The Masques of Ottawa Part 8

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 t.i.tle. 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 ill.u.s.trates 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 pa.s.sionate 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 G.o.d, 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 n.o.body 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 Boura.s.sa or an Eskimo could escape the snare of a Victory Loan advertis.e.m.e.nt 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 apt.i.tude. 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 a.s.sociates 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 a.s.sociated. 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 a.s.sessment 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.

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 munic.i.p.ality 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 advertis.e.m.e.nt proof escaped the eagle eye of this ex-newspaperman before it went to press. He scanned and corrected every syllable.