The Empire Club was established in 1903 as a result of a political discussion which created considerable unrest in Canada. In their acclaimed book, The Best Talk in Town, authors Scott Young and Margaret Hogan discuss the background which led to the creation of this historic organization:
Once upon a time in Toronto of long, long ago, there was a place called Webb’s Restaurant, at which it was acceptable to eat or drink, for a particular kind of Torontonian. In those days, he was the Torontonian of law, business, education, the clergy or medicine, or often with a direct or familial British connection, who liked to step out of his office at noon and stroll a block or two, or travel longer distances by horse-drawn carriage or motorcar or the newish electric trolley, to take lunchtime food and drink and discussion among his own kind. He was, in short, fairly akin to the kind of Torontonian Rupert Brooke defined a few years later as “Souls for whom the wind is always nor’ - nor’-west.” (That is to say, always favourable.) “They sail nearer success than failure, and nearer wisdom than lunacy . . . . They support civilization. You can trust them with anything, if your demand be for nothing . . . absurdly altruistic.
We join a few of these with their collars turned up against the chilly day’s-end early darkness of November 18, 1903, hurrying to where the door at Webb’s, when opened, threw out light and warmth. One was a militia lieutenant-colonel and lawyer, James Mason. A few days earlier, he and a friend had been discussing by telephone what they saw as a crisis in Canadian life: a sudden and widespread turning against the English in a way that seemed to pose a serious threat to Canada’s future as a loyal participant in the British Empire. To men of their class at that time, nothing was more important than Canada’s British connection. Could this threat somehow be countered? The dinner meeting of a few influential men at Webb’s had been called to seek out a way.
They felt beleaguered. For weeks, Canadian newspapers had been front-paging angry reports about how Britain’s Lord Alverstone, sitting on a judicial tribunal with two Canadians and three Americans, had sided with the Americans. The 4-2 vote had given to the United States several islands plus a long stretch of coastline called the Alaska Panhandle, shutting off, thundered editorialists, 210,000 square miles of North-West Canada from the sea. The towering anger of Canadians at what they considered a British sell-out could be read about every day. The Globe alone devoted its lead editorial to the subject for eighteen consecutive days. The perfidy of the Americans, Canadians seemed to have expected; they understood self-interest as a motive. But for the British to show themselves so eminently squeezeable (a term used earlier by Sir John A. Macdonald) was, said many editorials, betrayal.
From every side, the anti-British fire thus touched off was being doused with gasoline. The prime minister, Sir Wilfrid Laurier, rose in the Commons the day after the decision of the Alaskan Boundary Tribunal was announced, and demanded Canadian control over her own foreign affairs. John A’s letter to Sir Charles Tupper seventeen years before, warning Tupper to be as wary as a fox as the senior Canadian in another tri-nation tribunal on another matter, was quoted by one newspaper: “American members have found our English members of so squeezeable a nature that their audacity has grown beyond all bounds. (Their aim) is to go to England with a treaty in their pockets (that must be put into effect unchanged), no matter at what cost to Canada. The effect produced is that British protection is a farce.”
The Globe reprinted what was being said and written on the matter in England. The Saturday Review there expressed amazement “at the way papers here [in England] are telling Canada, as if she were a child, not to mind the Alaska smack in the face.” The Economist, more moderately, wrote: “We cannot but hold that the King’s government appear to have acted with a haste for which it is difficult to see justification.” The British prime minister, Arthur Balfour, chimed in disdainfully: “The islands, the loss of which to Canada has aroused such feeling, are really valueless from a strategic and military point of view.” That as if only Britain’s assessment of such considerations counted; not caring a whit that by the decision a good portion of Canada north of British Columbia had been cut off from the sea.
In all those circumstances, Canadians who took a longer view of what they called “the Imperial bond,” felt set upon. This cast of mind was in those who met at Webb’s with Col. Mason in the chair. Some were members of the long-established and often opinion-moulding Canadian Club of Toronto-but felt that the Canadian Club was laying too low in face of the anti-British public temper. The new club they were meeting to form would, like the Canadian Club, have weekly luncheons addressed by prominent men speaking with authority on the issues of the day, but there was a specific rider: “having also a distinctive basis of British unity in its work and policy.”
The next day, a few of them began drafting the new club’s constitution. When word got out, the new organization was dubbed a secessionist movement from the Canadian Club, possibly because one enthusiast said that those who now stayed in the Canadian Club would be demonstrating that they were no longer loyal to Britain and the crown. The Globe pooh-poohed this in an editorial, saying that most members of the Canadian Club were still imperialists of one stripe or another with few wanting Canada to break its ties with Britain. This mild controversy helped the word get around, however, and a week after the first meeting, sixty-one men gathered to consider the draft constitution and pick a name. After discarding several suggestions, including “the Dominion Club,” the majority voted to name it The Empire Club of Canada. Col. Mason was elected president. Membership was restricted to British subjects (there was no Canadian citizenship at the time) who would pay dues of $1 a year, with a maximum membership of 500. Within a month, membership exceeded 300. A year or two later, the club had a waiting list of those wishing to join.
“I can quite understand that to many persons the formation of a club of this kind will seem a very little thing,” said the first luncheon speaker on December 3, 1903, a clergyman and professor, William Clark. If he had had the gift of prophecy, he might then have said that in the next century hundreds of the world’s most distinguished men and women would follow him to that podium, discussing wittily, informatively, entertainingly (and sometimes boringly) many of the great issues of the century in a manner which would constitute a kaleidoscope of Canadian and world experience.
Clark addressed two issues of that time, both of which were to be more or less disposed of by time itself. “Certainly there are some, but they are very few indeed, among us who can look forward with equanimity to separation from the Mother Country,” he said. “This is supposed to mean either independence, or else absorption by our neighbours in the United States.” But he thought there was only one alternative, not two: “An attempt at separation would probably come to an end in a very speedy absorption. I do not seek to belittle the great Republic alongside of us. I esteem and respect the United States without wishing to become one of them. We have the most perfect liberty. What could we gain?”
It was in a sense a keynote speech for decades to come, a reference point noted consciously or unconsciously by all who spoke in subsequent years, including in that host Mackenzie King, Robert Borden, and every other prime minister of Canada; ex-president William Taft, soon-to-be president Richard Nixon, president Ronald Reagan, Stephen Leacock, Vilhjalmar Stefansson, cabinet ministers, royalty, generals, scientists, and Captain A.T. Hunter.”
Captain A.T. Hunter?
No aficionado of early Empire Club speakers could rightfully list those who impressed him without recalling the joy of discovering Captain A.T. Hunter. He shows up first on February 4th, 1904, with an address entitled “The Fatuous Insolence of Canadians.” He liked the idea of the Empire Club, he said. He had spoken once at the Canadian Club and “expressed with the frankness of the common Canadian a number of opinions, some of which I then held, and others of which I thought would be novel and interesting,” but: “They never invited me again.”
The Empire Club, in contrast, was “magnificently organized for both beginning and ending those family quarrels which make home life dear to us, and with whose progress we suffer no outsider to interfere.” Here, among citizens loyal to the Empire, he could “vehemently admire or despise” particular opinions. He proceeded forthwith to poke fun at some of them.
Captain Hunter was a youngish Toronto lawyer at the time he spoke, establishing that the speaker who came with wit and irony had as much a place as one such as Mackenzie King, who first came with the most dry-as-dust pedanticism that ever caused waiters to signal the end of an Empire Club speech by going around awaking the listeners. But from Prof. Clark’s opening musings to the most recent speech given to a modern Empire Club audience about 100 years later, each has been printed and bound in annual volumes reflecting and recording history as it appeared at that moment for more than three thousand lunchtimes since the first one at Webb’s.
Copies are available for inspection at both the club office in the Fairmont Royal York Hotel, as well as in most libraries.
Every Canadian Prime Minister and half a dozen U.S. Presidents have graced the Club’s podium.
In the 100 years since our founding, Canada has evolved from a colony of Britain to an independent nation which is by choice an integral member of the Commonwealth. Fears of U.S. annexation have subsided, to be replaced by cycles of concerns regarding our cultural and economic independence and economic opportunities. Our club has grown and evolved with Canada, fulfilling its objectives through weekly meetings with speakers of high calibre. Each of the addresses is included verbatim in the yearbook, which has been published continuously since our first year and which is provided free of charge to libraries across Canada by The Empire Club Foundation.
To review these yearbooks is to review the issues confronting Canadians through those years, and the attitudes and viewpoints of the day. With hindsight, many addresses can be seen to have been extraordinarily perceptive and others, quite naturally, could not have been farther from the mark. But all served to stimulate informed discussion and debate.
