Out of the army came slowly and ponderously the huge Highlander, with the "baby pink face" and the rumbling gong of a voice.

Sir Arthur Currie was much too honest to imagine that he or any other man could make the Canadian army. It was a heavy ordeal to follow Byng, just as it had been easy for Byng to succeed Alderson. But Currie knew the Canadians down at the root better than Byng knew them. He knew how that army had been made: that he was taking over a humanized machine that was to war in 1917 what the sword of Wallace had been in man-to-man combat seven hundred years earlier. He knew the weakness of men for idolizing a popular commander. They never would parody any nursery rhyme in his honour. Except the Anzacs, they were the most audacious army in Europe. They had become great in defiance of red tape, insisting on whatever is called Canadianism. They embodied all there was of Western independence on that Front. The Anzacs, great in fight and in ideas of personal liberty, had not been welded into such a machine as the Canadians, whose advertised national qualities Currie was expected to conserve.

"As soon as one lets the cheeky beggars, Canadians from America, have a bit of quiet, they get uppish," was the illuminating sentence in a letter found in a German trench near St. Eloi. Currie knew those "cheeky beggars". In his own elephantine way he loved them, when few of them could figure it out. He knew how hard those "beggars" could hit: how grimly they could stick: how madly they could raid and rush: how infernally they could scheme to "put one over on Heine"; how desperately they could abuse earth and heaven when they had time in the rest billets to smoke fags and write letters home. They were no army to go whacking on the shoulder.

It had been all right for Byng the Briton to go among those men with three buttons loose. Men like a touch of insurgency in a commander who has come up among the martinets. Byng was a professional soldier. Currie was not yet even a mild insurgent, or was not known as such to the ranks. He was almost a man of prayer. He moved in a large arc somewhat like his great resolute body; an engine of might that never seemed weary; who at "Molly-be-Damned" studied battle reports at two a.m., and was in the field at six. As he had almost come up from the ranks, the men knew him. Here and there in a British Columbia battalion may have been a man who had bought a corner lot from Currie in Victoria. If so, he liked to talk about the hard-up days of the Corps Commander when he was in real estate.

Currie knew that above all things he must keep the confidence of those men and that he could never do it by familiarity. Success was the only way. Not, anyhow, speeches. The C.C. was rather fond of talking aloud at first; sometimes too religiously. It was a habit that he never quite abandoned, though he changed his style as he grew in experience.

There was work to do. No army had more; few armies as much. Currie's was a mobile army; needed as shock troops in rough places—a very good reputation if not too much of it. There was danger of the army losing its Canadianism by being shunted about. One of Currie's first objectives that he wanted above all things to achieve as a Canadian commander of initiative, was the capture of Lens. He had a plan for this. He was never allowed to carry it out. Says the author of "Canada's Hundred Days":

"Thus when he is ordered to abandon his planned offensive at Lens and take the corps up the Salient, he refuses point blank to serve under the Commander of the Fifth Army. He is placed under his old Chief of the First Army, looks over the ground before Passchendaele and then protests against the whole operation as being useless in itself and likely to cost the Corps 15,000 men."

It was said by some who believed they knew, that the Lens preparation was nothing but a huge feint put up to mislead Heine for an attack in force elsewhere. This was one of the bewildering events of that baffling year when the French army was in a state of mutiny, the nation behind the army in a state of nerves, and the politicians, clamouring for victories—or at least a cessation of defeat. Something had to be done, not only by France but by Britain, whose Premier insisted that unless the Germans could be broken in the north he could not hold his country united at home. There was a Council of War—so, a few weeks before the writing of this, said a Canadian General in New York—at which Currie was present. Sir Douglas Haig unexpectedly arrived and was soon into an argument with the Canadian Corps Commander demanding that he abandon Lens and strike at Passchendaele. The two commanders were in violent disagreement. Currie refused to yield. The British Premier went to France and met Currie, who gave way to the Premier—as people usually did—and, against his own convictions, abandoned Lens.

The precise military significance is of less value here than the remark credited to Lloyd George, who is reported to have said in England after a subsequent War Cabinet meeting—that in the Canadian Corps Commander he had met "the biggest thing physically and mentally on that front."

What Currie was at the head of the Corps no civilian then in Canada has any means of knowing, except by what men say who were under him or about him. A brawny veteran infantryman, whom I met with his chum, said:

"Currie—oh, yes, he was a good general. But few of the men where I was in the trenches or the billets ever liked him."

"But did you see much of him?"

"Too much, begad." His chum nodded agreement. "Too awful much, sometimes. Why, he used to come into a rest billet almost every day after we'd come there all shot to bits with only a corporal's guard o' the whole battalion, muddy and tired and sleepy; yes, and what's the first thing we hear, but begad, we've all to shine up and get spic and span for parade because the O.C. says the C.C. orders it. Out we go, like a ragbag remnant and he looks us over, says he knows we're tired and makes a speech——"

"Oh, boy, them speeches!" sighs the chum.

"Tells us how well we've done and all like o' that, and at the end says there's such a devil of a job yonder that he's compelled against his will——"

"Oh, yes, dead aginst his will," pipes the chum.

"To intimate that he'd like us to trail back to the show and do it some more for the sake of the victory and the good long billet we'll get presently. Yes, Currie was a good General. He did the work, he got results. But never tell me he was easy on his men—becuz four years I was wan o' them."

One allows in this man's opinion for the tendency to "grouch" that always appears in veterans who know best how to fight. Men like this were "fed up" on the war, of which they never saw anything but the glimpse of their own sector. The war was over now, and between the armistice and getting home many such men had a chance to talk, as they wearily waited for a ship.

"Yes, and that capture of Mons," says the chum, as he sips a little drink. "Altogether useless and against orders. The war was over."

"No," says the veteran; "that was a mere trifle, as I see it. Not one, two, three with the march into Germany. Begad! if ever I was a rebel it was then on that 150 miles, says you. But—'twas so ordered by the C.C. and we went."

It was not likely that Gen. Currie believed his army to be rebellious against that march. He was too much of an insurgent to fear insubordination. He had packed many a pipe-clay parade officer home for inefficiency.

A machine gun officer, who had got a Blighty at Passchendaele and was asked by the writer what he thought about Currie, admitted that he knew very little about him because all he saw at the time was his own little corner of the show. He casually referred the question to two others, one of whom was a H.Q. staff officer, and saw Currie at first hand for months at a time. The answer was:

"I'll say that Currie always inspired me with absolute confidence in his genius for modern war. It was a pleasure just to see him revise a Divisional plan of action. He had a hawk eye for any weak spots and he pointed them out. No doubt some of the stuff that got through to the boys in some of the shows shortly after Currie took command was Byng stuff, and Byng sure handed over a fine army to Currie. But believe me, Currie had his own programme and picked his own men and developed his own machine shortly after. And I don't believe there was a commander in any of the Corps on that Front that had anything on him for what makes an army win."

The General's return to Canada was preheralded by a barrage of criticism that seeped through from men coming home. Some day we shall know how much or how little of this was politics inspired by Currie's enemies in Canada and by men who, jealous of his success and his eminence, had no scruples about fomenting the criticism. But Currie must be judged by what he did with his army. In that last hundred days all the armies but the American army were remnants of what they were in 1915. The wonderful thing about the Canadian army is that in the three months before victory it was an even more terrible arm of war than it had been at Vimy Ridge. After a year and a half of Commander Currie it was still the superb fighting machine described in the extracts already quoted from the battle of Amiens. For a few of the reasons why it was so we quote again that same book the writer's estimate of Currie:

"But according to the letter of the law he is not a good subordinate. He cannot be popular with the powers that be: he is always complaining about something; getting his own way or making it unpleasant for people if he doesn't.

"In the panic of the following March (1918 after Passchendaele) he finds the Corps is being torn to pieces, its divisions hurried here, there and everywhere; orders given and countermanded and then issued again. He protests strongly; the Canadian corps whose value is tested, must be kept together; and he wins out." . . .

"Is all this insubordination? If so, it is a quality that makes for victory. The average Canadian is always willing to "take a chance" because he has confidence in himself. And the Corps Commander is very much of a Canadian."

The author does not criticize Currie, though he had so good an opportunity. In telling so well the wonderful story of that last hundred days and so explicitly glorifying the Commander whose best work of the war was done during that period, he gives us no perspective. Is it not just to admit that though the four reduced Canadian divisions—with certain attachments—had defeated forty-seven German divisions, they had conquered divisions terribly more reduced than their own and absolutely without reserves in either men or materials and devoid of the last vestige of morale? The great bluff was about to break. It was due to have broken sooner.

When the armistice came all the armies but the Canadians laid down their arms. Currie had not finished his work. He had planned the whole hundred days, beginning with Cambrai, and the apex of that achievement after the breaking of the infallible Hindenburg line, was the recapture of Mons. He was once more "insubordinate". He did not seem to pay respect to the armistice. His men had often said that they wanted to fight Heine on German soil. Denied that, at least they wanted a chance to be part of the army of occupation, as far east as Cologne. Currie could never have ordered an unwilling army—not that army unwilling—to march 150 miles into Germany. He had an army of conquest, not of armistice. But the stereopticon and the slides:

What was to be done with this soldier at home? How could he be re-established in civil life? Thanks to the Administration's predicament in trying to please both the General and his enemies, here was the worst D.S.C.R. problem of the lot. Thanks to McGill University, the predicament was removed.

A sagacious professor in McGill who knows by experience what it is to get the ear of the public, said when Currie was appointed President that almost the entire faculty were opposed to him because the idea was so ridiculous. That professor now alleges proudly that faculty, students and management are all convinced that Currie is a wonderful President; that he has revolutionized all existing ideas about the headship of a university, that he understands even the academic mind; that the esprit de corps of McGill is such as it never was.

In short, nobody is left to remark—

"I say, what a pity Geddes left us in the lurch!"

They are making a new stereopticon for that slide.



A COAT OF MANY COLOURS

SIR JOHN WILSON

After a life of wearing Joseph's coat, Sir John Willison, ex-editor of the Toronto Globe and of the News, finds himself President of the National Reconstruction Association. Programme—to reconstruct Canada, beginning in 1918, after fifty years of Confederation.

A supercilious editor once asked why on such an Association no farmer had been appointed. The answer was simple enough. Sir John was born a farmer. He used to wield a handspike at logging bees in Huron County, Ont. Why no Liberals? But Sir John used to be the leading Liberal of unelected Canada. Why no professor of political economy to represent the great universities who are always supposed to be reconstructing a nation? Simple again. Sir John himself once conducted a university of culture, economics and general information known as the Toronto News. In fact there was no need of an Association at all. Sir John Willison was sufficient unto the day.

One finds it tolerably easy to be sarcastic about Sir John Willison, because for many years he was to some of us the sort of man that compelled a sincere, almost idolatrous admiration. In this also he is more adept than the average man. He himself once idolized Sir Wilfrid Laurier in two volumes; but a few years before he turned all his political guns on the French-Canadian Premier to get him out of power for good.

In all Canada there has never been a more versatile character; never one who after a volte face in politics could turn with such poise and dignity upon any critic cradled in the foundations of belief and ask, "Well, what's new?"

From his crisp manner of speaking and a certain austerity of manner, I used to think that Sir John was in a measure inscrutable. He had such a curt way of summoning a reporter, as once,—

"Never," he began when the culprit had got into the corridor facing the editor-in-chief, "never, when interviewing a man in his own home, say anything about the furniture."

Born a Conservative and a farmer, Willison became on the Globe Canada's greatest unelected Liberal. He conserved Liberalism. On the Globe he held the balance between the Free Traders who believed only in reciprocity and Brastus Wiman, who with Goldwin Smith made Taft a mere plagiarist when he said that Canada was an "adjunct" of the United States. It was Willison's attempt to consider commercial union on its merits that made the Globe seem like a mark for the annexationists, at a time when the high priest of the movement in Canada had the effrontery to remain a citizen of the nation which he was openly trying to sell at a bargain counter. The man who kept the Globe from becoming an annex to Goldwin Smith in 1891 had an experience that would fit any man to become a protection-tariff Chairman of Reconstruction, and to remember the sirens that tempted Ulysses.

Nobody could have predicted in those days that the great editor of the Globe would live to become first an Independent, next a Tory, and at the last a Liberal-Unionist. And perhaps none of these transformations would have been necessary if Sir George Ross had not tried the trick of "32 years in the saddle" from the days of Mowat; to do which and to remain politically virtuous was an impossible feat, even though the Premier of Ontario was a director of the Globe. Ross remained director, and also Premier. But it seems that Mr. Willison saw in such a dual role a greater inconsistency than even he deemed to be worthy of so brilliant a man. As he could not remove the director, he took what seemed to be a providential opportunity to remove the Premier.

The reconstructed Toronto News was the opportunity. The elimination of Ross was the first result. The removal of Laurier was the necessary sequel. The first was a pleasure. The second must have been a pang. Because of the first, in place of Sir George Ross, Willison had as frequent visitor to his sanctum James Pliny Whitney, the new Premier of Ontario, "honest enough to be bold and bold enough to be honest." From that to Toryism was merely opening a door. It took the new Tory editor eight years to remove his old idol Laurier, the result of which was a sort of intense and bigoted animosity to the Province of Quebec which Sir John is now learning to overcome. When the Tory News became a Northcliffe Imperialist organ it was inevitable that Sir John should convert his common hostility to the western Laurier-Liberals into a polite suspicion of the Radicals who were becoming Agrarians.

When finally, weary of mere politics in which he was our greatest journalistic expert by instinct and experience Sir John left the News, he was free to engage in work of a more practical character than writing, and to become Chairman of the Government's most important branch of active agenda outside of professional politics.

In all these Protean changes of makeup, if not of character, Sir John Willison has never abandoned two early habits; lawn bowling and reading the Globe. He is an expert in both. Bowling vexes him least, because its rules never change. The Globe gives him pangs because alas! it is now engaged in the unpardonable effort to merge the Liberals with the National Progressives as a greater Liberal Party.

Inconsistency may be the evolution of greatness. Inconstancy never. The Globe of a certain date in June, 1921, contained a front page display of the Agrarian bye-election victory in Medicine Hat. On another date there was an editorial once again advising the Agrarians to make common cause with Liberals against the common enemy, Meighenism, or as it might be said, Willisonism.

Perusing the Globe in his Reconstruction office, Sir John glances up—leisurely at a spot on the wall, next to the portrait of Sir John A. Macdonald. Like Macbeth's dagger, he sees a cold, organizing face smiling like Mona Lisa, fair at Sir John; the face of T. A. Crerar.

The Levite of Reconstruction shakes his fist.

"Down with you," he mutters. "Avaunt! I'll have none of you. There's nothing under Medicine Hat—except what Kipling said, 'all hell for a basement,' Natural gas, Crerar, not a test case at all. Oh, no. Too near the border."

Sir John yawns and peruses a proof of the 745th pamphlet issued from Reconstruction, total of nearly seven million copies paid for not by taxation of the people, but inferentially by tariffs. Probably a very patriotic minority read these Willison bulletins aiming to reconstruct the country by putting a crimp in the exportation of the Canadian dollar, looking after welfare work in factories, women and children, grappling with unemployment, helping to change over industry from war to peace, aiming to "stabilize" the nation, to curb that team of wild horses, Bolshevism and Agrarianism, and generally to keep Canada from going to perdition.

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 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 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.

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 passing 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 documentary 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 title, 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

Were I a novelist sketching a character for Henry Herbert Drayton I would have him, except in one item, just about all that he is not. He should be unmarried, live with his maiden aunt, most of his time make very little money and depend for his income upon winning about three good criminal prosecutions a year; the rest of his time to be spent reading up criminal psychology and taking his aunt to see pictures. The commonplace scene-shifter who places behind people the scenery of real life has bungled Sir Henry, thereby robbing him of much interest. What a net a man with his classic patience and enormous ferret instinct for minutiae could have woven about some cunning but once too often embezzler! Instead we have Drayton, K.C., pushing himself methodically through a series of legal metamorphoses, at each change getting one convolution higher, by public corporation solicitorships and county attorneyships, burrowing into hydro-electric affairs for Toronto until he becomes Dominion Railway Commission chairman—seven years at that—and at last steps out into the full glare of undramatic notoriety by taking office as Minister of Finance in 1919.

Well, in that capacity he has rubber-stamped millions of people in the region of their pockets whom he would have missed altogether had he been taking his maiden aunt to the picture galleries between detective cases. Besides, he has three or four children, and I'm sure that when some lady writes the cinema of his life she will portray him as a hugely devoted papa with perfect young geniuses of children who yearn to spend papa's money upon the very luxuries against which he is warning the parents of other young people.

Once,—it was something to do with Niagara power—I heard Mr. Drayton weaving a dull dry web of apparently trivial evidence about some very important people. It seems to me that one William Mackenzie was a particular object; if not he should have been. Once you admit that Drayton belongs to corporation instead of criminal law—though sometimes there's precious little difference—Mackenzie and Adam Beck are just the sort of audacious public-interest performers that a man like him should be after. He seemed to have an insatiable capacity for picking out little filaments of dry-as-dust technique from which on behalf of an impersonal client like the city of Toronto he could manage to inveigle a web of silk about any anti-civic despot who regards a city as a thing to be worked for dividends, and people merely as common economic dots and carry ones.

He impressed me then as a born Englishman. He had the neat, chiseled accents and the imperturbable air of a perfect gentleman, with a touch of nonchalance and the suggestion that if at the time of adjournment he had just got to the up stroke of a small "i", he could leave it there and come back to-morrow, beginning precisely where he had left off. But he was not born in England; only educated there—which is something. A few more of our public men would be the better for a little Harrowing.

Once into public finance, Sir Henry does not propose to be a mere reverberation of Sir Thomas White. Never have we had two such drastic highwayman budgets as those which Drayton flung at the people in 1920 and 1921. From the tone of any supplementary remarks which he feels like making in order to amuse us while he lightens our pockets, it may be worse next year and thereafter unless we have a care. This man has never uttered a soothing phrase since he took office. He has made no attempt to furbelow our finances. He is not even concerned about the precise political effect of his taxes and tariffs. We never had a Finance Minister who so disregarded the Gladstonian principle, that if figures cannot lie they may at least make interesting romances of the truth. In the two years that he has been budgeteering, this dapper, tailored man with the sailor hat and the truculent jaw and the heavy outskirts to his eyes has treated a budget as though it were a Santa Claus stocking to be talked about a long while in advance, so that when it comes it may be all the more significant.

Such budgets as he gives us are not the work of a true Conservative. They bear no interesting bigotries of the party. They deal only secondarily with tariffs. I believe Sir Henry knows that most people regard a tariff as a very oblique way of reaching the pocket. People compute tariffs and argue about them. Only the farmers can make them into frightful realities. Nobody understands a tariff anyway when it comes to the schedule. Its chief use is for winning and losing elections.

But Sir Henry's admonishing finger goes up, and we are hushed to see what is the really cruel thing he intends to show us next, that will hurt just like a thumbscrew. He smiles and flips down a long scroll of—direct and drastic taxes quite shocking to contemplate.

"This is going to hurt you all, good people," he says. "But I may as well be honest about it. I am not a financial Christian Scientist. You will all feel better after you are properly hurt."

Thus far we remember chiefly how it hurt. We are still hoping to feel better.

Drayton had some grounding in practical finance long before he took any of the detail jobs that have had so much to do with computations and costs. We are reminded of a little episode of his early youth in Toronto.

Harry Drayton and Frank Baillie were schoolboys together. They lived on the same street. A neighbour was about to have an auction sale of his goods, but looking over the lot he made a present of a punching bag to Harry and Frank, no doubt because he foresaw that they would both have strenuous lives. The boys thanked him and took away the bag. On the way home Harry said to Frank:

"Do you really want a share in that punching bag?"

"Not so keen as I might be," said Frank. "Why?"

"Because he had something else I'd rather have. Remember that little printing press?"

"Oh, what he uses to print calling cards on?"

"How would you like to go snooks with me and get that, Frank?"

"Well, it certainly would be swell to print our own calling cards, Harry."

"He wants $6.50 for it, though."

"Oh! That's different. Here, let me sell the bag, anyhow. That'll be a start."

Frank, already budding into finance, sold the bag for one dollar and twenty-five cents.

"Well, we're still shy $5.25, Frank," said the coming Finance Minister of Canada.

"Yes, and it's your move, Harry."

"All right, I've got an idea. You wait."

Next day the sprouting financiers met, when Harry had a fine steel trout rod.

"See that, Frank? Got that from dad. Made me a present of it—at my own suggestion. What is she worth?"

"Don't you want to fish, Harry?"

"Not if you can sell the rod."

Frank took it and looked it over.

"Sure!" he said. "I'll sell that for the company."

There being no guile in either of these young men, the sequel is that Frank sold the trout rod for $5.25 and Harry proudly took the entire $6.50 to the neighbour, paid for the press and had it taken home to his attic, where it must be presumed the two of them spent rainy days printing calling cards for Draytons and Baillies.

Canada took very little interest in Drayton till he came to be Chairman of the Railway Commission. But by that time the said Commission was no longer the grand court it had been in the days of J. Pitt Mabee. It settled more disputes than ever and settled them as well as ever. Drayton had almost twice the mileage to cover that Mabee had in 1903. He did it with tireless exactitude. He was less concerned with the ethical issues at stake in decisions between railways and communities than with the unethical fact of such a prodigal lot of lines having been built at all to give trouble to the nation. We were just getting to the end of the race of the railroads, when thousands of foreigners had been dumped into the country with shovel and pick, and thousands of miles of new railway built that would shortly be a charge on the country.

An able writer a few years ago wrote a series of articles in a Canadian publication headed, "Is there a Railway Muddle?" Being himself a railwayman he seemed to think that the muddle, if any, was chargeable to conditions over which the railways had little or no control.

Mr. Drayton, shrewdly traversing the network of those prodigally built railways, felt no need of asking any such question. He carried on into the slump in business, and on into the war when the Railway War Board, practising a sort of church union by cutting out competition and re-routeing traffic for the sake of getting war haulage done as quickly as possible, left very little for the Drayton court to settle. But there was a bigger settlement to come later, and Drayton was to have a hand in it.

As Chairman of the Commission he never made a statement that was good for a headline, or coined an epigram, or lost his temper, or spluttered into print. But on a certain occasion, before retiring from the Commission, Sir Henry put on record a number of things that the people of this country read with acute and sustained interest. This was the report of the Smith-Drayton-Acworth Commission for the purpose of finding out whether the Canadian Northern and the Grand Trunk Pacific could ever manage to pay their own debts, including interest on multi-millions borrowed from abroad, or whether, debts and all, they should be handed over to the people of Canada?

During the war this nation had many commissions. Their very names are mostly forgotten. Most of them committed themselves to nothing. This commission to investigate railroad bankruptcy was fated to be very different. Much of the difference was in Sir Henry Drayton who, had he been asked the question, might have saved the country the cost of the Commission.

But of course he was prejudiced, and against the roads. He knew those roads. The minority report of the chief of the New York Central made no difference to the grim bulldog judgment of the Chief Railway Commissioner—that the two secondary systems of Canadian railways were alike and for much the same causes constitutionally bankrupt, and should therefore be given the nationalizing cure.

What more disagreeable qualification could a man have for being made Minister of Finance? The air holes that White had skated around, Drayton proposed to go right over and to take the people with him. What the common stock of these roads might be worth was for Sir Thomas to find out. By the time Sir Henry went to the national ledger that matter was all adjusted and the thing left was to raise the money.

There's a divinity that shapes our ends even when they do not meet. The little Houdini of calculations was at last into a predicament where it seemed that he never could figure himself out. One fancies him gazing intently over the Finance Department of whose precise technique he knew nothing as yet, and saying to himself:

"Well, White did a wonderful turn. I don't believe the audience will like mine half as well—at first. No audiences ever do. I'm bound to be more or less unpopular because I don't know how to act a bit like Tetrazzini."

The great organized orgy was over, when the dollars followed the drum and the drum thumped at every crossroad; when a Victory Bond in every top commode drawer was more necessary than a bottle in every cellar. The whole nation, four times tagged for Victory, was once more tagged for reconstruction. Done with credits to England for purchase of war material in Canada, we were invited to extend credits to war-swept nations in Europe who would be sure to want things made in Canada to help put them on President Wilson's new map of self-determination. Even profiteers now admitted everything to be abnormal. The whole country was like a milkfed pumpkin at the fair. War wages inclined every man to become a profiteer. The land was teeming with war money and denuded of necessary goods. People who used to be content with good wages, a plain rented home and a bottle of beer, went out after short hours, high wages, French heels, $300 coats and motor-cars. It was part of the emancipation of people for which soldiers had not died.

"Er—if you need me, telephone, old chap," one fancies Sir Thomas saying as he carried Sir Henry's luggage to his room. "But I'm sure you are the man for the job. I really have to go back to private finance. However, the super-tariff on imports of luxuries is one thing with which you will feel at home, I am sure. Quite suited to your temperament, Sir Henry."

In one of Scott's novels a gentleman named Front de Boeuf pulls out a Jew's tooth every time he wants more money. Both our national dentists knew that a super-tariff on anything is the very thing that makes a large number of well-to-do people want it. People bought luxuries in this country and growled at the high cost of necessities. Most folk feel rather proud of a big price for a coat or a gown or a Chesterfield, if they can get even by skimping on the price of butter and potatoes. Low-value money and visions of Utopia had played far worse havoc with the people than legalized liquor had ever done. And one of the worst features of the situation was that the bulk of our luxury buying was done in the country which had the only remaining standard of value on the exchanges. Canada had convenient access to the country which alone had a surplus of factory goods. Our tremendous buying average in the American market was even used as propaganda in the interest of keeping the peace with Britain.

Hence the devil of exchange and Drayton's dilemma. The things Drayton said to this country even before he presented his first budget were as comfortable as what the doctor prescribes when you are overfed. On went the unpopular luxury tax and sales tax. The general principle was that the more people bought, the more they got out of living, and the more they should pay for the privilege. It was not merely a tax on improvements, but an impost on being alive. Accustomed as we had been to war taxes which never came off, this was a sanctioned way of "passing the buck" such as we had never known. The advantage is that when we pay 14 cents for a box of matches that used to cost five cents, we can read "5 cents War Excise Tax Paid" on the wrapper.

Sir Henry Drayton had no superb suavity with which to beguile those who made complaints. He heard the howlings of all the babies in the national dormitory and went ahead. He did not impress us as a financier, but as a plain doctor of homely common sense. He said in public many things which threw much instructive light upon our buying and selling. He spoke some blunt but kindly truths even in the United States at whose supremacy in our markets his policy was aimed.

"The men who save the world," says The Onlooker, "are those who work by rule of thumb; who do the day's work by the day's light and advance on chaos and the painful dark by inches; in other words, the practical men."

Such a motto might be Drayton's crest. He is very practical; too much so to be an interesting personality to the average man. But by his dull and diligent practicality he has done rather more than his bit in helping to re-establish Canada. He would, if he could, cut our imports from the United States in half in order to rectify exchange. Whenever he dies the Canadian $ par on exchange will be found graven upon his heart.

Drayton's tariff tour was one of the most characteristic things he ever did. In this, however, there may have been an element of politics. A travelling tariff commission taking evidence in almost every village with a smokestack from coast to coast must have had some real object. But Sir Henry had cleaned up most of the possibilities in direct taxation; it was time he tackled the tariff, even though he knew it was largely a show to satisfy the people that the most patient investigator in the world at the head of a small court had taken evidence on what every Tom and Dick had to say for and against in any part of the country outside of the Yukon. Had it been practicable to hold a session on Great Bear Lake, to determine the trade relations between the copper-kniving Eskimos and the meat-swapping Yellow Knife Indians, Sir Henry would have done it.

Such vast patience is phenomenal even in Drayton. One almost fears that he is becoming interested in a Federal election. If so, the end is in sight. The day we partyize Sir Henry we shall lose one of the oddest and rarest personal identities we ever had. But we can better afford to lose his personal identity in his party service than to lose both in putting into the Finance Department in 1922 some idealistic experimenter in the efficacy of Free Trade.



THE PERSONAL EQUATION IN RAILROADING

EDWARD WENTWORTH BEATTY, K.C.

The main thing that E. W. Beatty, K.C., did to help win the war was to become President of the C.P.R. And he did it well. A glance at this polished pony engine of a chief executive suggests that he has never done anything but well, and that he is the kind of man likely without preachments to stimulate well-doing in other people.

I first met this self-controlled master of executives not long after he became President. He was most cordial; as Shaughnessy had been austere. Under such a direct impression it seemed that I had at last found a man who would make the inexorable old C.P.R. become a golden door to humanity. Of course I was mistaken. That kind of man is born often enough, but he seldom stays with his birthright. I knew that the railway of railways was no school for the humanities; but this university graduate, Chancellor of Queen's, distinguished counsel and potential eminent judge, bachelor, Canadian born, every inch an athlete and as rugged as Carpentier, seemed to my aroused imagination one who would be as much bigger than the stodgy C.P.R. as that system was greater than others of its kind.

Beatty has not been at his new job long enough yet to prove what I suspect—that I was wrong. But he has been long enough with it to know that the surging ideals and aspirations of a young, healthy man in his own office are pretty rudely shaken down by the practical operation of a great system in a time of financial difficulty.

We talked for nearly an hour. He seemed to have the time and the interest. His big office was as quiet as a library. His desk was almost devoid of signs of labour. Not a paper to be seen that required immediate attention; every item neatly disposed; himself smoking—a fairly strong pipe; scarcely a telephone call to interrupt. He seemed the sculptor's embodiment of strength in reserve; a man who never could be tuckered or peevish or unable to detect either the weakness of an opponent, the penetration of a critic or the need of a man who came to ask him for advice. There was a big instant kindliness about him that would have won the cordiality of the stolidest of interviewers, as we talked about railways, government ownership, the needs of journalism and the value in business of the personal equation—his own phrase which he repeated so often that it seemed to contain something of prophetic intention. He paid his venerating respects to the founders of the C.P.R., but he seemed to have more enthusiasm for Lord Mountstephen than for Van Horne.

I heard him say some strong, sincere things about the uselessness of rich men who would sooner use their money on the gratification of vanity than upon public service. He meant that. He repeated such things at various interviews. In doing so he proved that he himself had always made a god of very hard work, discipline and self-denial, for the sake of giving his own personality a square deal, without regard to the money he could make. He had the strength and he used it. As solicitor and chief counsel he became almost a machine to win cases for the railway. He must win, and know how to lose. Fighting a corporation's battles is a good way to believe that the system can do no wrong. But I don't think Beatty was ever blind to the native defects of the C.P.R.

Railroading is a great university of character. Nothing else in our practical affairs attracts such a variety of men. None of our railwaymen have climbed to the peak of the railway operation business quite so successfully and so Canadianly as E. W. Beatty. Most other transportation magnates we have imported from either Scotland or the United States. This one is Canadian from his cradle up. He embodies the best characteristics of the average Canadian in a very high degree. He is an amateur athlete whom hard work has never been known to make weary. At the end of any perfect day of hard work he has as much strength in reserve as he had in the morning when he came to it. Even in his talk he wastes never a word, states everything clearly and in forcible language, but is seldom curt at the expense of courtesy. He does not talk like any big American executive whose equal or superior he may be in administration. He copies nobody. The day's work has always been his exemplar. He has no desire for mere personal success. Years ago he could have made more money by exporting his brains to the United States. But he preferred Canada where he has made less money, justly earned more fame, and where he can continue to do more work that counts for efficiency in himself and in other people. He is the kind of man—like Arthur Meighen—who inspires other men to go in with him on a heavy task to get it done in a big way.

Beatty's type of mind, though somewhat dry and legal and at times judicial, is also capable of an immensely quiet enthusiasm that transmits itself to other people. He invites discussion, but not familiarity. Not personally careful just to maintain traditions, he profoundly respects the men who created them—and goes ahead to transact business now, and to hand out decisions immediately, that get to-day ahead of yesterday and as near as possible to the day after. He believes in the square deal in action and in the high common sense of a decision. There is no public question upon which his opinion might not be sanely valuable, though one would never expect him to succeed as a leader in politics. As a business reorganizer of McGill University he is bound to consider a college as a "going concern". As Chancellor of Queen's, he upsets all traditions as to the dignity of pure scholarship.

It seemed like a long stride from being Chief Railway Counsel to becoming Chief Executive. But to his practical personality the stride was only a step. On an average this is no lawyer's job. Judges in the United States can preside over big corporations. The chief executive of the C.P.R. works. He must know the system, its men, its technique. Railroading is a complex of specialities. A good president must enter into the spirit of the man who builds a locomotive and of one who constructs a timetable.

It fell to this first Canadian President that the road ever had to shoulder a load which would have made the wizard Van Horne read up Hercules. Beatty holds the record for getting through with a programme that would have puzzled either of his two eminent predecessors in that office. Shaughnessy at the same age might have done it. Van Horne never. Yet Beatty never could have built the C.P.R. His brain has no wizardry in it. He is a co-ordination of facts that knows not the meaning of magic. He is the most matter-of-fact man in any high executive position in Canada. The task he undertook was all cut out for him. Fate decreed that he should take it. He never dreamed of refusing. And what a task!

The greatest trouble Beatty had to face when he became President was too much traffic, too little rolling stock, an almost tragic scarcity of labour and the McAdoo award in wages. Railroading costs were at an apex before even munitions costs began to be. The collapse of railways in the United States drove a vast amount of traffic over Canadian roads. The two younger transcontinental systems were on the verge of receiverships. The brunt of the burden fell upon the old C.P.R., which at that time, in spite of the McAdoo awards was making a heavy profit. The cash value of traffic handled was colossal. War work was wearing the railways down. New locomotives and cars were hard to get. Orders could not be placed outside. Canada's railways had to depend on Canada. Ships could not wait, though submarines could. Freight must move. Two hard winters nearly paralyzed all the systems. No new lines were being built. The old lines were wearing out. Canada had the longest hauls of any nation in the world. Our systems were built for the long haul. The railway systems of other countries were demoralized with wastage, low repairs and enormous traffic. Even in short-haul England of the easy climate, there was railway paralysis. But England had great gasoline highways and coastal routes when Canada had neither. It is said in a report of that period, "General Superintendents in charge of some of the "key" divisions of the big roads have had to work from 12 to 20 hours a day to keep roadbed, rolling stock and crews up to top mark." 22,000 Canadian cars were "lost" in the United States in one winter. What war left of the railways winter did its best to debilitate. Industry stole transportation labour at high wages and rolled out vast quantities of material that had to be moved, when even C.P.R. efficiency seemed to be just about obliterated from the chart of the world's work.

This was no time for any man to pray that he might be made chief executive of the greatest transportation system in the world; nor a time for Lord Shaughnessy to continue in that office. The work was now too heavy for the autocrat and for a man whose eyesight was bad. A successor had to be found. The directors did it almost automatically. There was but one man to consider; and he had no experience in any of the mechanical departments.

Beatty was the man. The old autocrat himself had said so; and he knew. Shaughnessy had taken the road from its wizard creator, and made it the size and efficiency that it was. There was almost apostolic succession. Stories that the Montreal directors favoured one man, the Toronto directors another, and that Shaughnessy gave the casting vote, were mere fabrications. Yet Beatty stated that never in his long years of experience with the system had he a clear ambition to climb up its ladder. He never wanted anything but a large day's work—and he got many. But, when he was made Vice-President, he must have known that he was the man. Vice-Presidents on the C.P.R. are not necessarily presidents to be. One of Beatty's friends travelling with him up from Three Rivers once bought him a picture postcard with the legend, "No mother ever picks her son to be a Vice-President." Beatty smiled it off. He probably knew. This was one of the rare bits of humour that illustrated the Shaughnessy regime. His lordship, fond enough of Irish jokes outside, was never humourous inside the system. All the humour in Canadian Pacific was supposed to have died when Van Horne left it.

But now and again a gleam of human insight came from the grim efficiency of the great system, and at least upon one occasion it flashed from the legal department. When the Railway Commission was almost a new thing under that remarkable square-deal chairman, Joseph Pitt Mabee, the town of Trois Rivieres, Que., had a suit, through its Board of Trade, against the C.P.R., involving discrimination in rates. The counsel for the plaintiff was a French-Canadian who could read, but not comfortably speak, English. The further he went the more bewildered the chairman became, until he ventured to interrupt:

"I have a suggestion to make to my hon. friend who is having difficulty in getting me to understand the case."

The suggestion was that the solicitor for the railway who had made a special study of the Board of Trade's argument for the sake of demolishing it, should himself present that side of the argument in the clear, concise English of which he is a master; that wherever necessary the French counsel should correct the statement; and that afterwards Mr. Beatty should proceed to demolish the argument which he himself had put up. The counsel was agreeable. Mr. Beatty rose to the occasion. His statement of the case was so satisfactory to the counsel for Trois Rivieres that he afterwards wondered how Beatty was ever able to demolish it and win the case.

Beatty has no hobbies. He cares for no art, collects no curios, has no great house, drives no big cars; cares not at all for society; thinks more of the Amateur Athletic Association and the Navy League and the boys of the Y.M.C.A., the athletic equipment of Queen's University and the success of Sir Arthur Currie as President of McGill. He never travels for pleasure. When he goes over the C.P.R., expect results. The average Montrealer does not even know where he lives. He is said to spend forty minutes a day, indoor weather, at basketball. In summer he camps. Snapshotted in a sweater he looks like a compromise between Babe Ruth batting a home run and Hofmann playing the piano.

When Beatty was first a young lawyer in Montreal he was so lonesome for the city he came from that he used to go down to the station to see the Toronto train pull in. He did not dream then that some day he would be the man that pulls all the trains in; that from his desk he should have a periscope on the world—every day—the greatest intelligence department in America. When he was a school lad in Thorold, afterwards at the Upper Canada "Prep." (where he got so bad a report that his father was advised to take him out of school), he had no idea that he would be Chancellor of Queen's University.

The system and the man. Determining which most affects the other is like the old problem of the hen and the egg. But here, anyhow, is a great system. No man venerates it more than Beatty. He does not even consent to call it a corporation; prefers to think of it as an association, imbued with enthusiasm and loyalty. Now and then he publicly discusses national ownership; none can do it better. He did it at Thorold soon after he was appointed. He argued it in Ottawa with Cabinet Ministers. He did it in Winnipeg. One suspects that Beatty's ability to do this was one of his qualifications for the presidency.

A year before Beatty became president a man high up in the system predicted that the C.P.R. would spend a million dollars to campaign against Bolshevism. He failed to foresee that the stolid old bulwark of things as they are would never need to do any such thing. All it needed to spend was Beatty who, within six months of the time he changed the sign on his door, had convinced the system that a sort of new optimistic vitality had got hold of it. There was once a cynical proverb around those offices: "It's cheaper to buy editors than newspapers." One hears very little of it now. The annual meeting of the Directors may be fine copy for the Montreal Gazette, but the yearly banquet of the officials is a matter of real public interest, especially to the young President. There is a psychology in this—"association"—that is not a corporation. How does he gauge it? From the officials. He does not visit the Angus shops; though if he did he would be welcome. It was an old axiom of Van Horne that what the head is, so also will the system be. Beatty extends the axiom—to include the officials. He would have them radiate optimism, not particularly caring that they get it from him.

For the past two years optimism has been needed. C.P. reports are not what they used to be. Even the stock exchanges tell the tale. But in comparison with American lines, with other Canadian systems—ah! here is always some comfort. Trust Beatty to miss no chance of intimating that he would much prefer to have real competition from Government roads. He fervently hopes for Government ownership to succeed. C.P. cannot thrive on weak competition. He has no fear that any sane Government will try absorbing the C.P.R. Even farmers, he thinks, would soon settle down to a sense of responsibility. The old pioneer is a hard organization to make into a tail that does not wag the dog. Steadily he has advertised to the public that the system is still the handbook of efficiency; let Government roads imitate. National ownership, being impersonal, somewhat Bolshevistic, and very vague, cannot develop the intensive "super-loyalty" of the big private system vested in a board of directors, and the chief.

Since ever he became chief Beatty has made this clear; for a purpose. Did I omit to say that he is the first C.P.R. president without whiskers; the first with a college degree; the first Canadian born, the first lawyer, the first bachelor and the first man from Toronto who had occupied that position; the youngest of all the presidents; that he used to be an expert at college Rugby; that at Upper Canada "Prep." he was much addicted to pugilism; not to mention the discarded tilt of his Fedora? If so it is because the man himself sets no value on these things. His faith is in the collective personality, called the Canadian Pacific, built up on the Personal Equation.

But Ottawa—what of that? Almost ever since Ottawa was, the C.P.R. has been said to own it. Governments of either party have never been inhospitable to the benign octopus—centipede it became—that had its origin in the Parliament of Canada and wrecked one Tory Government. The penalty of transcontinental railways is that they require to have mortgages on governments. Presently the worm turns. But that usually costs more money than the mortgage. We are now paying off the mortgages of two great systems. The C.P.R. mortgage was paid long ago. The President of the C.P.R. is usually regarded as second only to the Premier in point of national management. But Premiers and governments come and go; the President stays on. Suppose that in the year 19— there should be a Cabinet mainly of farmers. Alberta has a farmer government. Saskatchewan with a "Liberal" government has a Cabinet mainly of farmers. Manitoba sometimes has to remind herself that Premier Norris is a kind of farmer. Ontario has a farmer Premier and more than half a Cabinet of farmers.

This is the age of the farmers' innings. Suppose that a Cabinet of super-Agriculturists at the Capital some day should not agree with Mr. Beatty that farmers when they get responsibilities measure up and settle down to conservatism. Such a Cabinet might not remember that the C.P.R. had really done so very much for the prairies in comparison with what it has got from the West. It might decree that a lawyer President should be called upon to elucidate why he judges that so efficient a Personal Equation as the C.P.R. should not be "nationalized", if not government-owned, for the good of the whole people, and especially of the people whose traffic creates most of the revenues?

This is merely supposing. In any case Mr. Beatty would be master of the occasion. The lawyer who argued against himself and won at Three Rivers might be able to put up a more convincing argument to Ottawa Farmers than Lord Shaughnessy did to the Union Government when he offered to amalgamate the C.P.R. with the Government roads providing the management should be C.P.R. and the dividends guaranteed.

But of course this is a merely hypothetical argument. There may never be a Farmer Administration in Ottawa. And if there ever should be, we may trust to conservative and progressive old C.P.R. to do its share of injecting a "sense of responsibility" into a Farmer Cabinet to help it measure up and settle down, even if some farmer should buy C.P. shares enough to get himself elected as a director. As it stands to-day in the estimation of the travelling public, who may or may not care a copper about the personality of its rugged and efficient lawyer president, the Canadian Pacific is the one greatest proof that Canada needs no revolution which will interfere with the morale of that system. In fact so long as the C.P.R. holds its own an economic revolution in Canada is impossible.



A BOURGEOIS MASTER OF QUEBEC

SIR LOMER GOUIN

Early in January, 1917, a remarkable dinner was held in Toronto, the first of its kind ever held in that city of Orange Walks. Protestants and Catholics sat side by side. They applauded the same sentiments. Orator after orator dug into the mines of national idioms. They cracked jokes and told stories and worked up climaxes. The three hundred rose again and again with glasses of orangeade, and Apollinaris, toasting—Quebec, Ontario, and United Canada. They waved napkins and cheered and sang again and again "For he's a jolly good fellow". A Methodist minister sat at the back of the room next a Congregationalist preacher and pretended to unwrap a de luxe cigar. Orangemen sat at the same table with Catholics. Macs hobnobbed with 'eaus. They autographed one another's menus. The books of songs were bilingual—French and English. "God Save the King" was sung in both languages. "O Canada" was done in French. Methodist orators vied with French speakers. Col. George Denison sat next Gen. Lessard. They fraternized as soldiers. The Methodist local-preacher Premier of Ontario sat with the Roman Catholic Premier of Quebec. Sentiment ran high. But no French-Canadian was so emotional as N. W. Rowell, who glorified the heroes of Courcellette; and no Anglo-Canadian was quite so stolid, serious and impressive with homely common sense as Sir Lomer Gouin, the Premier of Quebec. This man spoke slowly, massively, almost gutturally like a Saxon, in fluent but accented English. He was far less excitable than the Premier of Ontario on the same subject:

THE RACE UNITY OF CANADA PREFIGURED IN THE BONNE ENTENTE

Three hundred public-spirited men of whom eighty came from Quebec were as one family on this.

At one in the morning the concomity broke up. Not a drop of vin or liqueur in any form had been served. The enthusiasm was, therefore, as natural as the tide of the St. Lawrence, which in the form of the great lakes and Niagara does its best to put its arms round the neck of Ontario before it cuts through the heart of Quebec. To the pure imagination it was somewhat as though a procession of St. Jean Baptiste had suddenly dreamed it was an Orange Walk.

This unusual Entente was held between the rancours of the bilingual dispute of 1916 and the Quebec revolt against conscription in 1917. Those present who doubted the sincerity of passionate speakers anchored a timidly steadfast hope to the practical, broad-angled Premier of Quebec, who, had he sat between Mr. Bourassa and the Premier of Ontario, would have inclined his ear to Ontario.