Part 25

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.