Free The Great Depression by Pierre Berton Page A

Kingsmere & who would ruin the whole place.” It goes a long way to explain King’s lack of interest when in the worst days of the Nazis his immigration department turned back to Europe a shipload of Jewish refugees, many to their deaths.
    He had convinced himself during a visit to India a few years before the Great War that “it is in every way desirable that Canada should be kept for the white races and India for the black, as Nature appears to have decreed.” He was far more at home with men like Signor Mussolini, then the darling of the Canadian right wing, whom he visited in Rome in the fall of 1928. “I have beenenthused,” he wrote, “about the manner in which this country has been bro’t together & is going ahead, the order of it all, the fine discipline, the evident regard for authority & for M.[ussolini] himself.” It filled him with admiration to note the way in which Mussolini had offered to clean up an Italy “filled with communists, banished them all to an island, cleared the streets of beggars and the houses of harlots.…” Mussolini was a “truly remarkable man of force of genius, fine purpose, a great patriot.” So much for the grandson of the rebel who had tried to topple the Family Compact.
    The distaste he felt for communism was less political than it was religious. The communists were godless atheists and King was a committed, if quirky, Christian who felt himself unworthy in the sight of his Maker. It was part of his obsession with spiritualism. In his
Industry and Humanity
, a naïve and almost unreadable book that he published in 1918 and of which he was excessively proud, he suggested that the church could solve “the vast problems of Industry and of the State.” Brotherly love was all that was needed to come to grips with economic and social questions. “It is from the reverence for life which men get from their mothers, and from the faith which a religion pure and undented imparts, that there comes the spirit of mutual aid through which the material interests of the world make way for the nobler aspirations of the soul.”
    King may have believed that, but as a practical politician he was far more devious, more canny, and more ruthless than his words suggest. Friends, enemies, biographers, and revisionist historians have all agreed on one thing: he was a consummate politician. It was hard to pin him down, to use his own words against him (the “five-cent” remark was an exception) because his speeches were masterpieces of ambiguity. He toiled over them for days at a time, but only his diaries reveal that he approached the task with something akin to terror.
    King once gave himself a full week to prepare for a speech in Toronto, but a week, he felt, wasn’t nearly long enough. “I shudder,” he wrote, “as I think of the little time ahead.” Three days later, he still hadn’t mastered the speech. Another two days passed; it still wasn’t finished, and King was “nearly desperate” – almost in tears. Another day and he was suffering from “brain fatigue greater than I can imagine.” Twenty-four hours later hewas still struggling away, totally disconsolate. “It lacks punch,” he wrote – but then, King’s speeches always lacked punch. “I can clearly see that I am not at all up to the mark.” He could only hope that God would give him strength to bring it off.
    Apparently God did, for King was able to speak for two hours – so long that his deputy, Ernest Lapointe, had to cut his own speech short and the other speakers were forced to cancel theirs. King felt “immensely relieved,” but one’s sympathies are with the audience and with his fellow Liberals who found their own time gobbled up. That didn’t bother King, who felt that a Higher Power was running the affair and had carried him through.
    Each time he spoke, he felt himself under nervous strain and tension. Once, when he tried to reply to “an exceedingly poor speech” by Bennett, he felt that he had