Chapter 8
"Tell you what I want him for," he said. "I want to go up and shake hands with a real live man. That's what I want. I read his message 'bout getting together, and it sure set me thinking. I'm strong for this Conference scheme. I'm going to back it for all I'm worth and do my darndest to help a real, live statesman to pull off a big deal. Damn if I care whether he is a Tory. My middle name is--Boost! I want to help."
We walked up to the Department of Trade and Commerce together.
"Just what line of industry are you interested in?" I asked.
"Boilers--steam boilers. Vancouver. Little Van-cou-ver. That's my town."
"And if I may ask, what is your idea about this Business Man's Conference? What do you think ought to be done?"
"Eh? Why, I don't know yet. That's what I'm coming to see Foster about."
An hour later I met the boiler-maker coming away from the Department of Trade and Commerce.
"Well," I said, "everything clear?"
"Clear?" he roared. "Clear? Why, man alive! that fellow Foster's away in the West with some Dominion Royal Commission, making speeches or something, and back there"--nodding toward the Department of Trade and Commerce--"nobody home!"
"Couldn't they explain it?"
"Sure. They explain that Sir George is away and nothing definite can be done. I asked 'em when the conference would be called and they said that was indefinite. Then I said where? And they thought somewhere in Ottawa. Why, all that fellow Foster made was a speech. That's all. A speech! Now what the h---- good will a speech do to help me and help the rest of us manufacturers to keep from getting swamped after this war?"
Trade in Canada during the war was of vastly more practical significance than the old fiscal idea of Empire of which Sir George had been such a protagonist when he stumped England for Chamberlain in 1903. But he never seemed able to grasp it as clearly even in a speech. I don't know which seems to me now the greater speech; that on the Chamberlain mirage to the Toronto Empire Club when he elevated fiscal statistics into a pageant of economic emotion; or his speech on the war, I think in 1916, when he lifted his thin spectral figure into a sublime paroxysm of ethical appeal, corralled all opposing arguments into a corner and flogged the life out of them in a great message to awakened humanity. The comparison scarcely matters except to show that in fifteen years of great Foster speeches alas for the prophets!--it was not the fiscal Empire of Chamberlain that had leaped to the war.
Still more startling to Sir George, the economics of war riddled to bits the old economics of Empire. In 1917 he was compelled to forget that a tariff was implied in the Ten Commandments and to consent for all necessary purposes to remove trade restrictions across the border. That was after the United States had declared war. The high priest of protection himself invented a phrase "economic unit" to express North America. He wanted markets to find their own levels by their own routes. He no longer had any fear of Canada being Americanized. Canada's nationhood was already defined in the trenches more than ever it had been in tariffs. In Sir George's phrase the food producers of North America were to become one vast international group. When Foster was "Yea" to Macdonald in 1887 and 1891, before he became "Amen" to Chamberlain in 1903, this economic unity was called continentalism, which to Foster was the mother of annexation, and Free Trade Liberals were traitors to the Empire.
Economic unity, however, meant far more than Sir George intended it to mean. He admitted the principle of free-trade only in production. In spite of tariffs North America became, not only a vast group of producers, but a huge family of consumers. Every Victory Loan raised money that was spent in once more paying wages and buying materials for war production in Canada. Every time that money went round the circle, prices for many of the staple commodities went higher. The Department of Trade registered a tremendous increase in the cash value of exports even when the bulk value changed very little. The more loans "put over the top," the more money there seemed to be. The more hazardous shipping became through submarines, the greater the scarcity, and the demand--and the price paid. Sir George witnessed this phenomenon: the fewer producers left by conscription on the land, in the mines, in the factories, the more Canada was able to export--in cash values.
This must have given a good Tory economist loss of sleep. No man could have analyzed the paradox more ably than Sir George. But so far as we can recollect, he published no illuminating bulletins from his Department to tell us about it. How we should have enjoyed his master mind elucidating the phenomenon of a continent being gradually denuded of goods and flushed with money; of prices inexorably mounting; of money hungering for goods; of fabulous wages for munition-making and anything else that could be scaled up to meet the competition unloading themselves into Victory Bonds at a sure profit, and the surplus into commodities most of which were not made in Canada and must therefore come from the United States. What a prophetic commentary it would have made on the "buyers' market" which followed the armistice. What wonderful reading it would have made if Sir George had issued replies to those commercial newspaper editors over the border who rushed jubilating into print to say with fabulous statistics that Canada was now the heaviest customer that nation had. How we should have liked to hear officially from the Minister of Trade how Broadway was infecting the country, luxuries reeling in argosies over the dry land to Canada, and Canada buying herself bankrupt on the exchanges; and that though there were powerful economic reasons for it all, we had better enlist in an army of economy instead of being conscripted later by the super-tariff on luxuries and the luxury tax.
But the Minister of Trade confined himself to growling that we should all wear patches and old clothes. Which was one good reason why many people did not. It was easy for Sir George to wear patched trousers if he felt like so doing. He would have been merely picturesque, like those ragged prophets of old. Most of us still had to invest in some sort of decoration. Anyhow a large number of people had the money to spend; and the more they spent the more they approved of self-denial in other people.
This problem of American penetration is big enough at any time here. The Department of Trade is the place where it is most clearly understood. We are constantly warned about the danger, not only to our Canadian dollar, but to our national independence if we persist in importing motor cars, fashionable footwear, party gowns and lingerie and hats, art furniture, home decorations, phonographs, moving pictures, and magazines. But we go on doing it; because Canada, whether in war or peace, fails to produce a great many things that people like to have and to wear and to go about in; and for those that she does we are charged the foreign price plus the duty and more; so that in many and many a case it has been found more economical to buy the article from catalogue, paying the duty and the express charges.
Has Sir George ever enlightened us about this? Has he ever tried to inform the Canadian manufacturer that if he expects to hold our allegiance even under a more or less protective tariff, he must refrain from charging the consumer all the traffic and more than the consumer will stand? We fail to remember; even when we recollect that on thus and such an occasion somewhere in the Empire he made some glorious patriotic speech. On a subject which causes many Canadians to explode, often with ill-considered accusation of "the Yankees," our greatest maker of pure and applied speeches seldom has a word to say. But he knows. Sir George Foster knows our economic subjugation by the 12 to 1 method, even under a tariff. Alas! he hails from the Maritimes, a land of great people, of constructive Canadians who have too often been in absolute economic need of more of that sort of subjugation.
Then there was the never-dead dragon of high prices for everything, which our St. George made no real attempt to spear. That is a long story. It was his department which furnished the Food Controller, the duties which the Trade Department could not discharge. Well remembered are the evangelical injunctions of the Controller to consume perishable and export other products; to live on garden truck grown in back yards and corner lots so that grain and butter and bacon and eggs and oatmeal might run the submarine blockade on the high seas. There was no fault to find with this, so long as it was economy. But heaven knew what armies of housewives, already desperate from lack of help, were dragooned into making their kitchens amateur canning factories where they wasted good fruit along with tragically expensive sugar in jars that approximated the cost of cut glass. And after all the slavery and the self denial, butter and eggs that were not shipped abroad because there was no room in munition ships to carry them, vanished mysteriously in the lower price season into some limbo known as cold-storage, only to emerge when it suited the storage barons at prices as high as were paid in Europe. No doubt there is an economic philosophy in cold-storage just as there is in hydro-power. But we have always supposed its virtue was in taking care of a perishable surplus, so that when there is a scarcity the surplus can be released at a reasonable profit.
Did the able Minister of Trade ever stoop to enlighten us with the economics of this? If so, the recollection has faded.
There is at any time, whether in peace or war, a great function for the Department of Trade to perform in the matter of what is the reasonable cost of any commodity in general demand. But no Trade Department in this country has ever done it. There is always plenty of time for the consideration of new markets, the plotting of new trade routes and the planning of mercantile marine for export; all very well, and if we are to pay our bills by exports, very necessary. But the common consumer has many a time, long before the war and often since, found himself in the jaws of a nutcracker in the shape of some combine or trust or confederacy of middlemen; and if there was any sphere of government to deal with these things it was the great Department of Trade.
This has nothing to do with party politics. Any party up to date has been capable of neglecting the people in these matters. But it is quite as important as the abolition of patronage.
We have ceased to expect any such function from a Minister so old, so eloquent, so Imperially-inspired as Sir George Foster. There is always something else to do. The party must be led in the House. Sir George was the House leader. Magnificent! No man ever rose at a desk in Parliament who could more superbly play upon the bigotries and the high patriotic emotions of even a remnant party. The man is a genius. There must be the valley of dry bones for Ezekiel. And the bones must come together and walk. Sir Robert Borden on such occasions was a mere interested gargoyle. Patriotism demanded that the party's desks be thumped. Sir George saw that they were thumped without stint.
Twice during the Opposition period Sir George was dead and buried by the Grits; once over the Union Trust land investigation; again in a libel suit which he lost to the _Globe_ when Rowell was against him. None of these things defeated the able author of Resurgam! who was made Minister of Trade, went for a six-months' journey in the Orient trying to convert the yellow races from rice to Canadian flour, and afterwards got his title. So when the people, in 1917, asked Ezekiel for a prophecy, the Minister of Trade stoically advised them to eat less, save more, waste nothing, wear what their grandmothers wore if possible, and hope for the best. In the matter of fixing prices Sir George had as much wisdom as most, though he made a very awkward attempt to adjust the price of wheat and only then at the instigation of the British Government.
The world by this time was full of upsetting anomalies to Sir George. Even government was perverted. He had no desire for Unionism; to sit at Council with even win-the-war Liberals--once plain Grits. It needed political philosophy to make colleagues of such men as Calder, the Grit enemy of Toryism in the West, Crerar, the avowed apostle of free-trade, Sifton, the Alberta mystery man, and Rowell, who had won the libel suit against him for the Globe. It was not to be expected that so complete and historic a Tory as Sir George could at first easily regard such men as anything but interlopers, even though he admitted their strength in the Coalition. One can imagine Meighen making up to his old trade enemy Carvell, but not Foster making overtures to Rowell.
But the vital element was gone out of the Administration, and Sir George had to admit it. Cold and repellent as he has always seemed in politics, without a crony or even a man who cared to make him a confederate, he has never been a man of implacable resentment. He was yet to regard Rowell as a real man, worthy his confidence.
A newspaperman sent to Osgoode Hall to report the Globe libel suit for an Ottawa Liberal paper relates how the night of the conclusion of the trial he met Mr. Foster at the Toronto Station. The reporter had already wired the decision of the Court adverse to Mr. Foster, who had not even taken the trouble to inquire what it was. The two chatted amiably on the train and met the next morning in Ottawa. On his way home Mr. Foster saw the Liberal bulletin at the newspaper office. A few days later he met the scribe.
"Tom," he said, genially, shaking hands, "why didn't you tell me about that decision?"
"Well, sir, I really thought you knew, and I didn't care to hurt your feelings."
The member for North York laughed.
"Feelings!" he repeated. "You are the first Grit that ever said I had any."
A prominent Liberal described to the writer the exit of Mr. Foster from the House after the Royal Commission investigation into the Union Trust.
"Mr. and Mrs. Foster," he said eloquently, "went together down the terrace in a fog of rain, into the shadow of the night, under one umbrella. And I said to myself as they went, dejected and pitiful, 'Well, that's the final exit of Foster from political life.'"
The author of Resurgam knew better. He could always somehow come back on the stepping stones of a dead self. Something made him feel that without him the Conservative party would have been like the Liberals without Laurier, or in an earlier day his own party minus the old chief Macdonald. He was almost right.
One other episode illustrates how spontaneously the emotional aspect of things sometimes sways this cold politician who never could lead a party. When the Premier by request called a caucus of his Union supporters for the purpose of discovering what could be done with the Coalition to make it a party, it was not the Premier who held the floor, but Sir George, who made a long passionate speech upon the vicissitudes of men who--like the Premier and himself--had carried the burden and the heat of the political day. When Foster had finished, there were tears on case-hardened faces and the caucus adjourned. Asked later for a copy of his great speech, Sir George said he had not even prepared any notes; when he went to the caucus he had not intended making any such speech; he did not now remember what he had said.
Can we call such a man anything but a genius? As Minister of Trade he may be a poor salesman. He is not less a poor salesman of his party, his country, or his big original belief in the Empire, whatever form of government it might become, or of his birthright to spend his tremendous talent in public service rather than in private gain. And he has been for almost a generation the most interesting personality in the ranks of the Conservative party.
There is but one other politician in America with the political vitality of Sir George Foster. "Uncle Joe" Cannon is the man. In Washington Cannon is regarded as a miracle because he was once the autocrat of Congress and is still a member of the House and a very old man. Sir George Foster is almost as old a man and has been in public service much longer. He has held portfolios under all the Conservative Premiers that Canada ever had--Macdonald, Thompson, Abbott, Bowell, Borden, Meighen. There have been times in the shuffles of these men when for ability he, rather than Abbott or Bowell or Borden, should have been Premier. But there was always a fatal obstacle in the personality of the man whose leadership always depended upon making a great speech. When he was first Minister under Macdonald, a lad named Arthur Meighen was getting ready to attend a High School. Could that Minister and that lad have been introduced, would Ezekiel have prophesied that in 1920 he would be holding office under the lad, Premier of Canada?
Anomalies like these are the rule in a life of a man so unusual as Sir George, who is now a Senator. Even in the Senate he is not dead; for in Ezekiel, 37th chapter, it is written, "Son of man, can these bones live? And I answered, O Lord God, thou knowest."
A HALO OF BILLIONS
HON. SIR THOMAS WHITE
Sir Thomas White was the world's only continuous Finance Minister for the whole period of the war--and after; when nobody else cared to have his job, and Sir Thomas did. He seduced billions of patriotic dollars out of the pockets of this country and smiled as he did it. No man in Canada was so exquisitely fitted to the task of making an average dollar burn a hole in a man's pocket in order to do its bit. It gave him "the pleasure that's almost pain" to feel that no man except Henri Bourassa or an Eskimo could escape the snare of a Victory Loan advertisement prepared by Sir Thomas and his committees of ad-men and brokers. Never before on this continent had a nation been so advertised into patriotism. In England some expert had done it for Kitchener's Army. But it was easier to recruit England, with 30 millions of people within the area of our maritime provinces, than to mobilize billions from a vast emptiness like Canada.
It must be admitted that the divinity which keeps governments from wrecking nations had somehow picked the right man for this stupendous task. Sir Thomas had a quality of mind and a political experience which made it possible for him to pull the last dollar for victory. In the war annals of Canada he will have a halo of billions, while Sam Hughes has one of bayonets. He mobilized our financial resources by a system that stopped only short of conscription.
I seldom see Sir Thomas standing at a street corner when I do not feel like urging him to run along and attend to his office and not to be losing time. He seems to belong to that cold group of men whose time is naturally money.
In 1912 I asked Mr. White in Ottawa for an interview. He appointed an hour when I might see him. As soon as I entered the office he began to talk. The ease and fluency of his conversation amazed me. No other Minister of that Cabinet could have been so suave and entertaining.
"Er--with regard to the question of railway fin----?"
He saw the question coming in a sort of parabolic curve and he dodged it. By a neat evasion he got the topic switched to sociology, from that to philosophy, to heredity, literature, journalism, art, and finally prenatalism. Every effort I made to probe him on public finance was met by some calm and smiling barrage of eclectic interest. For an hour we played conversational pingpong in the most amiable style. And when Mr. White urbanely confessed that he liked everybody in the House of Commons, even "Bob" Rogers and Dr. Pugsley, it was time for the interviewer to go, before so charmed a Utopia should vanish like a film on a screen, and to conclude that the Finance Minister of Canada was no novice in a certain species of diplomacy.
Time made some heavy changes in him. A press gallery observer, asked by a certain Canadian periodical to name a possible successor to Sir Robert Borden four years before the Premier's resignation, picked Sir Thomas whom he said he had watched turn grey and careworn in office, sedulous at his desk, always busy, never at ease. Yet in 1912 he could lecture hon. gentlemen opposite seasoned in political intrigues as though he, himself, had discovered some new coefficient in politics.
Sir Thomas White has always been a political emergency, a sort of administrative occasion. For real politics he was never meant. For government by business he had great aptitude. To him government is big business, and the human side of democracy a sealed book. He has an almost exquisite sense of prerogative. His equilibrium is adjusted to the niceties of a seismographic instrument. Yet he has never held himself aloof, and is not commonly proud.
There is an idle story that near the end of his term in office he went to a bank teller's wicket--being in urgent temporary need of a little common money--and presented a cheque. On being courteously reminded by the teller that he had not brought the customary identification, he blandly announced, "I am the Finance Minister of Canada." The manner in which the Minister spoke is said to have left no doubt in the teller's mind that he was indeed the very man whose photograph had appeared in the newspapers.
There is also a little story that during one of the Victory Loan conferences in Ottawa, one of his older associates in newspaper work politely called him Sir Thomas, and that the Minister replied, "Oh, forget it! Call me Tom."
The first may be fiction. The second is a fact. But the number of men who without invitation would call him Tom, is not very extensive.
From his youth up Tom White had a powerful capacity for ordered work. There was "a time to work and a time to play, a time to laugh and a time to weep." Nor did he acquire this from Sir Joseph Flavelle, with whom he was so long and intimately associated. He had it from the cradle, which he must have left at the appointed time with some impatience at too much rocking. As a student at the University, as a law student at Osgoode, as a barrister, as reporter on the _Telegram_, as an employee in the Toronto Assessment Department, he had always a sort of mathematical regard for the diligence that makes a man fit to stand before kings, and the sensation of a superbly pigeon-holed mind.
By heredity Sir Thomas was labelled a Liberal, and at the time of the Taft-Fielding reciprocity junta he sat on the edge of his political bed pulling the court-plaster off. Next morning, without a single new grey hair in his head, he found himself a Conservative. The Liberal regime of shipping in people and booming up speculative towns on the prairies was a good thing for any Trust. But when the Government began to barter its preserve for another lease of life, Mr. White decided that it was time for a change. When he quit the National Trust to take on a trust for a nation he was a new-born Conservative, and in the eyes of the new Premier a lovely child. And as Finance Minister in a Tory Government he became the real author of Coalition.