Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 299
If our time allows, we drop in for a moment to visit the splendid building where the Parliament of the Province of Quebec is in session. Here the Lieutenant-Governor sits enthroned, the direct representative of the King. Around him are the ministers of the Crown leaning over his chair. There is a strange charm in listening to the courteous debate which is going on, all of it, we note with unreasonable surprise, conducted in French. The distinguished Premier of the province is speaking. We bend our ear to listen, understanding as best we can. We gather that the Prime Minister is speaking, gravely and earnestly, on the question of the percentage of alcohol in the beverages of the province. Certain members of the opposition have urged that it be raised from 100 to 150. The Premier does not see his way to do this. But he assures the house that if any one will show him how to do it, he will do it.
The ancient city of Quebec has her own proud way of dealing with the modern liquor problem. She gives no licences but sells liquor only through the medical profession, and then only to those who need it. As we descend the slope from the legislature we pass the gay little street of the doctors, with its laughing crowd of sick people around each door. The law is very strict, it appears. No prescriptions must be filled out for more than a barrelful at a time. The enforcement of this law is aided by a vigorous public opinion in its favour.
We are back again upon our comfortable steamer. We are again ascending the river on our way to the metropolis of Montreal. The bar, which was closed during our absence on shore, is now open again. It is a strict rule of the Canada Steamships Company that when nobody wants a drink the bar is closed.
The scenery has changed now. On either side of the river, we pass from time to time the quaint little villages of French Canada, each with its tall church spires and its neat hotel, licensed to sell beer and wine. From time to time larger towns rise upon the bank. Here is Three Rivers with its vast piles of lumber, its tall smoke-stacks and its eighteen licences.
In the country to the north, we can see the dim outline of the Laurentian Mountains — a vast territory of lake and mountain, forest and stream, an ideal hunting ground, the paradise of the sportsman. Some of our passengers have visited the Laurentians and as we sit about the deck in a circle they exchange stories of their adventures. One tells us how he was once moose-hunting beyond the forks of the Batiscan and lost his flask. Another tells a tale of how he and two companions got separated from their party over the divide in the wilderness near Lake Mistassini and for four days had only two bottles of whisky among the three of them. Stories such as these, though told lightly and casually, give one a very real idea of the peculiar hardships and dangers of the hunter’s life in the Laurentians.
But our steamboat journey is at an end. Our boat is steaming into the river harbour of Montreal crowded with shipping. Before us lies the great metropolis framed against the background of its Royal mountain. Our landing fills us with wonder and delight. On every side are objects of interest. Here in the foreground of the picture is the great brewery of the Molsons; we can see the thin steam rising from its covered top in a dainty cloud in the clear air. There is something exquisite in the sight that recalls the canvas of a Turner or a Correggio or the skyline of Milwaukee as she used to be.
In the upper town, all is animation, on every side are evidences of industrial prosperity. It is the noon hour and we can see that even the labourer on the street has his can of beer beside him as he eats his dinner.
Ah! Here is the hotel, our destination. The hotel is full to the roof and has been since July, 1919, but it can always find room for one more. We enter. We sink into the luxurious wicker chairs of the Palm Room where a Czecho-Slovak orchestra (they call it Hungarian before the war) is playing Jugo-Slav music. We order a quart of champagne each and send for a bundle of naturalization papers and a fountain pen. We shall never go home.
WHY THE NEXT WAR DIDN’T HAPPEN. AN ATTEMPT TO REASSURE THE PUBLIC
ALONG WITH A great many other people, I begin to feel that it is time that something was done about the “Next War.” The public are constantly being too much alarmed about it, and it is fitting that some one should undertake to reassure them.
I am well aware of the terrific prophecies that are being made. I know that Major-General Fitz-Bung, the great artillery expert, has told the Press that in the “coming war” the range of guns will be a hundred miles; that Admiral O’Breezy has declared that in the next war submarines a quarter of a mile long will be pitted against battleships five hundred feet high; that the great chemical expert, Herr Schwefelstink, says that in the next war poisonous gas will pour over the whole civilized world and especially on civilians, women and children, hospitals, homes for incurables, and golf clubs. The aerial experts, I know, offer to let loose a bomb that will lift London into the North Sea.
I am quite aware that the military writers all agree that the war after the next will be a corker, and that the next war but two will probably be about as bad a war as the world will see till the fourth war, in which the entire human race, if they have any luck at all, will be exterminated.
Personally, I take no stock in it at all. It’s not going to happen. The mistake that people like General Fitz-Bung and Admiral O’Breezy make is that they are unaware of a whole lot of new influences that are coming into the world. Let me show what I mean by looking forward about twenty years, and then backward about nineteen, so as to show in retrospect just what happened, and why it was that the “next great war” never happened.
The Great War of 1935
This war was to have been as between England and the United States. It was all set and staged to break out early in the summer of 1935.
The precipitating cause, that is, the cause that should have precipitated it, was one of those high-class diplomatic “incidents” which no self-respecting nation can tolerate. An American sailor was thrown out of a saloon in Singapore right on to the sidewalk on the mere pretext that he had been in the saloon long enough.
The newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic were immediately filled with the “incident.” All America agreed that the affront was one that no high-chested nation ought to take with equanimity. The British retorted that the right to throw anyone out of a British saloon at any time was a fundamental part of the British constitution, which no determined, self-respecting, bull-necked people would ever allow to be curtailed.
But just at this stage there intervened the opening of the second annual international dog show in London, in which the first prize for Belgian police dogs was carried off by an American dog from Idaho. The enthusiasm and excitement over this, on both sides of the Atlantic, was such that the Singapore sailor was entirely forgotten. When the incident turned up again, America agreed that the sailor probably needed throwing out anyway, and British people urged that at least the sailor ought to be put back again in the saloon and stood up at the bar at the expense of the British Government.
But right after that came the international chess match in Vienna, and then the tour of the Welsh choir in the United States — two hundred voices at a pressure of fifty pounds per inch — and the whole episode was forgotten.
The Great War of 1940
This looked a fine war. It was to have been between England and France with the United States purely neutral and sinking the ships of both. It should have been ready as of June the first, but just at that very moment Alphonse Jules de Marigny won the golf championship of England in the great three-day competition at Scarborough, and on the very same day, by an odd coincidence, Hoke Peters, of Pie Corners, Oklahoma, won the golf championship of all France at Deauville; Edward Beauclere de Montmorency (a direct cousin of the Earl of Hasbeen) won the American championship at Paterson, N.J.; and Angus Macpherson Macrae, of Dumfoolish, the great Scottish expert, issued a challenge to play off against all winners at ten cents a hole, cash down before hitting a ball.
This upset the whole war. As the President of France said over the radio that evening, “Is this a time for making a war?” and the United States minister to Great Britain, speaking over the telephone to Siam, assured the world that golf had replaced all other forms of argument.
The Great War of 1945
The 1945 war was spoiled by the Oxford and Cambridge boat race. It ought to have been a real peach, and indeed all through February and March it looked as if world-wide destruction might be let loose at any moment.
The incident — it is not recorded just what it was — was admitted to be one of the nastiest, dirtiest incidents that had turned up in ten years. The American Secretary of State had written a dispatch in which he said that if the incident turned out in the way he was sure it was going to turn out, his Government would have to consider the matter as one of those matters they would have to consider. This brutal language almost carried war with it. And the situation was made even worse when the British Foreign Secretary replied that His Majesty’s Government was not prepared to admit that anything had happened, but that the whole circumstances would be investigated, and if when they were investigated they turned out as he knew they would turn out, His Majesty’s Government would feel themselves reluctantly compelled to take whatever steps they felt they ought to take.
This open and direct threat brought war to within forty-eight hours, and set up a feverish activity in all the paper factories, rubber factories, and gas companies of two continents.
Then that very afternoon came the astounding news that Oxford had at last beaten Cambridge in the annual boat race, and that the principal factor in the victory undoubtedly was that the Oxford boat contained five Americans, whereas Cambridge, very foolishly, had only four. The wild enthusiasm and the celebration of this event in London, Denver, Saskatoon (Saskatchewan), Phœnix (Arizona), and other great boating centres, dissipated all thought of war.
The Great Asiatic War of 1950
The collapse of the British-American war of 1950 was followed by several years of despairing quiet. For a little while it looked as if there was a chance of getting Serbia to fight Czechoslovakia, or of working up something as between the Latts of Latvia and the Slats of the Dantzig corridor; with good luck this might have started a conflagration that would have spread through all Europe, and sideways through Greenland to Canada and the United States.
Experts openly declared that only a spark was needed; unluckily during that very summer a main motor highway (London to Bagdad) was opened up via Latvia and Slatvia and an influx of American tourists poured into the country. The president of Latvia telegraphed at once: “This thing is too good to spoil, let us be friends,” and all chance of war was gone.
A last blow was struck in 1952. This year was to have witnessed the great Europe-Asia conflict, which all military experts had for twenty years declared unavoidable. But at the moment when the war was about to burst, a famous American explorer returned from Central China with a dinosaur’s egg — very old, but as good as new — and a British geologist returned from Western Mongolia with a robin’s nest in a perfect state of preservation, and a French scientist discovered in Cochin China, what was evidently one end (hard to say which) of a prehistoric megatherium, which must have been dead — which evidently had been dead — for over a million years.
The astounding discoveries led the International Ornithological Society to announce that it would hold its next annual convention at or near Lake Gob in the centre of Central Asia. The rush for tickets for this event, coupled with the announcement of the Palæontological Congress and the International Biochemical Society that they too would meet in Mongolia made it necessary to postpone the whole Asiatic conflict for five years. In fact, it was widely felt that the opportunity was practically gone.
And so, if one may point a moral too obvious to need pointing, the world gradually began to realize that there was something else in it as well as high explosives.
A, B, AND C. after twenty years
TWENTY YEARS AGO I wrote a book called Literary Lapses and I put into it a story called A, B, and C. It dealt with the three famous people whose names used to appear in all the arithmetic books used in the schools. Readers of ripe, or middle, age will recall A, B, and C as they used to be, and will remember the little anecdotes about them which ran after the following fashion:
A can do a certain piece of work in three days; B can do it in five days; and C in eight. How long will it take them to do it, if they all work together?
A was always the strong one, the quick one; B just ordinary; and poor C was just a nut. C worked slower, walked slower, swam worse, chopped less wood and laid fewer bricks than A and B. He lost every race, was beaten on every bet, and came out at the tail end of everything.
Now it happened that the other day I looked again at the story I wrote twenty years ago, and opened again the little text-books from which it had been derived, and I marvelled at the change of circumstance as between then and now.
The A, B, and C of my schooldays, with their “certain piece of work” — they never said what it was — look hopelessly antiquated now. They used to ride old high bicycles on which A, the hero, hit up a speed of eleven and a half miles an hour. They used to walk from X to Y — quite a walk, evidently, from the fact that they took “a certain number of hours” to do it: a thing that no one in these days of motor-cars would think of doing.
The biggest diversion that A, B, and C could think of was to “eat apples,” one after the other straight ahead. That was their best notion of a really wicked time.
When it came to money, their transactions were pitiably small. A used to “loan to B a certain sum of money,” which sounds most alluring and attractive, until it turns out that the “certain sum of money” was only thirty-five cents.
The highest wages that I could ever find credited even to A, the husky hero, which would work little C into consumption, was eleven cents an hour. When it came to speculation or gambling, the farthest any of them would go was that A would “offer to wager with B one dollar.” Whether B took up the bet or not, was not said. Beyond that the three poor pikers never got.
In other words, any up-to-date child studying arithmetic and reading such little anecdotes as that would despise them.
In the story as I wrote it twenty years ago I professed to have seen A, B, and C in the flesh and pictured their actual appearance: A, big, husky, and self-assertive; B, firm and moderate, but standing on his own feet; C, delicate and shaken with a consumptive cough and quite unfit even for a “certain piece of work.”
So let us imagine what their successors of to-day, the A, B, and C of 1932, would look like.
Here comes A, tall and swaggering and dressed in a plus-four golf suit. Here’s B in a Palm Beach effect, fairly sturdy-looking; hair mostly gone from drinking too much wood alcohol. Here, finally, is C, a weedy, mean-looking little type, with a cigarette hanging from his lip and a peaked hat over his eyes.
“Let’s take a look at the arithmetic problems set for to-day,” says A. (We imagine him looking at a school blackboard before school begins.) “What have they got us down for, anyway? Say, fellows, listen to this!” He begins to read:
“A, B, and C undertake to do a certain piece of work, beginning at six in the morning — —”
All three break out into laughter.
“Isn’t that a peach?” says A. “Here, wait till I change it before the class come in.”
He writes:
“A hates work worse than sin, and B quit work after he made a clean-up in oil, and C hasn’t worked since he came out of Sing Sing. Guess how long it will take all three together to do a certain piece of work.”
They laugh, but B, the moderate one, says, “You shouldn’t pull that law stuff about Sing Sing. C doesn’t want that shouted out.”
“Aw, shucks!” protests A. “Anybody who reads the Arithmetic books can guess that C has served time in Sing Sing. You couldn’t explain him any other way. But have it as you like. I’ll rub that out on the blackboard and put in another. Listen to this old chestnut. Did you ever hear the beat of this?— ‘A, B, and C are engaged to cut cordwood, working each day for ten hours and receiving 10 cents an hour — —’ How do you like that, fellers?”
“Gosh!” says B. “Ten cents an hour! Listen, A, let’s rub that out and write it like this, to make it up to date:
“ ’A, B, and C, not having done any work in six years, invest their savings in the oil exchange. A cleans up a quarter of a million dollars, B half a million, and C gets stung for a hundred thousand and — —’ ”
“But look at this one,” interrupts A, still reading from the blackboard. “Just listen to this:
“ ’A, B, and C set out to drive from X to Y in three separate conveyances. A, whose horse is the fastest, makes seven miles an hour — —’ ”
They all break into a shout.
“Gimme the chalk!” says C.
“You can’t write anything profane,” says B. “It’s a school.”
“Don’t I know it?” says C. “I ain’t writing nothing profane, see! I’m just putting it into up-to-date English, see? The way A done.”
C writes on the board:
“A, B, and C fly across the Atlantic — —”
“Good!” interrupts A. “Stick in a bet! Make it for money.”
“ ’ — for a million-dollar pool. A goes at the rate of 180 miles an hour — which is faster than B or C by twenty miles an hour — —’ ”
“That’s the stuff!” says A. “Attaboy! And so I beat you both to it, do I, and get the pool?”
“You don’t,” says C. “The sum don’t end that way. You hit an iceberg, see, and you get in the drink — —”
“And I win out!” laughs B. “I can go next quickest to him.”
“Yes,” says C, “but you don’t win out just the same. You stop to help A, see, because you’ve gotta sort of soft spot in your bean, and while you’re trying to help him, I beat the both of yous to it, and win out!”
