Chapter 9
Mr. White took into the Finance Department the atmosphere and the technique of the fiduciary corporation. Hence he was never able to read himself into the life of the country, never became more than a superficial master of its political forces, never rallied men about him in a great effort to save anything but a financial situation, and never lost a superb sense of himself. The fact that without ever having been elected to Parliament or Legislature, or even a County Council, he could walk into what is usually regarded as the most important department of administration in any country, is a proof that government as big business was more important to him than politics as experience.
The average portfolio is handed to a politician, not because he knows anything about the matter in hand, but because he is a good politician, a big enough man to represent some electoral area, and may be left to learn his public job after he gets it. Such is democracy. White was a tyro in politics and public administration. But he did know finance. When Laurier picked editor Fielding from Nova Scotia to look after the Budget he chose a good deal of a genius. Mr. Fielding was a master of tariffs and of inspiring fiscal speeches outside the House. He had almost a Gladstonian faculty for making statistics scintillate with human interest. He had made a survey of the country on tariff for revenue; and he usually had a bookkeeping surplus at a time when he practically boasted on the platform of what it cost to run the country. Much thanks to him the Liberals had given Free Trade a profoundly respectable burial, with Michael Clark, headmaster of the Manchester School in Canada, as chief mourner.
But the ledgers of Canada looked to be in a bad way to Mr. White. "The cost of high living" had been demonstrated by the Liberal Government some time before James J. Hill coined the phrase. Laurier monuments to high living were dotted all over the country in the shape of armouries, post offices, customs houses, docks, courthouses, the Quebec Bridge, and vast systems of unpopulated railways.
When Mr. White's sensitive finger came to that prodigal item in the public ledger he had almost excuse, in spite of his pre-knowledge of the business, for curling up like a cutworm. His knowledge of banks and their customers was very extensive. He had dealt with those banks. The ex-manager of the National Trust had long known that Canada was overbuilt with railways and going-to-be-bankrupt towns. The orgy of expansion whose familiar figure was the prodigal with the scoop shovel in the gold bin by the open window with a huge hole in the ground beneath, was just about at the crest of its master carousal [Transcriber's note: carousel?]; and the transcontinental railways with their entails of cash and land grants and guaranteed bonds was the thing that gave the new Minister the greatest concern of the lot, though he never said so. An ex-Cabinetarian who used to agree with Sir Thomas in politics still stoutly alleges that the 1911 "bolt" of the famous 18 Liberals, of whom Sir Thomas was one of the leaders, was a tactical manoeuvre to save the Canadian Northern from bankruptcy by reciprocity.
Sir Thomas should have made the railways his first drastic item of reorganization. Here was a Verdun for the Finance Minister to take. But for two years while the railway cataclysm was coming he went along with business as usual. It would have been less of a burden to unload that railway bankruptcy in 1913 than it was during the stress of after the war.
But of course the Finance Minister was only the chief subordinate in the Administration. Time would force the railways to terms. The war and war business came faster than the time. Sir Thomas probably dreaded the public ownership in which he has never profoundly believed. In conversation with the President of the Canadian Pacific he practically admitted that a Government cannot compete with a great corporation in operating a railway. But in 1912, on the principle that an egg hatches into a chicken, he must have foreseen that national ownership of half Canada's railways would be thrust upon him.
It is not explicitly known what are Sir Thomas White's opinions about the Government ownership of railways; but one can easily imagine what he would have said prior to 1911 to any proposal of any Government to begin owning and operating banks and trust companies. And as Government is the owner of the Royal Mint in Canada and does its own coining of the metals used in our currency, it would seem to be vastly easier for a Government to own banks and loan companies than to own and operate transportation systems. Sir Thomas would scarcely deny that. He is too shrewd in experience. It is one thing for a municipality to own street railways, because all the streets are automatically part of a city's property. It is quite another matter for Government to own and operate railways, because the routes of these highways and the machinery necessary to conduct traffic are not naturally the property of a Government, which exercises its power chiefly through the regulation of rates and the functions of the Railway Commission.
One imagines that Sir Thomas sincerely hoped that the railways built from cash borrowed on Government guaranteed bonds, and by direct loans from the national exchequer would some time develop business enough to pay their own way. But it is not remembered that he held any conferences with the Minister of Railways to prepare a public statement on this question. Both these Ministers had troubles enough without creating more. The country was on the crest of a wave whose trough was not far ahead.
Sir Thomas had made but one really constructive budget speech when the inevitable slump began to come. But as yet he seemed to be rather charmed with the novelties of Parliament and the ironies of preparing to win elections. The war plunged him into a system that cared no more for his budget than a cyclone for a baby carriage. Tariffs, bankrupt railways, the banking system, exchanges, and the common cost of living were all but obliterated in the campaign of war loans, not the least marvellous feature of which was that selling Victory Bonds almost made the Finance Minister a friend of the common people. The "vicious circle" of higher wages and higher cost of living was offset by Sir Thomas White's virtuous circle of money raised in Canada, spent in Canada, for goods needed by Canada and the Allies at the front. The formula was 5 1/2 per cent with no taxes, and the best security in the world--if the war was won, which of course it would be if people bought Victory Bonds.
In this era of the patriotism of the pocket, common reason almost tottered from her throne. Ordinary financial logic was forgotten. Economic delirium took hold of the nation. A broker in those days could talk in language more mysterious than the polite attentions of a juggler who pulls an egg from your pocket. Newspapers were full of jargon that sometimes seemed more fantastic than the theories of the Holy Rollers. The citizen who could not cash a Victory Bond to pay a debt was considered behind the times, and the banker who told you that it was better to sell bonds than to borrow on them at the bank was regarded as an oracle, even though you could not begin to comprehend his logic.
But the Finance Minister was as calm as Gibraltar. He was the man behind the curtain and the show. He was seldom absent from the Orders-in-Council convention, commonly known as Parliament. He was again and again acting Premier. He cared little for Imperial Conferences. His war was at home. His firing line was all over Canada. He was the most stay-at-home and sedulous of our ministers. He worked while others slept or sailed the seas. No Victory Loan advertisement proof escaped the eagle eye of this ex-newspaperman before it went to press. He scanned and corrected every syllable. Every advertisement was a sermonette from the Finance Minister.
An independent writer visiting Ottawa in the fall of 1916, wrote concerning the Finance Minister:
"One of the best evidences of Ottawa's frame of mind is the way it talks about Sir Thomas White--and the way Sir Thomas talks about himself. Sir Thomas White has probably rendered more real brain service to this country in his few years of office than any one man who has held office as a Minister--I am not now speaking of Prime Ministers, whose functions are particular and peculiar--since Confederation. To Ottawa, Sir Thomas is little short of a miracle. The frame of mind on both sides of politics regarding Sir Thomas is not unlike that of the farmer who saw a two-humped camel for the first time. "Hell," said Ottawa, "they ain't no such animal!" Now it calls Sir Thomas White 'great'--and even Sir Thomas admits it!"
Vol. I., No. 1 of The Onlooker, had this to say on the other side of the ledger:
"One would gather from the way some of his admirers talk that he, and he alone, was responsible for the success of the various loans issued during the war. He had it easy. The country was literally bursting with money seeking investment. One could almost have raised it with his eyes shut. The whole community was humming with activity like a top asleep; and still the orders from abroad came pouring in. Every fresh loan stimulated activity anew. All that was required was to issue the prospectus, pass the solicitation of funds to interested canvassers, newspapers, publications, loan companies, banks, brokers, and hurrah at the end."
Some things do look easy to the man who is not doing them. Common sense admits that the man who patriotically juggled the billions from pocket to exchequer and back to pocket again would have had a much harder task to undertake what somebody called "the Gethsemane" of paying the nation's bills when the "hurrah" was over. The method of financing Canada in the war may be vastly different from the method necessary in peace. But when money must be had quickly in vast quantities there is no time to debate on just how you are going to get it. Sir Thomas White's raid upon the pockets of Canada was a financial spectacle not to be judged by standards of thrift, for the very good reason that the people were nauseated with thrift talk, were looking for something easy, and White had the instinct to know that the easier and the more spectacular he could make a Victory Loan the better for the war. He rowed with the current and knew he was doing it. In his own financial brain, which is not unthrifty, he knew that the "hurrah" was not healthy in the long run and that it could not last forever. But once it was started there was no other way but to keep it up.
Thanks to Sir Thomas, every citizen had an opportunity to get himself rubber-stamped on behalf of the nation; which on general principles was a good thing, because a large number of people at that time indulged the fiction that as the Government was paying its debts, a good way to do it would be to print more paper money. It was the Finance Minister's opportunity to instruct us, that the Government was not paying debts--but making it possible to pay wages. Unless the surplus of every man's earnings was invested in Victory Bonds there would shortly be no big industries left to pay the earnings at all, Canada would cease to export munitions--which might be the one thing to lose the war, in which case nothing would be left for any of us but to pay war indemnities to the enemy. Critics declared that non-taxable bonds were an iniquity in favour of the big investor who could heap up bonanza investments without taxes; another way of accusing the Finance Minister of being in league with the "big interests." But we must do Sir Thomas the credit of taking a sure way to encourage the small investor by refusing to tax his patriotism. A 100th per cent tax on some people's patriotism might have squelched it altogether. It would have been a public service if Sir Thomas White had plainly told the people, not less about why they should buy Victory Bonds during a period of inflation, but more about what would happen to them when deflation began to set in; when, ceasing to buy Victory Bonds at a low price, we should have to buy bread and butter and clothes at higher prices than ever at a time when money began to sneak away, we knew not whither.
Perhaps it was too much to expect one man to organize the "hurrah" and afterwards to conduct the "Gethsemane." At any rate, before we had an opportunity to test the real size of Sir Thomas as a public servant he resigned office.
Whether the Finance Minister at the climax of his big _opus_ was shrewd enough to imagine that the kudos of the loans might get him the Premiership, we do not profess to know. He is not considered famous as a political strategist. He has far too much serenity.
In 1917 Sir Thomas was chairman of a monster meeting in Toronto when ten thousand people who tried to hear Theodore Roosevelt speak on behalf of that year's Victory Loan of Canada were turned away. For some hours he had been in company with a man whose mastery of the unusual was almost the equal of Mark Twain's. If ever he had a chance to be startled out of his headmaster poise, here it was. But he made a long, tedious preamble of a speech the only sentence of which that sticks in my memory is that sincerely girlish utterance of Portia to Antonio after the trial, "Sir, you are very welcome to our house." It was like pinning a pink bow knot on the head of a lion.
Sir Thomas showed strategic ability when he refused the Premiership. After declining the Premiership he was not likely to need a portfolio.
Public life is considerably like war. Every time you move there must be a motive.
A former political crony of Sir Thomas said to the writer that the excess profits tax imposed by the Minister was one of the cleverest political manoeuvres ever perpetrated in Ottawa, because it drove manufacturers and merchants to advertise in the newspapers in order to reduce their profits, thus paying part of the excess to the newspapers rather than to the Government; which was supposed to have made the Government popular with newspapers on both sides of the political fence. This is a genially cynical way of saying that every publisher has his price, and that the Finance Minister had made some startling progress in his mentality since the day when he was charmed with everybody in Parliament. But it is a Machiavellian touch quite uncharacteristic of a man whose friends had designated him for the Premiership.
The friends of Sir Thomas may have had good reason for considering him as the next Premier. On the evidence of the mere handling of executive big business demanding cool judgment, practical vision and powerful action he was the equal of any other candidate for the office. His defects were less obvious, but perhaps more vital in the case. Sir Thomas was not designed to lead, which in these days means to be constantly recreating a party, not to operate a well-built governmental machine. In his nine years of public life he did a big national work and justly earned all the real distinction he ever got. He did so much in a big, unusual way for the nation that his passing out becomes another example of how easy it is to cripple administration by sacrificing public service brains to private business.
CALLED TO THE POLITICAL PULPIT
HON. NEWTON WESLEY ROWELL
N. W. Rowell has the bearing of a man who long ago felt that he was called to do something for a cause or a country and has never got over it. Meanwhile he has done much for both a cause and a country, and seems to have quit before the country had begun to enjoy more than the least agreeable elements in his character. To have suffered the insistent righteousness of Mr. Rowell so long, and at the close of the first period of his life when he seemed to be getting his own measure as a public man on a big stage, to see him withdraw like a chambered nautilus into his shell, not only from the Cabinet but from his seat in Durham, is a little hard on public patience. But of course the chambered nautilus may emerge again.
Years ago Mr. Rowell had moral energy enough to reconstruct a large part of the world in Liberalism and in the Methodist Church. Today he finds evangelic Liberalism rampant out on the skyline under such men as Crerar and Drury, and the church discussing social reformation in phraseology associated with dynamic ideas to which he never could be assimilated.
Mr. Rowell's career reminds us that there are four brands of Liberals in Canada: Evolutionary; Manchester School; Laurierite; Agrarian. Tories never evolve. There are only good Tories and bad ones.
He belongs to the first group, and there is nothing in his temperament to make him anything else. Free Trade never did convince him; he broke away from the enchanting tyranny of Laurier; and, though born on a farm, he never could revert to the plough-handles for a vision of the world.
Judging from some fairly recent preachments by able reverends such as Wm. Woodsworth and Salem Bland, there may be as many brands of Methodism. If so we unhesitatingly place Mr. Rowell in the evolutionary group. Therefore by personal development he is next thing to a Conservative; and the latest phase of his career proves that in working it out he has practised the fine old platitude of Polonius to Laertes:
"To thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man."
Mr. Rowell is one of our most encouraging types of what is called the self-made man. Any Oxford professor hearing him make a typically good speech in London on "The Commonwealth of Nations under the Union Jack," would infer that he had taken a post-graduate course in political history after graduating as a B.A. But Mr. Rowell never even attended a High School. He went from the farm as a lad to be a parcel boy in a London, Ont., dry-good store. The class-meeting and the sermon and the Mechanics' Institute gave him a taste for serious literature. He came up in the oratorical county that produced G. W. Ross and J. A. Macdonald. He must have regularly read Tannage's sermons. He was a youth when the Y.M.C.A. movement invaded Canada along with baseball. He made the choice. He passed into the Law School, somehow dodging all the good brethren who advised him to go into the ministry. And through the opportunity afforded him by the successful practice of law and Liberalism on a large scale he has been able to preach his sermons to much bigger audiences than he ever could have found in the Methodist Church.
If some of the advanced radicals of these days would con over the outlines of a career like this, they might get rid of some of their fantastic notions about State-devised equality and emancipation. Mr. Rowell instinctively reached out by industry and enthusiasm for the forces that would better his condition. In so doing he spent a large part of himself upon the betterment of society. The result is an intellectual, moral and financially successful character of which any community might be proud--so long as the community contained but one of the kind.
Rowellism is a good salt. It is not good porridge. The average unprofessional Christian man cannot live on the levels where Mr. Rowell breathes so easily.
Time and again have we heard the equivocal remark about this man; if such, and however so. Why not take the man as he is and make the best of him? Surely by now he has proved that he has a definite and uplifting leverage on public life. It is of no use to complain that he never was cut out to be a leader in anything but ethical ideas of statesmanship. It was political makeshiftery to make such a man the leader of Ontario Liberalism, which did not ask to be led but to be cajoled and tricked up for the carnival. It was fatuous to imagine that he could ever become a chief of the National Liberal and Conservative party to which he now inextricably belongs. If secret ambition ever spurred him to indulge that dream--which seems incredible--sober reflection at the looking glass should have corrected the strabismus. Mr. Rowell is not a leader of men, in action; never was and never could be--without some drastic transformation in his outward character such as he has never shown.
The last time I observed Mr. Rowell he was in the lounge of a club where he had just finished lunch. All about him were scores of men in groups, each group animatedly intent upon some topic from baseball to high finance. A few weeks earlier that same club had given a public dinner to Mr. Rowell and Sir George Foster, when each seemed to overdo the other in gripping those present by the presentation of a world theme backed by a striking personality. In the lounge Mr. Rowell, our best authority on the ethics of the Empire and the League of Nations, went about alone, unobtrusive, drab-coloured, almost insignificant. He spoke to nobody and few men as much as noticed him. He nodded gravely now and again, but never smiled. Both hands in his trouser pockets, he seemed to be gazing at some vagabond blind spot in the room. He almost seemed to be whistling to himself like a lad in a forest. Presently he wandered out.
By no exercise of imagination could one conceive such a man as a Canadian political leader. If there is anything in an aura he has it not. A halo would have suited him better.
Three elements conspire to make Rowell:
Conscience; oratory; opportunity.
Most men have trouble enough with any two of the three. Mr. Rowell continues to hold our respect in spite of the whole trinity. Too much conscience always on duty at a peak load is no way to attract a vast variety of people who relish a degree of sinfulness now and again. We do not repudiate the value of conscience in public affairs. The public man without it provides almost the only sane argument for the preservation of the gallows. But when one man carries so much of it, a number of others may be excused for carrying less. This is an age of specialties.
It is required of a truly efficient conscience, however, that it be instant in season and out of season, and that it do not wait upon opportunity. When the Ross Government was so old in sin that even the new _Globe_ editor accused the ship of having barnacles, we fail to remember that Mr. Rowell lifted his voice against it. He was a candidate for the Commons five years before James Whitney began his regime of government by indignation; at a time when if Ontario went on a political spree Ottawa got a headache. Big-party government was pretty strong in those days to keep a man like Rowell from talking out in meeting. The value of a conscience to a community, whatever it may be to an individual or a party, is in giving it a chance to speak out when something is wrong with your own group, not when it is politically convenient to take off the muffler. Mr. Rowell's method of opening Durham as a safe seat for himself by making a Senator of the Conservative member for Durham, was one way of reforming the Civil Service, which was one of his Government hobbies. But in practical politics it is sometimes necessary to do evil that good may come. Mr. Rowell needed a safe seat--in order to do his work for the country. It seems a pity that a constituency so shrewdly obtained could not have been steadfastly held.