Canada: THE DOMINION: Preventive Medicine

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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¢ 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."