Canada: THE DOMINION: Preventive Medicine

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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.