Two Prime Ministers, one sitting and one from the past, were together in Toronto on this date in 1957 for a special dinner organized by the Canadian Club. Prime Minister John Diefenbaker had come from Ottawa for the event to praise one of his predecessors as both PM and Tory party leader, the Right Honourable Arthur Meighen.
It is difficult in a few words to pay adequate and fitting tribute to one who has, in his lifetime, received as many fulsome and deserved tributes as has our guest of honour. One of those rare individuals among men of distinction he reached the summit of achievement not, as most do, in latter years, but at the halfway mark. And then, far from fading away into the shadows of men’s memories, he has remained amongst us to add significantly to his laurels as a statesman, orator and man of letters.
And just as Arthur Meighen found the man Shakespeare in reading and re-reading what he wrote, so I believe we and posterity are going to discover and re-discover Arthur Meighen from the record of his recorded utterances. In them you will find epitomized not only the spirit of his but much of the spirit of his country.
As Mr Meighen has said on occasions, there were disappointments along the way. It is characteristic of him that no one has summed up this phase of the life of Arthur Meighen better than Arthur Meighen himself. He had above all men whom I have known, in or out of politics, the supreme ability to “meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two imposters just the same.
I doubt if we shall see his like again in Canadian public affairs. “Stainless integrity” is a phrase which I have seen used to describe his conscience, but it was more than that. The phrase suggests a passive conscience and I am sure that those who know Arthur Meighen will agree with me that if ever a man had an active and up-and-doing conscience it was he when he was in public life.
Whatever the subject, he had something to say that nobody has said quite the same way before. Do we seek the secret of the genius of D’Arcy McGee, that ill-fated Father of Confederation? He will tell us : “Wherever McGee the statesman went, McGee the orator was there and McGee the poet was not far away.”
“There are,” said Arthur Meighen on that occasion, “not many amaranthine wreaths that come by way of unearned increment, but this surely is one.”
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