Chapter 14

In spite of Sir John, in 1919 and 1920, people bought Canada almost bankrupt on the exchanges. Hence among the items in the cheapening list may be placed the Canadian dollar which is now worth about 89 cents in New York. That is what happens to the dollar when it goes away from home and plays prodigal son. What Sir John works to see is Canadian commodities crossing the border and the Yankee dollars coming back in exchange.

Here is one of the greatest moral issues of the age for this nation. Even the preachers, if they could see us put up the barriers against luxury imports from the United States--said to be such a wicked nation--would breathe more easily. People so often buy sin done up in dutiable packages. For the fiscal year ending March 31, 1921, Canadians went into debt to the United States over a million a day--adverse exchange. Nearly $400,000,000 in one year spent for Yankee goods more than Yankeedom spent buying goods from us.

And now comes the need for the rationalizing philosophy of Sir John Willison, truly our most versatile expert on tariffs from the _Globe_ reciprocity down to the Reconstruction. Beginning in 1917 with Foster's "economic unity" in North America, a friendly Democratic tariff had let Canada send certain natural products into the United States free of duty. Private interests found it profitable to handle Canadian trade, much of it in transit to Europe in a state of high demand. The democratic element in Sir John must have approved that. Grit as he used to be, Sir John must believe in letting the great United States practise free-trade if it be so disposed. Those good Democrats! Had they not enacted the Underwood tariff, what a mountainous load must have been imposed upon the Atlantean shoulders of Reconstruction!

Which brings us to the eve of Dominion Day, 1921. Sir John was not bowling; he was reading the _Round Table_ for June--at least if not he should have been--an article on the meeting of the "Imperial Cabinet".

"Mischievous title!" he mutters. "It's an Imperial Conference of Premiers. John S. Ewart will be sure to make a kingdom article out of that. Very ill-advised. Er--Come!"

"Evening paper, Sir John," says the boy.

Sir John takes up the paper and is at once confronted by an item which convinces him that if ever Canada needed protection from the United States, now is the time. The item is the repeal of the Underwood tariff. Accustomed for life to unpleasant sensations from printed pages, his face gives no sign of emotion. Swiftly he reads through, flings the paper down and looks up. At once he rises, glaring coldly at the Crerar palimpsest on the wall. Again that Mona Lisa exporting smile, as the lips seem to say:

"Well, Sir John--what will be the Republican Reconstruction price of the Canadian dollar now?"

"Bah!" Sir John snorts into a handkerchief, like a Tory squire. "That tariff, Sir, is not a menace, nor a prophecy of agrarian victory at the polls. It is a challenge to this nation. Canada will not let down the bars. We shall put them higher! Keep the Canadian dollar in Canada. Sell our natural products to Britain. Build up our towns and our industries. Utilize our great water powers, the cheapest power in the world. Use our raw material; our manufacturing experience gained in the war. Develop the home market. Sell more to ourselves and spend our incomes in countries that do not put up economic barriers against our products. Without some adequate protection, sir, we are economically as extinct as the Dodo. There's but one alternative--commercial autonomy from the United States or commercial annexation. Nobody but a lunatic or an Agrarian would ever doubt which of these we shall choose--eh, what's that you say?"

The portrait chuckles. An uplifted hand appears in the unframed picture.

"I said, Sir John--put the repeal of the Underwood tariff under your Medicine Hat."

In sudden fury Sir John flings the _Round Table_ at the place where the picture vanished.

This may be a whimsical conclusion to the study of a personality so perplexing and vagarious as Sir John Willison. But he himself, having a high sense of humour, will appreciate its psychological justice as much as he regrets its historical inaccuracy. Sir John has always aimed at being a big Canadian, and he has usually succeeded. He did his share of contribution to right thinking about the war, as he did in vicarious action when he lost one of his two sons in that struggle. He could not do otherwise, because in spite of his bewildering superficial changes of coat, when even his detractors almost admired the dignity with which he changed it, Sir John, the Tory at heart, has always been a loyal servant of his country. Without him the story of political journalism in Canada would be a thing of shreds and patches.

He has at various times wielded an immense power usually in the direction of shrewd, sane thinking about national affairs. No Canadian editor of his time so thoroughly mastered its intricate problems. He has a faculty of clear, constructive thinking and a fine style of writing. With no college education he became a cultured journalist--which is sometimes an anomaly--though he never showed any zeal for the "humanities" and never knew much about that peculiar sociological phenomenon called the proletariat.

Since he drew away from the farm Sir John has never had a desire to return, even in sympathy. With a fine sense of humour he has never relished reminiscences of the backwoods and the smoke of the log heaps. His published "Reminiscences" are a fine contribution to our political history, but they show no real sympathy with the rude pioneer life from which the writer came and to which he owes a debt that he could very well discharge, if he would write a book about the social and craft life of the Canadian farm as it was in the Victorian Era. There is more national vitality in the story of that than there is in the programme of the National Reconstruction Association. Sir John has a true sympathy with that life, because he knows it has been at the root of all his own big Canadianism in all its forms. He is one of the kindliest men alive and he writes with great discernment and dignity. Let him stop writing Reconstruction bulletins and do something of more value to the country, so that the older enthusiasm of men who used to think he was Canada's greatest editor may not althogether die.

WHATSOEVER THY HAND FINDETH

SIR JOSEPH FLAVELLE, BART.

"Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might." I have forgotten whether it was Paul or Solomon who said that. But Sir Joseph Flavelle, Bart., will be sure to remember. From the time he was big enough to carry in wood for his devout Christian mother near Peterborough, Ont., he was living out that text.

The Flavelle family afterwards moved to Lindsay, where the future baronet went into business. Queer little town--to be the home of three such men as Flavelle, Hughes, and Mackenzie.

A man who has had years of business intimacy with Sir Joseph said to me once--under suggestion--"Yes, you never miss a word he says to you, because he puts everything so clearly, and you admire the big things he does, because he has such a genius for action after he thinks--but somehow you are so exasperated when you leave him that you feel like giving him a big swift kick."

Another man who was under him in an organizing position for years during the war said: "Well, the higher critics can say all they like against his methods and his personal peculiarities, but I tell you--I like the old boy."

One of Britain's foremost financial experts in the war said to an interviewer: "Ah, you know Flavelle? Clev-er man! Clev-er!" That was nearly twenty years ago.

In 1918 Sir Joseph Flavelle had in his Munitions Office at Ottawa a staff of 360 accounting clerks working upon thirteen ledgers, each representing a separate department of the Board, which up till that time had placed orders in this country for war material aggregating $1,60,000,000 [Transcriber's note: $160,000,000? $1,600,000,000?] in value.

At that time an editor wrote Sir Joseph asking for a statement of what his Board had done. Within a few hours of receiving the letter Sir Joseph forwarded an itemized statement a column long, of which one paragraph read:

"Upwards of 56,000,000 shells have been produced; 60,000,000 copper bands; 45,000,000 cartridge cases; 28,000,000 fuses; 70,000,000 lbs. of powder; 50,000,000 lbs. of high explosives; 90 ships built, or under construction aggregating 375,000 tons; 2,700 aeroplanes have been produced."

He stated also that 900 manufacturers had taken contracts in all the Provinces except Prince Edward Island. The great ex-Minister of Munitions himself, reading that report, might have said: "Flavelle? Yes--he is mighty clever." And Flavelle had been for one year then a baronet. That also was clever; and just in time. The man who happened to be in England when war was declared and sold war bacon in August, 1914, was not to be caught napping in 1917; neither after he had got his title was he to be found slacking in his marvellous work in 1918. Flavelle earned a title--even after he had taken it.

"Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do!" Yea, verily. I have been fairly well acquainted with Sir Joseph for a good many years. I do not know him. Yet his altogether uncommon personality has almost frozen itself into my memory. Whenever I see that thick-shouldered, whitening-whiskered man of sixty-three hastening afoot up the street, or driving his little runabout, or wiping his glasses every minute in some office, or coming becaped and crush-hatted to a concert, I can hear that high-keyed, slow voice, the calm dispassionate utterance with never a syllable misplaced, and feel the energy of a nature that of all men I ever met is the oddest compend of clear thinking, cool judgment, strength of grip and juvenility of impulse.

The story of his struggle to affluence is not much different in basic outlines from that of any average, self-made man; differing vastly in the character of the man. A year after he was forced out of Lindsay by boycott because of his Scott Act campaign, the freezing of a car of potatoes on a Toronto siding almost wiped out his business. Frankly and modestly, yet with a sort of fatalistic assurance, he discusses the kind of man he thinks himself to have become since he lost those potatoes. He denies that he has ever been interesting; rather bewildered that at one time or another people have taken such a peculiar interest in him. He talks of his early struggles, the economy of bacon, and the bigotries of Old Testamentarians in the same concise language set to the same unvaried monotony of voice. If you should fail to follow him, he would almost chide you for not paying attention.

Nearly twenty years ago I met a preacher keenly interested in Flavelle. He told me a story repeated to him in a sort of admiring deprecation that very day by a Methodist preacher from Toronto who had a gift for elevated gossip. This story was probably out of the Apocrypha, as it concerned a very worldly episode in the joint experiences of Mr. Flavelle and another Canadian financier on a visit to Chicago, when the latter got a wire stating that a certain conditional donation of his to a small church in Ontario had been unexpectedly covered by the congregation with the stipulated equal amount, and that it was time to send the money. It was said that he showed the wire to Flavelle; that the two financiers took joint action on the Stock Exchange; and that the money was wired immediately. The little details about the transaction I omit, partly out of deference to the preacher who bandied the yarn--wherever he got it. He probably only half believed it himself. Even ministers will gossip.

Much has been said about Sir Joseph's religious affairs. He has had many. He has been in publicity over a few, such as the controversy between the late Dr. Carman, his old adversary, and Rev. George Jackson, his then pastor, whom he defended. Flavelle has never concealed his enthusiasm for the church. He has entertained many a celebrated minister. He has been prominently identified with Missions, with the Methodist Book Room--that sadly unecclesiastical corporation--with debates in Conference on amusements and other things, with Methodist education. In all these he has practised the text, "Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do." The church needed Flavelle's organizing hand. He generously lent it. He could not do otherwise without being untrue to his own prodigious and inherited passion for a certain kind of organized religion.

The personal faith of a public man is no business for the critic, except where that faith becomes public works. Sir Joseph has been conspicuously aligned with the militant work of the Church. It has been the belief of those who know him, casually or intimately, that his philanthropic works were inspired by his faith. But many men have had as much faith with less works, because of too much dissipating emotion. Sir Joseph with all his juvenility of impulse had a way of hitching his emotions up to a job. The church needed organization. Other wealth-getting Methodists were prominent in pews, public donations and conferences. Flavelle believed in the seven days' work. He had a programme of action for the Sabbath. Church, social work, business, were to him very much one thing; all in need of organization to get results. He had no use for the idle church and less for what he called "the dead hand"--referring to the influence of his old adversary, Dr. Carman, who thought it presumption in a wealthy pork-packer to regard himself as a critic of clerical authority.

It is tolerably certain that had Flavelle made less of a business of religion, the public would have had less business condemning him on the bacon inquiry evidence. Here was a man who all his life had been a tremendous organizer of the church and a professor of a peculiarly active faith, president of a company which in one year had made an alleged profit of $5,000,000 on a capital investment of less than $14,000,000. Bacon at that time--1917--cost the consumer 50 cents a pound. The price was considered outrageous. Bacon afterwards went to 80 cents at a time when nobody blamed Sir Joseph; and when he had disposed of his interest in bacon altogether. But the alleged extortion of this powerful and baroneted Christian stuck in the public mind. Bacon was the pioneer in exposed "profiteering." O'Connor's report was made public at a time when it was yet the private property of the Cabinet. There was politics here. And the Premier was away. Other men afterwards made much more amazing profits that never were mentioned in the press; men who never went to church; who had never in public said such words as "let war profits go to the hell where they belong."

It was not the actual profit, but the alleged hypocrisy of Flavelle that roused the detestation of a large section of the public. And to the end of his life this man will never erase from the minds of many people the notion that he was of all profiteers the worst, because the most hypocritical.

Then there was the baronetcy. For a man who had preached Christ so much this seemed a thin business. A man's Christianity, if he works hard at it, becomes advertised without posters. The world that mistrusts the church on principle, that only waits the chance itself to profiteer and to get social preferment, is quick to anathematize the man who in a big way seems to corelate church, profits and society.

The public are no longer concerned, neither did they understand at the time, whether the Davies Co. made 5.05 cents a pound on bacon or 5.05 minus overhead charges, 4.1. Here was the first "sinner" caught; sentimentally lynch him. It made no difference then what had been the man's serious work in philanthropic organization and in public service; or that for war production he had offered the Wm. Davies plant to the Government to operate at so much percentage to the company; or that Flavelle himself had no connection with the management and at the time concerned knew very little about it. The public appetite did not want extenuating facts. It wanted a victim. Certain other interests, curbed by Sir Joseph in the matter of prices for munition contracts, wanted revenge. Under the old system of contracts these men had made a fairly good start at plundering the nation in its extremity. Between the long-suffering public, who thought they had a reason for hating Flavelle, and the profiteers who really had such a reason, Sir Joseph had an experience that would have tested any man's Christianity.

However, he made no protest; did not resign his post or leave the country, but worked on. The time came when he could have said, "Et tu, Brute!" to men who with no record for helping the church or organizing to help humanity had profited far more prodigally than the Wm. Davies Co. But he kept silence. He believed in his conscience that the company buying hogs at competitive prices, and selling in a protected market was ethically A1 at Lloyds. He still believes so. His enthusiasm for the company has not waned. He admires it even to a point of emotion. The company was not his, but he had made it. From the day that William Davies drove to Flavelle's house in an old open buggy and asked him to sell out his provision business to manage the company, till the day it produced about 100 million pounds of bacon alone, in a year, he had been its energizing head. The Wm. Davies Co. was but the main thing from which he made his money. Its stock was not sold on the markets. There was never any need of capital except what came from the business conducted by Flavelle. There was no wit and philosophy in "The Letters of a Pork Packer to His Son" that could have instructed him in the shrewd business of making a great commercial concern out of a little business. His success in Canada was relatively equal to that of any Swift in Chicago. Multiply it by the ratio of population and see. In one year during the war the Wm. Davies Co. had a bacon output of forty million dollars.

But Flavelle never can be judged by bacon. He could have done as well at railways or banking or law. He did even better at munitions when there were no profits, not even a salary. He did as well at any other form of public service. No man can justly judge him by commercial success. He invested--himself--in everything to which he set his hand, with the one exception of the now defunct _Toronto News_, which he left to the management of other people. He invested the same self capital in the commercial concern and in public service.

Any patient who has been in the Toronto General Hospital will tell you what a wonderful institution it is. He may not know who made it possible, or whose genius for order and perfection of mechanism it expresses. Without Flavelle, Toronto, instead of one of the greatest hospitals in the world, would have had just a good hospital. Almost a village was pulled down to make room for it, on a site that would suit the medical needs of the University. It needed a strong will to put it there, against the opinions of other people; a great hospital on the end of a slum! The same will put the great "Methodist Book Room" where it is--against the wish of a majority.

Flavelle was Chairman of the Commission that reorganized the University of Toronto. He had no desire for the work. The late Goldwin Smith was already chairman, much disliking Flavelle for some editorial about him in the _Toronto News_. The old professor was feeble. The Commission asked Flavelle to replace him. He consented. If they thought he was the man, he was willing to do the work. And it was thoroughly done, so far as a business brain could direct the reconstruction of a concern in which business system is the anatomy, not the life.

No man could sit at a conference with Flavelle and not think hard; or accept a duty from his committee and not discharge it. He demanded on behalf of the public--service. No man ever sat on a committee with him who had time for badinage. That man with the slow, high voice and the steady look was judging other men by results. Men came to believe that when there was a public task to perform, Flavelle was the man to take it. He was almost forced into service, often by the public indolence of other men. Canada has always played the professional grandstand method of getting things done for the public. Before the advent of Rotary and Kiwanis Clubs our two chief cities systematically advised the humble philanthropist without pull to go to such men as Flavelle, Edmund Walker, one of the Masseys, E. R. Wood, J. C. Eaton, Thomas Shaughnessy, Herbert Ames and P. S. Meighen--because these men were in the habit of doing or giving or organizing for the public interest, which is supposed to be a game for experts, not amateurs.

Flavelle's investment in things that made him no money was one of great ability, hard work and conscience. His returns on such capital were in the efficiency and usefulness of things which he had helped to create; the need for which he had observed as clearly and calmly as ever he had foreseen the scope of a great business.

Yet for much of his life he has been a creature of impulse, powerfully attracted by things not in business. He left his seat once in a great Buffalo hall to stand at the door that he might judge the effect of a certain decrescendo from a choir. To a group of musical enthusiasts in Chicago he suddenly suggested a trip to the Cincinnati May Festival. Speaking to the boys of Upper Canada College, he drew from his pocket a piece of putty to illustrate the plasticity of character. Standing amid heaps of luggage at the docks in St. John, he looked at the immigrant sheds and said, "What a very human picture!" Pocketing the proof of an hospital article, which as proprietor of the _Toronto News_ and Chairman of the Hospital Board he had withdrawn from publication, he said to the reporter, "Old man, a place of suffering should not be described in the language of the racetrack." When Pastor Wagner, author of "The Simple Life", was in Toronto, he was the guest of Mr. Flavelle, who for a time was as much absorbed in the peasant philosopher as he often was in the "Meditations" of Thomas à Kempis.

Considering these impulses to express himself, it is not hard to understand how Sir Joseph came to say to the Toronto Board of Trade that war profits should go to the hell to which they belonged. He was speaking under a sense of emotion. All through his enormously successful career he had been energized by a sudden enthusiasm to take hold of something, and afterwards to make it go. "Whatsoever thy hand findeth."

Flavelle's hand found many things. Among them was the _Toronto News_, his one recorded failure. This also was an impulse; precisely the same as had led him years before to subscribe $5,000 to a fund for the better education of the Tory party. The _News_ cost him one hundred times as much, for much the same reason on a larger scale; and he lost it. But he has never regretted the loss, because he gained the experience. The _News_ did a valuable work. But its rather Utopian resurrection had a sad sequel in Toryism such as Flavelle never could have endorsed, and its ultimate extinction seemed to prove that newspapers cannot be operated by ideals.