Part 24

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.