The Masques of Ottawa Part 15

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 sh.e.l.ls 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 t.i.tle was he to be found slacking in his marvellous work in 1918.

Flavelle earned a t.i.tle--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 gla.s.ses every minute in some office, or coming becaped and crush-hatted to a concert, I can hear that high-keyed, slow voice, the calm dispa.s.sionate 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 a.s.surance, 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 amus.e.m.e.nts 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 pa.s.sion 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 n.o.body 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 h.e.l.l 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 appet.i.te 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 compet.i.tive 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 inst.i.tution 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 Ma.s.seys, 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 ill.u.s.trate 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 a 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 h.e.l.l 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.

Again, reconstructing enthusiasm followed him to Ottawa. He went there at the instigation of the Imperial Government. Whether he himself made the original suggestion of the need, I do not know. But he obeyed the need when he saw it. Impulse drove him to meet it in the greatest work of public organization ever done in so short a time in this country, except the sending of the First Contingent.

Flavelle had never liked Ottawa. Ordinarily he had a sort of contempt for its waste of time and its dissipation of morality. It is not conceivable that he would have taken Munitions under any Canadian department. Nor was it necessary. Canada was to produce munitions for much more than the Canadian Army.

The work was vast and varied; the man at the head of it capable, exacting and impartial. His sole aim was to produce and to export munitions at a price high enough to attract industry and low enough to prevent profiteering. For three years he was the superman of Canada's industrial fabric. The C.M.A. and the Department of Trade became mere annexes to munitions, at a time when Davies' bacon clamoured for ship-room needed by Flavelle munitions.

Official Ottawa had never known a man like this. He was not popular.

The Government had no control of him. Ottawa had never cared for super-men. Flavelle was there without politics. He had a department greater than any in the Administration. He was never responsible to Parliament. Ministers to him were not necessary. He had no favours to ask of members. He never even looked in at the Commons which he would like to have reformed. People sometimes ask why such a man does not go into Parliament. Impossible. He regards government as sheer business, when it is often a pa.s.sing show. Foster's Business Conference that never met would have caused him to discharge the department for incompetency. Sir Thomas White had no desire to lift his eyes unto the hill Flavelle, the super-Minister who for years had been a critic of his own party, and now believed it more inept than ever in spite of the great work of the Finance Minister. Sir Sam Hughes had never wanted Flavelle. There was a good reason. Sir Sam had started the munition industry in Canada as a branch of war, not as a department of mere business. Flavelle was all business. War was business. There was the rub. The nearer the war came to a climax, the more men like Flavelle at home became part of the machinery. Foster never could have salaamed to this super-man of trade and commerce. Did even Sir Robert Borden ever feel comfortable with him? Back from Europe in a fit of impulse more powerful than he had ever known, impressed by the success of Coalition in England, Sir Joseph wanted to see it established in Canada. The nation was united for munitions; why not for national business? The Premier was away in the West. Sir Joseph wired him asking permission to urge coalition at a certain public dinner. There was no response. Evidently the Government wanted no advice from a man who had nothing whatever to do with it and represented merely big business.

Something must have caused the Premier to treat Sir Joseph coolly.

Afterwards at the bacon investigation there was cause for a change in temperature. The Premier had been negligent about some doc.u.mentary evidence extenuating to the Flavelle presentation of the case. The two had warm words. Sir Joseph told the Premier one thing which, as it was repeated to me without reference to use in publication, had better be omitted here. But it was scathing. Sir Joseph is no mean master of the kind of language that hurts. But he has the Christian spirit--which in this case he laid aside. I should like to know what the Premier said to Sir Joseph; and precisely what were the Premier's opinions, before and after, concerning the baronetcy.

In his quiet moments Sir Joseph does not rebuke himself more than he regrets the moral myopia of other people. I think he is somewhat disillusioned as to what it is worth to gain a good deal of the world at the risk of a lot of people thinking he has lost his soul. He does not believe that his soul was ever in danger of being lost. Often he goes to rugby games. In this he sees again the virtue of struggle, probably wishing he himself had played rugby in youth.

"When a man gets old," he said lately, "he loves to sit at home."

But Sir Joseph, for all his whitening whiskers and his impatience with the shortcomings and animosities of the world, is not yet old. He has the strength of two men, and a power of administration possessed by few men in public office in any country. He has lost some of his bubbling enthusiasm for the humanities. The last thing he will lose must be his faith in himself: and that is very far off.

"Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do . . . ."

Sir Joseph Flavelle has yet a strong hand. What remains that he will do with all his might? If he so desires, more of service on behalf of the public good in the ten years he has left than many men accomplish in a strenuous lifetime.

It is time we learned the difference between a public pirate and an organizing servant of the public. Take away from this man his public church business, his power to make money, his human vanity over an hereditary t.i.tle, and we still have left the story of a big life, much of it spent in doing good for the sake of other people. You cannot efface that strange personality; that desire after all the admiration of his wonderful ability to administer him mentally "one good swift kick." But you will never mentally kick a man of such powerful good to his country.

NO FATTED CALVES FOR PRODIGAL SONS

HON. SIR HENRY DRAYTON