Preventive Medicine

(See Cover)

One day last week a reporter went to call on Canada's Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King at his three-story brick house at 335 Laurier Ave. East, Ottawa. The housekeeper took him to the tiny elevator, pushed the button for the third floor.

At a desk in an alcove of his book-lined study sat the Prime Minister. There was a large bouquet of red roses in front of him. Two feet away, where Mr. King could see it with the slightest turn of his head, hung a portrait of the Prime Minister's mother in a pose resembling Whistler's mother. The picture was illuminated from below by a table lamp.

The Prime Minister rose to greet his guest. He carried his 71 years lightly. His voice was firm, his hands steady, his face and fingers just perceptibly wrinkled. He walked toward the grate to give the fire some encouragement. Swiftly he moved the screen aside, thrust the poker into the coals, put on a thick glove and tossed a fresh chunk of coal squarely into the center of the fire. He made these casual, hostly gestures with neatness and dispatch. But as he was settling again in the deep sofa, something disturbed the Prime Minister. He hopped up, shifted the fire screen one-half inch to the left.

Now the talk could proceed. The Prime Minister's seven-year-old Irish terrier, Pat II, padded in. The visitor asked if Pat II had by now replaced Pat I, an earlier Irish terrier, in the Prime Minister's affections. Gravely the Prime Minister replied that no dog could ever do that.

But the Prime Minister was quite happy with Pat II; he explained that he was a military dog. "Salute," called the Prime Minister, and the dog stuck forward his paw. "Get into the trenches," and Pat flopped on his belly. "Find the enemy," and Pat retrieved a cookie from a chair. The Prime Minister looked pleased.

As he leaned back in the deep sofa, his heavy head perched squarely on his chunky body, Mr. King seemed to have no neck at all. As he talked, his only motions were slight oratorical gestures with the hands, an occasional smoothing of his wispy grey hair. Once in a while he plucked his key ring from his pocket and absently swung his keys.

Mr. King talked--of Canada's future (he is optimistic), of the recent election ("with any kind of organization we could have won 20 more seats"), of his own sobersided career ("It's the result that counts, not the figure you cut while you're getting there"). He quoted Burns and the Bible and discussed the brotherhood of man.

New Stature. More perhaps than any other living ruler, he is the embodiment of his country. And now both King and Canada had reached another milestone. This week by Act of Parliament, for domestic purposes, Canada declared the war against the Axis officially ended and the nation was once again on a peace footing. And, as he had for more than 18 years, Bachelor King would continue to lead his country. He had led it to Britain's rescue in the war; he had led it through to victory ; now he would lead it out of war and well along the road to peace.

He was proud of what Canada--a nation of but eleven and a half million people--had done in the war, and, better than almost anyone, he knew what the war had done for Canada.

Canada had fought abroad and produced at home as it had never fought and worked before--and her war record, at home and abroad, had gained her new stature in the world. Canada could no longer be classified simply as a promising young country; she had come of age.

On that March day in 1867 when the British Parliament created a confederated Canada, Britain's Lord Carnarvon had cried: "We are laying the foundation of a great state--perhaps one which at a future date may even overshadow this country." That polite nothing was now a something which, in some senses, had already begun to come true:

P: The Dominion was now one of the three great trading nations in the world (the others: the U.S. and Britain).

P: With a population less than that of New York State, Canada was, at war's end, the fourth most potent fighting power among all the United Nations, and had the third largest and strongest Navy.

P: She went into the war a debtor nation and came out a creditor.

P: By sole virtue of the fact that she, along with the U.S. and Britain, holds the secret of the atom bomb, she had been accorded a high place in the top councils of the world. Last week, at the Moscow Conference of Foreign Ministers (see INTERNATIONAL), Canada was invited to join the Big Five in deciding what to do about The Bomb. It meant that the Dominion was virtually assured of a place on the Security Council of the United Nations Organization.

P: Canada's colonial subservience to the "old country" was all but gone. George VI was, theoretically, still King of Canada, and would remain so. But the ties that long bound the Dominion to Mother England's apron had frayed and snapped, one by one. Of the legal strings, only one remained: in civil lawsuits, Britain's Privy Council is still Canada's court of final appeal. And elimination of that last bond was already in process.

New Awareness. Canada felt a new and vibrant awareness of national identity. It showed itself in the eager popular acceptance of recent proposals for a distinctive Canadian citizenship and for a distinctive Canadian flag (TIME, Nov. 5; Nov. 19). It showed itself in the snap and swagger of veteran Canadian regiments marching up their Main Streets, and in the cheers to which they marched. The new spirit could be seen in the words of Prime Minister King a fortnight ago in the House of Commons: "We do expect and will expect that this country shall be given full recognition [in] matters that affect the future. ... I cannot emphasize [this] too strongly. . . . We shall . . . press for our rights."

Canadians were aware of their new power and prestige; so was the world.

This world recognition was largely due to the facts of the case, but the case had been put, widely and well, by Mackenzie King. He was not a salesman's idea of a salesman, but he was well fitted for this job of worldwide public relations. He had known both Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt as young men, and he moved with ease among the statesmen of the world. And, though he was not a politician's idea of a politician, he had done an even better job of governing his country. He had taken a nation of two cultures, a land often torn by racial strife, and held it together, for its own good.

One of his greatest trials came in the conscription crisis of 1944. Mackenzie King is thoroughly Scotch-English in temperament. He speaks but the poorest French and has little fondness for French Canadians as such. But he is well aware of the need for unity in a country long racked by sectional strife between its 3,500,000 French and the rest of Canada. He has always given French Canada what he considers fair and just treatment. When he was forced to impose military conscription, because of the soldier shortage in October 1944, he was squarely on the horns of a dilemma.

With artful compromise, he invented partial conscription. Draftees would have to go overseas--but only some of them, and maybe none at all. Neither the anti-conscriptionist French nor the pro-conscriptionist English were completely satisfied, but both grudgingly accepted the solution.

On that occasion, as on others, King aroused impatience and attracted mockery. It did not disturb him, for, as he says, "it's the result that counts." And he gets results: he has proved his people's confidence in six elections.

What was there about William Lyon Mackenzie King that Canada liked so much?

Slums & Strikes. He was bom on Dec. 17, 1874 in Berlin, Ontario, a town which later, in the fever of World War I, changed its name to Kitchener. His first political asset was the endowment of a historic name. Grandfather William Lyon Mackenzie, a stern and pious man who fled at 25 from awful poverty in his native Scotland, was a journalist, politician and rebel. He had led an armed rebellion in 1837 against an aristocratic oligarchy which was throttling representative government in what is now Ontario. The uprising was short-lived and forced him into exile, but it earned William Lyon Mackenzie a hero's page in Canada's history.

In high school at Berlin, "Billie" King was, he says, "just an ordinary boy." He was a studious boy, too, and a good cricketer. He studied political economy at the University of Toronto (class of '95), did postgraduate work at Harvard and the University of Chicago (where he lived at Jane Addams' Hull House, and studied trade-union organization and slum conditions). With the help of a traveling fellowship, he peered at more slums in London.

His interest in poverty and social misery inspired by his grandfather, was not confined to theory. In 1897 he aroused Toronto with his discovery that women were sewing uniforms for Canadian letter carriers for 3-c- an hour while Government subcontractors made 100% profits. As a consequence, Canada's great French Canadian Prime Minister, Sir Wilfrid Laurier, asked King to become deputy minister of labor. King passed up a chance to teach at Harvard, and went to Ottawa.

In eight years Mackenzie King settled many a labor dispute, drafted some labor legislation drastic for that day (e.g., compulsory investigation of industrial disputes). Quickly and surely he earned a reputation for being on the side of the little people against the interests. In a report on a 1907 telephone strike in Toronto, he sympathetically noted the "physical strain" involved in "long sitting in one position" and the "buzzing and snapping of instruments in the ear."

Conscription & Compromise. Mackenzie King won his first House of Commons seat in 1908; a year later he became full-fledged Minister of Labor. It was not long before he was one of Sir Wilfrid's closest friends and advisers, and recognized on Parliament Hill as his heir in the Liberal Party. In 1919, Sir Wilfrid Laurier died.

Canada and the Liberals had been torn by savage, riotous dissension over the issue of military conscription in World War I. With Sir Wilfrid's death, the Liberal Party needed a conciliator who could hold the French-speaking and the English-speaking Liberals together. At the party convention, King, whose talents for compromise had already shown themselves, was picked on the fourth ballot. Two years later, 47-year-old King became Prime Minister of Canada--the youngest in the Dominion's history. Except for a five-year interruption, when the Conservatives came back in 1930, he has been Canada's head man ever since.

He works hard at his job. He gets up at 8 o'clock, breakfasts lightly, reads the morning papers, listens to a newscast. Between 9 and noon he reads his mail, dictates, studies government matters and ticks off appointments at home. Around noon, the Prime Minister is driven to his Parliament Hill office, where he meets his Cabinet. Unless there is a special luncheon, the noonday meal is a catch-as-catch-can affair. After that, if Parliament is in session, he attends its opening. But unless matters of importance are being discussed, he will leave early for more office work. He is home for dinner by 7, in bed by 11. On Sundays, he goes to St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church.

His favorite form of exercise is walking, usually with Pat II, at his summer home at Kingsmere, 15 miles from Ottawa. For diversion he likes to read poetry and philosophy. During the 1944 conscription crisis he sent to the Parliamentary Library for David Grayson's Adventures in Contentment.

He detests ostentation, dresses in dark suits and stiff high collars, rarely allows himself to be photographed in any but the most sedate poses. No nickname has ever stuck to him. Behind his back, he is frequently referred to as "Willie," but to his face only the smallest handful of acquaintances dare call him even "Mackenzie." It is always "Mr. King."

An unspectacular man in all respects, he does not govern Canada by showmanship, or by oratory, or by sensational moves, but rather like a Boy-Scout leader herding his charges along on a Saturday hike.

After Pasteur. His formula, he thinks, is simple: the secret of political success is to avoid mistakes. "It is like preventive medicine," he says. "You keep the disease from developing. The important thing is not what action you take to make desirable events happen, but the action you take to keep bad ones from happening. There is a force in human affairs that keeps them going toward good ends if nothing interferes. The political job is to prevent such interference. That is unspectacular, but it succeeds. It is unspectacular because the world never sees what evil might have happened if you didn't prevent it. Take Pasteur. For all we know, the whole world might be dead but for what Pasteur did."

It is not quite as simple as King makes it out. He has a vivid and rangy talent for sensing, not what his people want, but what they themselves really know they should have. He is, in a sense, a sort of national conscience that bends, persists and never breaks: "I try to make up my mind what is the right thing to do, and feel confident that the people will think it is right."

For Canada, despite any foreign notions about its rough & ready rowdiness, is a country deeply endowed with moral sense. Its feelings about "decency" stem from deep roots in both its Anglo-Saxon and French traditions--traditions whose offshoots have blossomed into some unlovely flowers of puritanism and respectability. Canada's divorce laws are harsh. The Canadian Lord's Day Act is a Sunday-observance law that makes Canada on a Sabbath day the dullest place in the world. The liquor laws are repressive.

A steady, colorless man with too much honor and intellect to be a demagogue, too little fire to be an orator, too little hair and too few mannerisms to be spectacular, King fits his country's mood and pattern.

On frequent occasions, Canadians damn him roundly, call him timid and dull, scoff at him, invent bad jokes about him. But on polling day they vote for him. They feel he is good for Canada. Said one Ontario capitalist just before last June's elections: "If you had a salesman who had no personality but he brought in the orders, you'd keep him. I think we ought to keep the old son of a gun."

They did. That was probably their last chance: before the next election, King will retire ("Nothing will change my mind"). But his consuming ambition is to be Prime Minister at least until next June. He would then surpass the 19-year record of Canada's first Prime Minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, and achieve the distinction of having ruled Canada longer than any other man. The chances that he will are good.

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