith, "so'm I. There ain't nothing like
it."
"What do you think about imperial defence?" asked another questioner.
"Which?" said Mr. Smith.
"Imperial defence."
"Of what?"
"Of everything."
"Who says it?" said Mr. Smith.
"Everybody is talking of it."
"What do the Conservative boys at Ottaway think about it?" answered
Mr. Smith.
"They're all for it."
"Well, I'm fer it too," said Mr. Smith.
These little conversations represented only the first stage, the
argumentative stage of the great contest. It was during this period,
for example, that the Mariposa Newspacket absolutely proved that the
price of hogs in Mariposa was decimal six higher than the price of
oranges in Southern California and that the average decennial import
of eggs into Missinaba County had increased four decimal six eight
two in the last fifteen years more than the import of lemons in New
Orleans.
Figures of this kind made the people think. Most certainly.
After all this came the organizing stage and after that the big
public meetings and the rallies. Perhaps you have never seen a county
being "organized." It is a wonderful sight.
First of all the Bagshaw men drove through crosswise in top buggies
and then drove through it again lengthwise. Whenever they met a
farmer they went in and ate a meal with him, and after the meal they
took him out to the buggy and gave him a drink. After that the man's
vote was absolutely solid until it was tampered with by feeding a
Conservative.
In fact, the only way to show a farmer that you are in earnest is to
go in and eat a meal with him. If you won't eat it, he won't vote for
you. That is the recognized political test.
But, of course, just as soon as the Bagshaw men had begun to get the
farming vote solidified, the Smith buggies came driving through in
the other direction, eating meals and distributing cigars and turning
all the farmers back into Conservatives.
Here and there you might see Edward Drone, the Independent candidate,
wandering round from farm to farm in the dust of the political
buggies. To each of the farmers he explained that he pledged himself
to give no bribes, to spend no money and to offer no jobs, and each
one of them gripped him warmly by the hand and showed him the way to
the next farm.
After the organization of the county there came the period of the
public meetings and the rallies and the joint debates between the
candidates and their supporters.
I suppose there was no place in the whole Dominion where the trade
question--the Reciprocity question--was threshed out quite so
thoroughly and in quite such a national patriotic spirit as in
Mariposa. For a month, at least, people talked of nothing else. A man
would stop another in the street and tell him that he had read last
night that the average price of an egg in New York was decimal ought
one more than the price of an egg in Mariposa, and the other man
would stop the first one later in the day and tell him that the
average price of a hog in Idaho was point six of a cent per pound
less (or more,--he couldn't remember which for the moment) than the
average price of beef in Mariposa.
People lived on figures of this sort, and the man who could
remember most of them stood out as a born leader.
But of course it was at the public meetings that these things were
most fully discussed. It would take volumes to do full justice to all
the meetings that they held in Missinaba County. But here and there
single speeches stood out as masterpieces of convincing oratory.
Take, for example, the speech of John Henry Bagshaw at the Tecumseh
Corners School House. The Mariposa Times-Herald said next day that
that speech would go down in history, and so it will,--ever so far
down.
Anyone who has heard Bagshaw knows what an impressive speaker he is,
and on this night when he spoke with the quiet dignity of a man old
in years and anxious only to serve his country, he almost surpassed
himself. Near the end of his speech somebody dropped a pin, and the
noise it made in falling fairly rattled the windows.
"I am an old man now, gentlemen," Bagshaw said, "and the time must
soon come when I must not only leave politics, but must take my way
towards that goal from which no traveller returns."
There was a deep hush when Bagshaw said this. It was understood to
imply that he thought of going to the United States.
"Yes, gentlemen, I am an old man, and I wish, when my time comes to
go, to depart leaving as little animosity behind me as possible. But
before I do go, I want it pretty clearly understood that there are
more darn scoundrels in the Conservative party than ought to be
tolerated in any decent community. I bear," he continued, "malice
towards none and I wish to speak with gentleness to all, but what I
will say is that how any set of rational responsible men could
nominate such a skunk as the Conservative candidate passes the bounds
of my comprehension. Gentlemen, in the present campaign there is no
room for vindictive abuse. Let us rise to a higher level than that.
They tell me that my opponent, Smith, is a common saloon keeper. Let
it pass. They tell me that he has stood convicted of horse stealing,
that he is a notable perjurer, that he is known as the
blackest-hearted liar in Missinaba County. Let us not speak of it.
Let no whisper of it pass our lips.
"No, gentlemen," continued Bagshaw, pausing to take a drink of water,
"let us rather consider this question on the high plane of national
welfare. Let us not think of our own particular interests but let us
consider the good of the country at large. And to do this, let me
present to you some facts in regard to the price of barley in
Tecumseh Township."
Then, amid a deep stillness, Bagshaw read off the list of prices of
sixteen kinds of grain in sixteen different places during sixteen
years.
"But let me turn," Bagshaw went on to another phase of the national
subject, "and view for a moment the price of marsh hay in Missinaba
County--"
When Bagshaw sat down that night it was felt that a Liberal vote in
Tecumseh Township was a foregone conclusion.
But here they hadn't reckoned on the political genius of Mr. Smith.
When he heard next day of the meeting, he summoned some of his
leading speakers to him and he said:
"Boys, they're beating us on them statissicks. Ourn ain't good
enough."
Then he turned to Nivens and he said:
"What was them figures you had here the other night?"
Nivens took out a paper and began reading.
"Stop," said Mr. Smith, "what was that figure for bacon?"
"Fourteen million dollars," said Nivens.
"Not enough," said Mr. Smith, "make it twenty. They'll stand for it,
them farmers."
Nivens changed it.
"And what was that for hay?"
"Two dollars a ton."
"Shove it up to four," said Mr. Smith: "And I tell you," he added,
"if any of them farmers says the figures ain't correct, tell them to
go to Washington and see for themselves; say that if any man wants
the proof of your figures let him go over to England and ask,--tell
him to go straight to London and see it all for himself in the
books."
After this, there was no more trouble over statistics. I must say
though that it is a wonderfully convincing thing to hear trade
figures of this kind properly handled. Perhaps the best man on this
sort of thing in the campaign was Mullins, the banker. A man of his
profession simply has to have figures of trade and population and
money at his fingers' ends and the effect of it in public speaking is
wonderful.
No doubt you have listened to speakers of this kind, but I question
whether you have ever heard anything more typical of the sort of
effect that I allude to than Mullins's speech at the big rally at the
Fourth Concession.
Mullins himself, of course, knows the figures so well that he never
bothers to write them into notes and the effect is very striking.
"Now, gentlemen," he said very earnestly, "how many of you know just
to what extent the exports of this country have increased in the last
ten years? How many could tell what per cent. of increase there has
been in one decade of our national importation?"--then Mullins paused
and looked round. Not a man knew it.
"I don't recall," he said, "exactly the precise amount myself,--not
at this moment,--but it must be simply tremendous. Or take the
question of population," Mullins went on, warming up again as a born
statistician always does at the proximity of figures, "how many of
you know, how many of you can state, what has been the decennial
percentage increase in our leading cities--?"
There he paused, and would you believe it, not a man could state it.
"I don't recall the exact figures," said Mullins, "but I have them at
home and they are positively colossal."
But just in one phase of the public speaking, the candidacy of Mr.
Smith received a serious set-back.
It had been arranged that Mr. Smith should run on a platform of
total prohibition. But they soon found that it was a mistake. They
had imported a special speaker from the city, a grave man with a
white tie, who put his whole heart into the work and would take
nothing for it except his expenses and a sum of money for each
speech. But beyond the money, I say, he would take nothing.
He spoke one night at the Tecumseh Corners social hall at the same
time when the Liberal meeting was going on at the Tecumseh Corners
school house.
"Gentlemen," he said, as he paused half way in his speech,--"while
we are gathered here in earnest discussion, do you know what is
happening over at the meeting place of our opponents? Do you know
that seventeen bottles of rye whiskey were sent out from the town
this afternoon to that innocent and unsuspecting school house?
Seventeen bottles of whiskey hidden in between the blackboard and the
wall, and every single man that attends that meeting,--mark my
words, every single man,--will drink his fill of the abominable stuff
at the expense of the Liberal candidate!"
Just as soon as the speaker said this, you could see the Smith men at
the meeting look at one another in injured surprise, and before the
speech was half over the hall was practically emptied.
After that the total prohibition plank was changed and the committee
substituted a declaration in favour of such a form of restrictive
license as should promote temperance while encouraging the
manufacture of spirituous liquors, and by a severe regulation of the
liquor traffic should place intoxicants only in the hands of those
fitted to use them.
Finally there came the great day itself, the Election Day that
brought, as everybody knows, the crowning triumph of Mr. Smith's
career. There is no need to speak of it at any length, because it has
become a matter of history.
In any case, everybody who has ever seen Mariposa knows just what
election day is like. The shops, of course,
are, as a matter of custom, all closed, and the bar rooms are all
closed by law so that you have to go in by the back way. All the
people are in their best clothes and at first they walk up and down
the street in a solemn way just as they do on the twelfth of July and
on St. Patrick's Day, before the fun begins. Everybody keeps looking
in at the different polling places to see if anybody else has voted
yet, because, of course, nobody cares to vote first for fear of being
fooled after all and voting on the wrong side.
Most of all did the supporters of Mr. Smith, acting under his
instructions, hang back from the poll in the early hours. To Mr.
Smith's mind, voting was to be conducted on the same plan as
bear-shooting.
"Hold back your votes, boys," he said, "and don't be too eager. Wait
till she begins to warm up and then let 'em have it good and hard."
In each of the polling places in Mariposa there is a returning
officer and with him are two scrutineers, and the electors, I say,
peep in and out like mice looking into a trap. But if once the
scrutineers get a man well into the polling booth, they push him in
behind a little curtain and make him vote. The voting, of course, is
by secret ballot, so that no one except the scrutineers and the
returning officer and the two or three people who may be round the
poll can possibly tell how a man has voted.
That's how it comes about that the first results are often so
contradictory and conflicting. Sometimes the poll is badly arranged
and the scrutineers are unable to see properly just how the ballots
are being marked and they count up the Liberals and Conservatives in
different ways. Often, too, a voter makes his mark so hurriedly and
carelessly that they have to pick it out of the ballot box and look
at it to see what it is.
I suppose that may have been why it was that in Mariposa the results
came out at first in such a conflicting way. Perhaps that was how it
was that the first reports showed that Edward Drone the Independent
candidate was certain to win. You should have seen how the excitement
grew upon
the streets when the news was circulated. In the big rallies and
meetings of the Liberals and Conservatives, everybody had pretty well
forgotten all about Drone, and when the news got round at about four
o'clock that the Drone vote was carrying the poll, the people were
simply astounded. Not that they were not pleased. On the contrary.
They were delighted. Everybody came up to Drone and shook hands and
congratulated him and told him that they had known all along that
what the country wanted was a straight, honest, non-partisan
representation. The Conservatives said openly that they were sick of
party, utterly done with it, and the Liberals said that they hated
it. Already three or four of them had taken Drone aside and explained
that what was needed in the town was a straight, clean, nonpartisan
post-office, built on a piece of ground of a strictly non-partisan
character, and constructed under contracts that were not tainted and
smirched with party affiliation. Two or three men were willing to
show to Drone just where a piece of ground of this character could be
bought. They told him too that in the matter of the postmastership
itself they had nothing against Trelawney, the present postmaster, in
any personal sense, and would say nothing against him except merely
that he was utterly and hopelessly unfit for his job and that if
Drone believed, as he had said he did, in a purified civil service,
he ought to begin by purifying Trelawney.
Already Edward Drone was beginning to feel something of what it meant
to hold office and there was creeping into his manner the quiet
self-importance which is the first sign of conscious power.
In fact, in that brief half-hour of office, Drone had a chance to see
something of what it meant. Henry McGinnis came to him and asked
straight out for a job as federal census-taker on the ground that he
was hard up and had been crippled with rheumatism all winter. Nelson
Williamson asked for the post of wharf master on the plea that he had
been laid up with sciatica all winter and was absolutely fit for
nothing. Erasmus Archer asked him if he could get his boy Pete into
one of the departments at Ottawa, and made a strong case of it by
explaining that he had tried his cussedest to get Pete a job anywhere
else and it was simply impossible. Not that Pete wasn't a willing
boy, but he was slow,--even his father admitted it,--slow as the
devil, blast him, and with no head for figures and unfortunately he'd
never had the schooling to bring him on. But if Drone could get him
in at Ottawa, his father truly believed it would be the very place
for him. Surely in the Indian Department or in the Astronomical
Branch or in the New Canadian Navy there must be any amount of
opening for a boy like this? And to all of these requests Drone found
himself explaining that he would take the matter under his very
earnest consideration and that they must remember that he had to
consult his colleagues and not merely follow the dictates of his own
wishes. In fact, if he had ever in his life had any envy of Cabinet
Ministers, he lost it in this hour.
But Drone's hour was short. Even before the poll had closed in
Mariposa, the news came sweeping in, true or false, that Bagshaw was
carrying the county. The second concession had gone for Bagshaw in a
regular landslide, six votes to only two for Smith,--and all down the
township line road (where the hay farms are) Bagshaw was said to be
carrying all before him.
Just as soon as that news went round the town, they launched the
Mariposa band of the Knights of Pythias (every man in it is a
Liberal) down the Main Street with big red banners in front of it
with the motto BAGSHAW FOREVER in letters a foot high. Such rejoicing
and enthusiasm began to set in as you never saw. Everybody crowded
round Bagshaw on the steps of the Mariposa House and shook his hand
and said they were proud to see the day and that the Liberal party
was the glory of the Dominion and that as for this idea of
non-partisan politics the very thought of it made them sick. Right
away in the committee rooms they began to organize the demonstration
for the evening with lantern slides and speeches and they arranged
for a huge bouquet to be presented to Bagshaw on the platform by four
little girls (all Liberals) all dressed in white.
And it was just at this juncture, with one hour of voting left, that
Mr. Smith emerged from his committee rooms and turned his voters on
the town, much as the Duke of Wellington sent the whole line to the
charge at Waterloo. From every committee room and sub-committee room
they poured out in flocks with blue badges fluttering on their coats.
"Get at it, boys," said Mr. Smith, "vote and keep on voting till they
make you quit."
Then he turned to his campaign assistant. "Billy," he said, "wire
down to the city that I'm elected by an overwhelming majority and
tell them to wire it right back. Send word by telephone to all the
polling places in the county that the hull town has gone solid
Conservative and tell them to send the same news back here. Get
carpenters and tell them to run up a platform in front of the hotel;
tell them to take the bar door clean off its hinges and be all ready
the minute the poll quits."
It was that last hour that did it. Just as soon as the big posters
went up in the windows of the Mariposa Newspacket with the
telegraphic despatch that Josh Smith was reported in the city to be
elected, and was followed by the messages from all over the county,
the voters hesitated no longer. They had waited, most of them, all
through the day, not wanting to make any error in their vote, but
when they saw the Smith men crowding into the polls and heard the
news from the outside, they went solid in one great stampede, and by
the time the poll was declared closed at five o'clock there was no
shadow of doubt that the county was saved and that Josh Smith was
elected for Missinaba.
I wish you could have witnessed the scene in Mariposa that evening.
It would have done your heart good;--such joy, such public rejoicing
as you never saw. It turned out that there wasn't really a Liberal in
the whole town and that there never had been. They were all
Conservatives and had been for years and years. Men who had voted,
with pain and sorrow in their hearts, for the Liberal party for
twenty years, came out that evening and owned up straight that they
were Conservatives. They said they could stand the strain no longer
and simply had to confess. Whatever the sacrifice might mean, they
were prepared to make it.
Even Mr. Golgotha Gingham, the undertaker, came out and admitted that
in working for John Henry Bagshaw he'd been going straight against
his conscience. He said that right from the first he had had his
misgivings. He said it had haunted him. Often at night when he would
be working away quietly, one of these sudden misgivings would
overcome him so that he could hardly go on with his embalming. Why,
it appeared that on the very first day when reciprocity was proposed,
he had come home and said to Mrs. Gingham that he thought it simply
meant selling out the country. And the strange thing was that ever
so many others had just the same misgivings. Trelawney admitted that
he had said to Mrs. Trelawney that it was madness, and Jeff Thorpe,
the barber, had, he admitted, gone home to his dinner, the first day
reciprocity was talked of, and said to Mrs. Thorpe that it would
simply kill business in the country and introduce a cheap, shoddy,
American form of haircut that would render true loyalty impossible.
To think that Mrs. Gingham and Mrs. Trelawney and Mrs. Thorpe had
known all this for six months and kept quiet about it! Yet I think
there were a good many Mrs. Ginghams in the country. It is merely
another proof that no woman is fit for politics.
The demonstration that night in Mariposa will never be forgotten. The
excitement in the streets, the torchlights, the music of the band of
the Knights of Pythias (an organization which is conservative in all
but name), and above all the speeches and the patriotism.
They had put up a big platform in front of the hotel, and on it were
Mr. Smith and his chief workers, and behind them was a perfect forest
of flags. They presented a huge bouquet of flowers to Mr. Smith,
handed to him by four little girls in white,--the same four that I
spoke of above, for it turned out that they were all Conservatives.
Then there were the speeches. Judge Pepperleigh spoke and said that
there was no need to dwell on the victory that they had achieved,
because it was history; there was no occasion to speak of what part
he himself had played, within the limits of his official position,
because what he had done was henceforth a matter of history; and
Nivens, the lawyer, said that he would only say just a few words,
because anything that he might have done was now history; later
generations, he said, might read it but it was not for him to speak
of it, because it belonged now to the history of the country. And,
after them, others spoke in the same strain and all refused
absolutely to dwell on the subject (for more than half an hour) on
the ground that anything that they might have done was better left
for future generations to investigate. And no doubt this was very
true, as to some things, anyway.
Mr. Smith, of course, said nothing. He didn't have to,--not for four
years,--and he knew it.
