The National Dream: The Great Railway, 1871-1881 (23 page)

There had been one ironic moment: long established custom decreed that a resolution be moved declaring that the House would proceed with the utmost severity against all persons guilty of bribery and corrupt practices. When that rote issued from the Prime Minister’s lips, it was greeted with derisive cheers and scornful laughter from the Opposition benches. The atmosphere was anything but genial; the air crackled with suppressed antagonism; the usual social amenities attendant on an opening – the easy banter and chaff, the mutual greetings – were absent.

At three that Monday afternoon the members of the Government and Opposition were in their places. Macdonald lounged at his desk to the Speaker’s immediate right, presenting to the world a picture of jaunty indifference. Nearby, in Cartier’s old place, squatted the rotund figure of Langevin, his new Quebec lieutenant, a shrewd and affable man, gentler than Cartier, but embattled now by virtue of his role in the scandal. It was a powerful front bench: Hincks, the aging Hyena, making his last appearance in Parliament, Tilley, the handsome New Brunswicker, untainted by any scandal, and, of course, Tupper, the doughty “Cumberland War Horse,” perhaps the best tactician in the House, poised for the attack. Young George Ross of Middlesex, sitting in the Opposition back-benches and looking over the political heavyweights with a tyro’s eyes, thought that Tupper even in repose looked “as if he had a blizzard secreted somewhere about his person.” The “Fighting Doctor,” as he was called in Nova Scotia, had inherited many of his abilities from his father – a man of dogged character and methodical thought who had been able to read the Old Testament in Hebrew and the New in Greek at the age of nineteen and who, at twenty-one, had become an evangelist with all the forensic powers that calling requires.

Directly across from Macdonald sat Alexander Mackenzie, perhaps the bleakest looking man in the House, whose features might have been carved out of the same granite he himself had fashioned in his days as a stonemason. His desk was piled high with references for the speech that he had been working on all weekend.

The Opposition had a formidable offensive team of its own: Mackenzie, himself, caustic and dry, an expert at invective; Edward Blake, the strongest man in the Grit party, a master of satire whose every word carried conviction, his scorn so withering that he could crush an opponent with a phrase; Cartwright, known as “the Rupert of Debate,” his speeches models of classic purity and polished diction, a coiner of pungent, cutting phrases; the one-armed E. B. Wood,
known as “Big Thunder” because of his roaring speeches, which came freely garnished with scriptural references and resounding passages from the great orators and poets; and, of course, the eloquent, sonorous Huntington. They stared across the no-man’s land of the Commons at their enemies, hungry for the kill.

Both sides were confident of success. Though the Opposition had the public on its side, the Government still had the votes. At this stage of political development, party lines were not yet tightly drawn and whips could not exert the kind of discipline that was eventually to prevail. The Opposition itself was a loose amalgam of Reformers and Clear Grits, working under the umbrella of the Liberal Party. Many of those who supported Macdonald called themselves Independents. In addition there were six members from the new province of Prince Edward Island, who had never sat in the House before. Nobody had a clear idea of how they would vote.

At the close of the Royal Commission hearings, Macdonald counted his supporters and estimated a majority of twenty-five. He held to this estimate through most of October. Lord Dufferin thought it overoptimistic; but he, too, believed the Government could easily weather a vote. Part of the parliamentary struggle, therefore, took place not on the floor of the House but behind the scenes, as one side struggled to hold its supporters and the other strove to capture them. Doubtful members found themselves besieged day and night with promises, cajolery, threats and even bribes. The Prince Edward Islanders were hotly pursued: Mackenzie had made a special trip to the Island before the session with Tupper right behind him, both intent on swaying these new unknown quantities. Amor de Cosmos, the mercurial Victoria member, was besieged by representatives of both sides as soon as he entered Ontario. He stepped off the train at London into the arms of Edward Blake and J. D. Edgar, the Liberal Party whip. When he left Toronto for Ottawa, Senator Alexander Campbell, Macdonald’s old law partner, was practically in his berth. In Ottawa the whiskey flowed as freely as the waters of the Rideau and to such an extent that certain Government supporters, known for their conviviality, were kept under lock and key lest they, in the phrase of the day, be “spirited away” and persuaded to vote contrary to their expressed intentions.

By Monday, October 27, Macdonald could no longer be sure of his majority of twenty-five. The number had dropped to eighteen and then to sixteen; some thought it as low as thirteen. “There is no
country in the world, I imagine, where the rats leave the sinking ship so fast,” Dufferin remarked acidly. But if Macdonald could hold the debate down to three or four days and make one of his powerful speeches early in the game, he could probably win the vote.

This was not to be. Everyone wanted to speak (forty managed to do so); and everyone was on hand. Such a crowded House had not been seen in the short political history of the Dominion. Every seat seemed occupied save one: the elusive Member from Provencher would not be heard from.

The battle was joined shortly after three, once the routine business was dispensed with. An address in reply to the Speech from the Throne was duly moved and seconded. The first clause was read and agreed to. The second was put; and then, as the cheers of the Opposition echoed from the vaulted walls, a grim Mackenzie rose to his feet. He spoke for almost three hours to the continual accompaniment of applause and cries of encouragement from his followers. It was a wickedly effective speech, in which Mackenzie told the House that it was being asked to vote that black was white – that Sir Hugh Allan had simply given his money as a good member of the Conservative Party, though the country had been told “very plainly by that gentleman that he had no party views at all.” Mackenzie wound up with a motion of censure.

When Tupper rose to reply after the dinner recess, the galleries were jammed. The entire first row of the Speaker’s Gallery was occupied by Lady Dufferin and her entourage. It was whispered that the Governor General himself was disguised in the audience. Actually, the eager Dufferin had pleaded with Macdonald “to arrange some little closet for me in the House … a ‘Dionysius ear’ no matter how dark or inconvenient.” Macdonald was too wise to allow such a breach. The idea that a
Globe
reporter, or some sharp-eyed member, might uncover the person of the Queen’s representative trespassing, like a secret agent, on the hallowed ground of the Commons at this moment of crisis, must have sent shivers down his spine. “If, as I believe, we defeat the Opposition … they will be sulky and savage and ready to wreak their vengeance on everybody and everything,” he told the Governor General. Dufferin was forced to get his reports second-hand from his lady and from the press. He concluded that, though the speeches were “enormously long, most of them averaging three or four hours” and “characterized by a kind of rude vigour,” none of them was really talented or brilliant. “It was in fact rather the
encounter of blundering rustics trying to beat out each other’s brains with bludgeons than that of trained lawyers wielding effectual weapons.” It was well for Lord Dufferin that his confidential correspondence with Lord Kimberley did not suffer the same fate as that of Sir Hugh Allan’s with George McMullen.

Tupper, certainly, was a master of the bludgeon. The robust Nova Scotia doctor with the hard, unblinking eyes and the creased, pugnacious face believed in one tactic in debate: attack with every weapon available; admit nothing; pound, hammer, swipe, thrust; if an opponent dares utter a word, batter him down.

He leaped to his feet, rejoicing that “the time has come when I and my colleagues are in a position to discuss this question in the presence of an independent Parliament.” After that barefaced opening, he never let up: The country’s prosperity was being affected. Canada’s fair name was being tarnished. The real plan was to frustrate the building of the railway, nothing more. The sum Allan had contributed was “of an insignificant character.” Public feeling was strongly with the Government. The charges were false and scandalous. All loyal people would regard the Opposition with suspicion. No intelligent person could fail to perceive that they had entirely abandoned their case.

This show of bravado put the House in a spirited mood and the Cumberland War Horse had to trample his way through a thicket of catcalls, derisive cheers and whoops of laughter. Totally undeterred, he galloped on for more than three hours and then gave way to the hero of the Opposition, Lucius Seth Huntington.

Huntington was a different kind of speaker; indeed, every parliamentarian in those days had his own style of address, which was as much his trademark as that of a popular singer in a later age; hence the political nicknames, all of which seemed to deal with this one aspect of parliamentary ability – “Big Thunder,” “War Horse,” “Hyena,” “Rupert of Debate,” “Bismarck” (the last for Peter Mitchell). The craft of public debate was a well-developed art in the Canada of the seventies. The rousing platform address, delivered outdoors at a picnic or a rally, or indoors in a closely packed meeting hall, was the chief means of communication and the prime form of entertainment. Major speeches were published verbatim in the press, as were the full proceedings of Parliament. The oratorical styles of various public figures were dissected and compared. Newspapers and periodicals reviewed the declamatory techniques of star speakers much in the manner of drama critics. A politician’s voice, like an opera singer’s, had to carry like thunder in an age devoid of artificial aids; and, since it was the custom for speakers of opposing views to share the same platform like verbal gladiators, the aspiring public servant needed to be quick on his feet. He also had to be long on stamina. It was nothing for a man like Blake to speak for five hours (indeed, in Blake’s case, anything less than five hours seemed trivial). The sophisticated Dufferin might find Canadian oratory rude and rustic, but it was directed at a rude and rustic audience, not a conclave of British peers. It was no accident that the most successful politicians were often the best speakers. It was this that made the spectacle of Parliament as exciting as Mr. Barnum’s Circus and Menagerie, which had just completed a successful tour of Ontario.

A Huntington speech was honed and polished with great care and delivered in a voice rich in melody. There was more than a hint of the future novelist in his style. With the clock past eleven, Huntington plunged into a spirited defence of his own position and a sardonic attack upon his adversaries, among whom Charles Tupper led all the rest.

At one point, Huntington had the House roaring with laughter as he pounced on Allan’s statement to General Cass that he had suborned twenty-seven of Cartier’s phalanx of forty-five Parliamentary supporters:

“As a mere matter of curiosity, I should like to know who are the twenty-seven.
(Cheers and laughter.)
We have in this House a Sir Hugh Allan brigade consisting of twenty-seven members. We have it upon Sir Hugh Allan’s authority that they were sent here to vote for the Government, and if any of the twenty-seven desire to stand up, I will sit down.
(Loud laughter.)
How delighted that brigade must have been, how their sore toes must have been relieved, when the hon. member for Cumberland in his eloquence wandered off … and when, by and by, in a few words he proceeded to assert that there was no evidence at all of corruption, how these twenty-seven must have
wilted. (Laughter.)
Why, they were the exhibits themselves of their corruption! They were twenty-seven of the thirty-one who had voted down the investigation which I attempted to obtain here.
(Cheers.)
Will the hon. gentleman tell us how many steamships Sir Hugh Allan has, and is there a man to each steamship? Sir Hugh was asked at the Commission how many ships he had, but they had no
need to ask him how many members of Parliament he had, because they had incontestable evidence that Sir Hugh had twenty-seven here.…”

Huntington continued, in the same vein, to twit the Prime Minister for being on the bench, in the dock and prosecutor all at the same time. He wound up, at 1.30, with a glance at the wavering Government supporters, by declaring that “the time comes when they have to choose between fidelity to party and fidelity to country.”

Thus, day after day, the debate see-sawed back and forth. On Wednesday night, a storm broke over Ottawa and the citizens awoke to find their city shrouded in the first snow of winter. But a more important question than the weather hung on every lip: what on earth was wrong with Macdonald? Why had he remained silent? His boasted majority was drifting away “like leaves in the Valley of Vallombrosa” (Dufferin’s literary style again); and yet he had not joined in the debate. His friends were full of angry entreaties. He
must
speak; only he could stem the tide. Stubbornly, the Prime Minister refused.

He had started to drink again. By Friday, when he had an interview with the Governor General, he was clearly not himself. Haggard in appearance, he was weak with fatigue and ill with strain. It was assumed by many that he did not feel himself fit to take up the cudgels in his party’s defence.

But this was not the case. Macdonald was waiting for Blake to speak for he was tolerably certain that the Opposition was holding some damning piece of evidence, some document of “a fatally compromising character,” that Cartier had written. Or, perhaps, he himself had dispatched some damaging letter during the election; the appalling thing was that the Prime Minister could not be sure whether he had or not, he had been in his cups for so much of that period. The press had certainly been hinting that there was more to come. Abbott had told him the previous July that the Montreal papers were preparing further revelations. These had not appeared; was it because the Liberals were holding one devastating piece of evidence in reserve? He
must
have the last word. He could not afford to make his move and then have Blake follow him with such a
coup de grâce
.