Dief, who had known Meighen for many years at that point, gave particular tribute to his predecessor’s skills as an orator and Parliamentarian.

“The man speaks for himself,” Dief said. “The sheer integrity of his mind seems to lift him above the often too pragmatic and utilitarian dogmas of ordinary political life. And for that reason, he is always the most explicit when he is heard in his own words.”

You can read Prime Minister Diefenbaker’s entire tribute to Arthur Meighen below.

Prime Minister John Diefenbaker: In rising to propose the toast to our guest of honour, the Right Honourable Arthur Meighen, I feel that I must first of all thank you for asking me to join with you on this occasion in paying tribute to one whose greatness grows with the years and whose presence of itself gives honour and distinction to those who have the privilege of his company for even so short a time as we have this evening.

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.

It has been my privilege to know him personally and admire him professionally (if indeed the sphere of activity can be called a profession) for many years. I have read all of his public speeches and heard many more at first hand. May I say to any of you who have not read them (and particularly those which have been gathered together in that fascinating volume Unrevised and Unrepented and in the sometimes less than fascinating record of Hansard,) that his speeches have won for themselves an enduring place not only in Canadian public life but also in Canadian letters.

In a way that is peculiarly his own, he was and is above all others the statesman-scholar of Canadian public life. In this connection I can, perhaps, do no better than quote to you these words: “But no man is loved just because he is a genius and we do not need to read a man long unless we like him. We have to look at the elements and attributes of his genius and, through both, to the man himself.”

Those words were written about William Shakespeare by Arthur Meighen and in essence they are fully applicable to our guest of honour.

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. And you will find more than this, something beyond the pages and the print, something which I can best describe once again by using the very words which he used about his boon companion, Shakespeare. How appropriate they are to his own literary qualities and the majesty and power of his words.

“Read him and enjoy him,” said Arthur Meighen. “Read his works over; read the best of them, or those you like the best, and then read them over again and keep on. You will discover that each time you like them better; that each time you get more out of them. There is nourishment for mind and soul rich and various all along his shores. You will find yourself gaining possession of a storehouse which is adding light and charm to your everyday existence. You will find yourself thinking more of your species, more of your friends and more of your enemies. You will realize that this man understood all of them; that he saw to the very depths of all of them; that he did not hate them but loved them, and that he loved them, if for no other reason, just because they were part of that great panorama and that every one of them added something to the astounding spectacle of creation.”

Mr. Chairman, if I have appeared to stress up to this point the “literary” rather than the “political” aspects of the career of our guest of honour, it is only because I believe Mr. Meighen to be unique among the public men of Canada in the quality of the literary heritage which he has given us and to which I am sure we all hope he will continue to add in the lively and unrepentant years still ahead of him.

I know that it is not necessary for me to attempt to discuss in detail his career in public affairs before such an audience as this. He has, of course, the unique distinction of being the only Canadian who has, in his lifetime, held each of four great offices of our Parliament—prime minister and leader of the opposition in the Commons, and government and opposition leader in the Senate. From 1908 to 1926 he sat in twenty-three sessions of the House and from 1932 to 1942 in thirteen sessions of the other place. He has been a member of Her Majesty’s Canadian Privy Council for more than 40 years and of the Imperial Privy Council for 37 years. Until recently he was our only living ex-prime minister, a distinction which he now shares with another great Canadian, the Right Honourable Louis St. Laurent. He came out of the west to the House of Commons at the age of 34. As Lloyd George said of himself when he first saw the House of Commons—he looked down upon it in the spirit of William the Conqueror.

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.” Only one whose qualities of heart and mind combined the calm of the philosopher with charm or gentlemanliness could have risen to the eloquence of his speech on resigning the leadership of the Conservative Party. Most of us might have indulged in recrimination and bitterness at the turn of events, not he. Yet this is what he said:

“Fortune came and fortune fled… It is only the lot of all of us, at least of all who strive—the joy of the upward struggle, the successes, disappointments and defeats. Perhaps it has been my fate to have had more than the average on both sides of the account, but I promise you there is going to be nothing of bitterness carried forward after the page is turned… Whether now judged right or wrong, whatever I have said, whatever I have done, is going to remain unrevised and unrepented … I take my place cheerfully in the ranks and without a touch of sadness, of remorse, or of envy, and will hope still to be able to do something for causes in which I believe and which mean much to our country.”

Yes—unrevised and unrepented he took his place cheerfully in the ranks. As Max Freedman, his friend and admirer has said, “Our public life was impoverished when he was prevented, while his powers were yet far from their flood tide, from making his full contribution to our national life with increasing maturity and wisdom across the pageant of the years and with the wider mercies and reconciliations that are taught by advancing experience.”

And why, and how, had this happened? The historians are already remarkably unanimous in their verdict. Arthur Meighen, when he believed he was right (and few men ever sought the right as assiduously) was unshakeable in his course of action, and as dedicated to the logical conclusions of his principles. In all his decisions, it has been said “he preferred the compulsion of his conscience.”

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. His adversaries wilted again and again under the sting of it, for when his wrath was righteous, he spoke as it were ex cathedra, and his opponents knew that the wrath of some if not all the gods was about to fall on them.

Like the lawyer he is, our guest of honour has always been equally skillful on the attack or in defence. I know that none of us who heard what was perhaps the greatest of all his speeches at the Winnipeg Leadership Convention in October, 1927, will ever forget the forcefulness, persuasion and defiance of that stupendous defence of the famous Hamilton speech which had been so completely misunderstood even by many of his own supporters. The Winnipeg speech ranks, to me, with the best of Burke and the cream of Churchill.

When he spoke in the House of Commons or Senate he was listened to whether those who listened were delighted or mortified, convinced or antagonized. His aptness and zest for debate from his earliest days placed him in the thick of every controversy and his mastery of complicated matters made him as a young member one of the chief champions of government policy during the prime ministership of Sir Robert Borden. Sir Wilfrid Laurier, when he first heard him in the House of Commons, said of him: “There is a future prime minister.” This was from one who in his superb command of language and masterful personality received from Meighen unstinted admiration and affection, of such is the House of Commons that I love.

It is, I think, because his erudition is so great, his memory so prodigious and his learning so eclectic that he can speak or write on almost any subject and illuminate it for us with the superb quality of analysis and give it for us a new content and meaning.

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 (and I quote Arthur Meighen’s words): “Wherever McGee the statesman went, McGee the orator was there and McGee the poet was not far away.”

Do we seek words to give voice to the sentiments we feel as we stand before the shrines of our glorious dead? If so, we can find them in the full flower of the eloquence of our language in that short but glorious dedication of the War Memorial on Vimy Ridge:

“Here in the heart of Europe we meet to unveil a memorial to our country’s dead. In earth which has resounded to the drums and tramplings of many conquests, they rest in the quiet of God’s acre with the brave of all the world. At death they sheathed in their hearts the sword of devotion, and now from oft-stricken fields they hold aloft its cross of sacrifice, mutely beckoning those who would share their immortality. No words can add to their fame, nor so long as gratitude holds a place in men’s hearts can our forgetfulness be suffered to detract from their renown. For as the war dwarfed by its magnitude all contests of the past, so the wonder of human resource, the splendour of human heroism, reached a height never witnessed before.”

And where, I ask, in all the literature of the gracious giving and receiving of gifts could you find anything simpler or better than these words of his when he received an honorary degree from the University of Edinburgh:

“There are,” said Arthur Meighen on that occasion, “not many amaranthine wreaths that come by way of unearned increment, but this surely is one.”

At his best, I do not hesitate to compare our guest of honour with the best. I heard Lloyd George in 1916 in his first speech after he was prime minister, and Laurier, yet, as Grattan O’Leary has said: “At his highest and best Meighen was an arrow’s flight beyond them all.” It would be too much to say that Mr. Meighen inspired Sir Winston’s great phrase about “blood, tears, toil and sweat” but he anticipated it to a remarkable degree, On the 9th day of September, 1939, Arthur Meighen used these words in a speech in the Senate chamber on the declaration of war on Germany:

But as we square ourselves for the task ahead, as we stand erect and commence the long journey through troubles, through trials, through tragedies, through blood, let us not forget that others of our lineage for the same great purpose have trodden this path before. Let us remember every hour the two great nations from which we spring, the two great nations who today stand at the side of Poland, the two great nations who have set out together to preserve the treasures of civilization in the only way they can be preserved, to save the altars of liberty, the altars of religion, the altars of democracy, from destruction by pagan force. To the heritage we derive from those heroic peoples let us all be true.

I have quoted extensively this evening, Mr. Chairman, from our guest of honour’s own words, for two reasons:

First, I feel that they reveal the inexhaustible wells of spiritual strength and power of Mr. Meighen more completely than words of mine. To a degree, applicable I think to no other Canadian statesman, his achievements and accomplishments—and indeed what some might regard us his failures and disappointments—transcend, for the time being at least, ordinary standards of historical comment. This is so, I believe, because the standards which he set for himself and adhered to so unfalteringly were so completely his own. The man speaks for himself. The sheer integrity of his mind seems to lift him above the often too pragmatic and utilitarian dogmas of ordinary political life. And for that reason, he is always the most explicit when he is heard in his own words.

Secondly, Arthur Meighen is, by the grace and goodness of the Lord, still with us… I recall the wonderful faculties of his mind, and that fantastic memory which is still a legend in the House of Commons. If I emphasize the magic of his own words tonight, it is, Mr. Chairman, in the hope that he may be persuaded to give us more of them. Neither our Canadian history nor Canadian literature is over-rich in word-magic such as his. He will do our generation and the generation to come a service of inestimable value if he will give us more from the archives of his delightfully enigmatic mind, and share with us some of the secrets of his heart’s great bounty.

There remains but to wish you, sir, a glorious eventide. Live on to hear your children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren call you blessed. Live on for the sake of your friends and admirers whose name is legion, for whom life would lose much of its lustre in losing you as a friend and companion. Live on to see Canada become greater and even greater—that Canada whose institutions you have nobly served and whose councils you have adorned. Live on to enjoy the opulence of your own richly-stored mind; live on in honour, respect and esteem. Live on, assured and confident in the certain knowledge that you have handed on to the right-thinking world at large, the richest legacy which man can leave to man—the memory of a good name, the inheritance and inspiration of a great example.

And so in closing, Mr. Chairman, I bring your salute to this elder statesman, this ablest master of the English tongue in our Dominion, this great Canadian, and in offering him the toast of this distinguished gathering and of all Canadians, I give him back the words which he himself wrote of Sir Robert Borden, his immediate predecessor in the office of prime minister. Of him Arthur Meighen once said these words which I now say of him:

Happy indeed are they who, as the night of life approaches, find that the inner vision does not fade. Happier still are they who, as the shadows lengthen, have full assurance that they bore with head unbowed a strong man’s measure of the heat and burden, who are conscious that they enjoy the undimmed confidence of everyone who shared with them their struggles and anxieties, and who have just cause to hope that when all is over there will be heard from their fellow men the simple and sincere benediction: ‘He served his country well.’[caption id="attachment_611051" align="alignleft" width="394"] John Diefenbaker[/caption]Arthur Milnes is an accomplished public historian and award-winning journalist.  He was research assistant on The Rt. Hon. Brian Mulroney’s best-selling Memoirs and also served as a speechwriter to then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper and as a Fellow of the Queen’s Centre for the Study of Democracy under the leadership of Tom Axworthy.  A resident of Kingston, Ontario, Milnes serves as the in-house historian at the 175 year-old Frontenac Club Hotel.