With good reason, the Rt. Hon. Arthur Meighen, Canada’s 9th Prime Minister, is considered, along with Sir Wilfrid Laurier, the greatest debater of all those who’ve held Canada’s top political job. Meighen’s reputation before history was cemented in large part when he published a selection of his greatest speeches called Unrevised and Unrepented: Debating Speeches and Others, late in life.
On this date in 1950 a review of Meighen’s book, authored by Professor Norman Ward of the University of Saskatchewan, appeared in the Saskatoon Star-Phoenix
“(A) summary of the book is impossible. Arthur Meighen’s qualities are such that a book of his speech’s sheds little new light on politics in Canada, or to a regular reader of Hansard on Arthur Meighen,” Professor Ward wrote. “He remains a remarkable figure, and I enjoyed every word of his book. Here, as Grattan O’Leary writes in the introduction, from a great man are the words with which his tongue and heart stirred and enriched his country. So personal is the force of Arthur Meighen’s words that the dominant thought left by his book is not concerned with the book but with the man himself: I wish him well, and hope he will be around for a long time to disapprove of the rest of us.”
If I’m allowed, I proudly note that decades later, in 2011, yours truly, who first picked up Meighen’s Unrevised and Unrepented in his high school library in Scarborough, edited and published through the Queen’s University School of Policy Studies, a new edition of the book. Unrevised and Unrepented II was released in 2011 and launched by then Prime Minister Stephen J. Harper and then House Speaker Peter Milliken at a special ceremony on Parliament Hill.
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.