Sir George Foster is a genius. The world forgives much to geniuses,
because it lives by them. Canada has tolerated a great deal in Foster
for the very good reason that no man except Laurier has for so long a
period without interruption seemed so picturesquely necessary to our
public affairs.
In his own temperamental way Sir George somewhat compensates Canada for
never having produced a Milton or a Bach. One of his best speeches
might be made into blank verse or set to a fugue. He illuminates life.
Decade by decade he comes prancing down the vistas of our politics with
a vitality that is perfectly amazing. And when some obituarist writes
his epitaph, "Foster Mortuus Est," he promptly rubs it out and writes,
"Resurgam!"
The first allusion I ever heard made to Sir George Foster was in 1889,
on a Sunday School excursion when a Grit lawyer superintendent spoke
with admiring deprecation of the then famous divorce case; adding, as
might be expected of a righteous Grit, that it was a pity so eminent an
advocate of prohibition should have so compromised, perhaps ruined, his
political career.
Well, the compromise has lasted a long time and the ruin seems to be
long overdue. Public sentiment over both temperance and divorce has
somewhat shifted. In 1889, when virtue shuddered over marrying
divorced women, drunkards were being made by hundreds in any town under
the very nose of the church. In 1921 when Parliament moves to
popularize divorce, public sentiment not only abolishes the bar, but
votes bone dry on the eve of an artificial millennium.
A man who for some years has wanted the Ministry of Trade made the
remark in a magazine article that if he had Sir George Foster in his
employ as a salesman he would have him discharged for incompetence.
That man forgets that a genius is not born to sell goods. There were
times in the war when less genius and more business in Trade and
Commerce would have been better for Canada. Foster was almost seventy
when the war began; a pretty old man to act as the chief business
manager for a nation at war. His department was the economic backbone
of the Administration. The nearer Canada got to total conscription of
resources, the more Foster's work should have towered into the blue.
Trade and troops were the life of the nation. Hughes, White, Borden,
Rowell, Meighen, were all shoved into greater eminence by the work they
did in the war; Foster was no bigger or more potent a figure in war
work or any other kind of work when peace was signed than he was in
1914.
He never was a great executive even at his portfolio under Macdonald in
the early '80's. He has always been a prophet. Public speech is his
besetting passion. He could rise anywhere and translate logic and
economics into ethical emotion. No man in Canada felt the war more
intensely. But Trade was not a matter of emotion; or of oratorical
periods; or the right hand descending upon the left. It was a matter
of urgent and colossal business.
In 1916, talking to the war budget, he declaimed against patronage. He
had done the same thing in 1910 just as ably when he was the pot
calling the kettle black.
"I hope," he said, "that in the white light of the present struggle the
two parties will agree to do away with the evil."
But the "white light" was more intent on doing away with the parties
themselves.
In the same speech:
"When the trenches call for munitions and supplies, when the blood of
the country is oozing from its veins in the struggle to preserve its
ideals and its liberties, when those who are at home are contributing
with generous self-sacrifice and without murmur or repining, I say that
to me as a member of the Government, to you as supporters of the
Government, and to you, gentlemen opposite, as a part of the great body
which represents the people of this Dominion, the call comes to cut off
every unnecessary expenditure, to refuse every improper demand. It is
our business to administer the funds of the people with perfect
economy, and to devote ourselves to the one sole purpose of prosecuting
this war to a successful and final conclusion."
Again, he spoke like a prophet when he riddled the blind optimism of
the prosperity pack. At that time Canada had a favouring balance of
$200,000,000 just two years after a heavy ledger against us.
"The Optimist speaks of the unexampled prosperity that is to follow the
war. I would like to think so, but I can't. The prediction of a
Montreal newspaper that Canada will have from twelve to fifteen million
inhabitants within three years after the war is a mischievous
exaggeration. The first trying period of readjustment will come
immediately after the actual fighting ceases and an armistice is
declared."
Ezekiel was profoundly right up till the last prophecy. The Minister
of Trade, with all his great ability to analyze trade, had not mastered
economics. Neither had the President of a great Canadian bank when he
said before the armistice, that merchants with empty shelves and able
to buy cheap goods would be in luck. It was a bad time for prophets.
However, for a man who aimed at so many nails, Sir George had a good
average of hitting. But while he was talking so much, and in Europe so
long, the biggest-business administration of which he was the chief
went along on its own more or less mechanical momentum. By 1917 Canada
had a total export trade of more than half a billion; with a possible
yearly munition order of 500 millions--no thanks to the Minister of
Trade. No nation in the world exported so much from so few people. No
Ministry of Trade had such a record. Sir George knew exactly what it
all meant. He was used to analytical surveys. But one fails to
remember that at any period he issued from his office, the trade centre
of the Dominion, any statements that shewed him to be more than a
puzzled commentator on the riddle of trade, usually between speeches
and journeys. Sir George never did have executive patience for the
mastery of detail. In this case he did not even convince the people
that he had sized up the great general outlines, so fascinating because
so profoundly unusual.
In June, 1916, Sir George issued in his weekly Trade Bulletin a
resounding Call To Action for a business conference at Ottawa of all
parties interested for the purpose of pulling the country's industries
and organizations into one big _ensemble_ for getting back to peace.
That "Call" was published in one paper illustrated by a picture of Sir
George--in the climax of a speech. A few months later a political
writer was in Ottawa, and when he came back he wrote an article about
the Foster Conference. The following extract shows what he thought of
it:
In Ottawa, last week, I met a big bear of a Canadian westerner. He had
just arrived from Toronto. He was all smiles, all energy and
enthusiasm, and he was looking for the Minister of Trade and Commerce,
Sir George E. Foster.
"Tell you what I want him for," he said. "I want to go up and shake
hands with a real live man. That's what I want. I read his message
'bout getting together, and it sure set me thinking. I'm strong for
this Conference scheme. I'm going to back it for all I'm worth and do
my darndest to help a real, live statesman to pull off a big deal.
Damn if I care whether he is a Tory. My middle name is--Boost! I want
to help."
We walked up to the Department of Trade and Commerce together.
"Just what line of industry are you interested in?" I asked.
"Boilers--steam boilers. Vancouver. Little Van-cou-ver. That's my
town."
"And if I may ask, what is your idea about this Business Man's
Conference? What do you think ought to be done?"
"Eh? Why, I don't know yet. That's what I'm coming to see Foster
about."
An hour later I met the boiler-maker coming away from the Department of
Trade and Commerce.
"Well," I said, "everything clear?"
"Clear?" he roared. "Clear? Why, man alive! that fellow Foster's away
in the West with some Dominion Royal Commission, making speeches or
something, and back there"--nodding toward the Department of Trade and
Commerce--"nobody home!"
"Couldn't they explain it?"
"Sure. They explain that Sir George is away and nothing definite can
be done. I asked 'em when the conference would be called and they said
that was indefinite. Then I said where? And they thought somewhere in
Ottawa. Why, all that fellow Foster made was a speech. That's all. A
speech! Now what the h---- good will a speech do to help me and help
the rest of us manufacturers to keep from getting swamped after this
war?"
Trade in Canada during the war was of vastly more practical
significance than the old fiscal idea of Empire of which Sir George had
been such a protagonist when he stumped England for Chamberlain in
1903. But he never seemed able to grasp it as clearly even in a
speech. I don't know which seems to me now the greater speech; that on
the Chamberlain mirage to the Toronto Empire Club when he elevated
fiscal statistics into a pageant of economic emotion; or his speech on
the war, I think in 1916, when he lifted his thin spectral figure into
a sublime paroxysm of ethical appeal, corralled all opposing arguments
into a corner and flogged the life out of them in a great message to
awakened humanity. The comparison scarcely matters except to show that
in fifteen years of great Foster speeches alas for the prophets!--it
was not the fiscal Empire of Chamberlain that had leaped to the war.
Still more startling to Sir George, the economics of war riddled to
bits the old economics of Empire. In 1917 he was compelled to forget
that a tariff was implied in the Ten Commandments and to consent for
all necessary purposes to remove trade restrictions across the border.
That was after the United States had declared war. The high priest of
protection himself invented a phrase "economic unit" to express North
America. He wanted markets to find their own levels by their own
routes. He no longer had any fear of Canada being Americanized.
Canada's nationhood was already defined in the trenches more than ever
it had been in tariffs. In Sir George's phrase the food producers of
North America were to become one vast international group. When Foster
was "Yea" to Macdonald in 1887 and 1891, before he became "Amen" to
Chamberlain in 1903, this economic unity was called continentalism,
which to Foster was the mother of annexation, and Free Trade Liberals
were traitors to the Empire.
Economic unity, however, meant far more than Sir George intended it to
mean. He admitted the principle of free-trade only in production. In
spite of tariffs North America became, not only a vast group of
producers, but a huge family of consumers. Every Victory Loan raised
money that was spent in once more paying wages and buying materials for
war production in Canada. Every time that money went round the circle,
prices for many of the staple commodities went higher. The Department
of Trade registered a tremendous increase in the cash value of exports
even when the bulk value changed very little. The more loans "put over
the top," the more money there seemed to be. The more hazardous
shipping became through submarines, the greater the scarcity, and the
demand--and the price paid. Sir George witnessed this phenomenon: the
fewer producers left by conscription on the land, in the mines, in the
factories, the more Canada was able to export--in cash values.
This must have given a good Tory economist loss of sleep. No man could
have analyzed the paradox more ably than Sir George. But so far as we
can recollect, he published no illuminating bulletins from his
Department to tell us about it. How we should have enjoyed his master
mind elucidating the phenomenon of a continent being gradually denuded
of goods and flushed with money; of prices inexorably mounting; of
money hungering for goods; of fabulous wages for munition-making and
anything else that could be scaled up to meet the competition unloading
themselves into Victory Bonds at a sure profit, and the surplus into
commodities most of which were not made in Canada and must therefore
come from the United States. What a prophetic commentary it would have
made on the "buyers' market" which followed the armistice. What
wonderful reading it would have made if Sir George had issued replies
to those commercial newspaper editors over the border who rushed
jubilating into print to say with fabulous statistics that Canada was
now the heaviest customer that nation had. How we should have liked to
hear officially from the Minister of Trade how Broadway was infecting
the country, luxuries reeling in argosies over the dry land to Canada,
and Canada buying herself bankrupt on the exchanges; and that though
there were powerful economic reasons for it all, we had better enlist
in an army of economy instead of being conscripted later by the
super-tariff on luxuries and the luxury tax.
But the Minister of Trade confined himself to growling that we should
all wear patches and old clothes. Which was one good reason why many
people did not. It was easy for Sir George to wear patched trousers if
he felt like so doing. He would have been merely picturesque, like
those ragged prophets of old. Most of us still had to invest in some
sort of decoration. Anyhow a large number of people had the money to
spend; and the more they spent the more they approved of self-denial in
other people.
This problem of American penetration is big enough at any time here.
The Department of Trade is the place where it is most clearly
understood. We are constantly warned about the danger, not only to our
Canadian dollar, but to our national independence if we persist in
importing motor cars, fashionable footwear, party gowns and lingerie
and hats, art furniture, home decorations, phonographs, moving
pictures, and magazines. But we go on doing it; because Canada,
whether in war or peace, fails to produce a great many things that
people like to have and to wear and to go about in; and for those that
she does we are charged the foreign price plus the duty and more; so
that in many and many a case it has been found more economical to buy
the article from catalogue, paying the duty and the express charges.
Has Sir George ever enlightened us about this? Has he ever tried to
inform the Canadian manufacturer that if he expects to hold our
allegiance even under a more or less protective tariff, he must refrain
from charging the consumer all the traffic and more than the consumer
will stand? We fail to remember; even when we recollect that on thus
and such an occasion somewhere in the Empire he made some glorious
patriotic speech. On a subject which causes many Canadians to explode,
often with ill-considered accusation of "the Yankees," our greatest
maker of pure and applied speeches seldom has a word to say. But he
knows. Sir George Foster knows our economic subjugation by the 12 to 1
method, even under a tariff. Alas! he hails from the Maritimes, a land
of great people, of constructive Canadians who have too often been in
absolute economic need of more of that sort of subjugation.
Then there was the never-dead dragon of high prices for everything,
which our St. George made no real attempt to spear. That is a long
story. It was his department which furnished the Food Controller, the
duties which the Trade Department could not discharge. Well remembered
are the evangelical injunctions of the Controller to consume perishable
and export other products; to live on garden truck grown in back yards
and corner lots so that grain and butter and bacon and eggs and oatmeal
might run the submarine blockade on the high seas. There was no fault
to find with this, so long as it was economy. But heaven knew what
armies of housewives, already desperate from lack of help, were
dragooned into making their kitchens amateur canning factories where
they wasted good fruit along with tragically expensive sugar in jars
that approximated the cost of cut glass. And after all the slavery and
the self denial, butter and eggs that were not shipped abroad because
there was no room in munition ships to carry them, vanished
mysteriously in the lower price season into some limbo known as
cold-storage, only to emerge when it suited the storage barons at
prices as high as were paid in Europe. No doubt there is an economic
philosophy in cold-storage just as there is in hydro-power. But we
have always supposed its virtue was in taking care of a perishable
surplus, so that when there is a scarcity the surplus can be released
at a reasonable profit.
Did the able Minister of Trade ever stoop to enlighten us with the
economics of this? If so, the recollection has faded.
There is at any time, whether in peace or war, a great function for the
Department of Trade to perform in the matter of what is the reasonable
cost of any commodity in general demand. But no Trade Department in
this country has ever done it. There is always plenty of time for the
consideration of new markets, the plotting of new trade routes and the
planning of mercantile marine for export; all very well, and if we are
to pay our bills by exports, very necessary. But the common consumer
has many a time, long before the war and often since, found himself in
the jaws of a nutcracker in the shape of some combine or trust or
confederacy of middlemen; and if there was any sphere of government to
deal with these things it was the great Department of Trade.
This has nothing to do with party politics. Any party up to date has
been capable of neglecting the people in these matters. But it is
quite as important as the abolition of patronage.
We have ceased to expect any such function from a Minister so old, so
eloquent, so Imperially-inspired as Sir George Foster. There is always
something else to do. The party must be led in the House. Sir George
was the House leader. Magnificent! No man ever rose at a desk in
Parliament who could more superbly play upon the bigotries and the high
patriotic emotions of even a remnant party. The man is a genius.
There must be the valley of dry bones for Ezekiel. And the bones must
come together and walk. Sir Robert Borden on such occasions was a mere
interested gargoyle. Patriotism demanded that the party's desks be
thumped. Sir George saw that they were thumped without stint.
Twice during the Opposition period Sir George was dead and buried by
the Grits; once over the Union Trust land investigation; again in a
libel suit which he lost to the _Globe_ when Rowell was against him.
None of these things defeated the able author of Resurgam! who was made
Minister of Trade, went for a six-months' journey in the Orient trying
to convert the yellow races from rice to Canadian flour, and afterwards
got his title. So when the people, in 1917, asked Ezekiel for a
prophecy, the Minister of Trade stoically advised them to eat less,
save more, waste nothing, wear what their grandmothers wore if
possible, and hope for the best. In the matter of fixing prices Sir
George had as much wisdom as most, though he made a very awkward
attempt to adjust the price of wheat and only then at the instigation
of the British Government.
The world by this time was full of upsetting anomalies to Sir George.
Even government was perverted. He had no desire for Unionism; to sit
at Council with even win-the-war Liberals--once plain Grits. It needed
political philosophy to make colleagues of such men as Calder, the Grit
enemy of Toryism in the West, Crerar, the avowed apostle of free-trade,
Sifton, the Alberta mystery man, and Rowell, who had won the libel suit
against him for the Globe. It was not to be expected that so complete
and historic a Tory as Sir George could at first easily regard such men
as anything but interlopers, even though he admitted their strength in
the Coalition. One can imagine Meighen making up to his old trade
enemy Carvell, but not Foster making overtures to Rowell.
But the vital element was gone out of the Administration, and Sir
George had to admit it. Cold and repellent as he has always seemed in
politics, without a crony or even a man who cared to make him a
confederate, he has never been a man of implacable resentment. He was
yet to regard Rowell as a real man, worthy his confidence.
A newspaperman sent to Osgoode Hall to report the Globe libel suit for
an Ottawa Liberal paper relates how the night of the conclusion of the
trial he met Mr. Foster at the Toronto Station. The reporter had
already wired the decision of the Court adverse to Mr. Foster, who had
not even taken the trouble to inquire what it was. The two chatted
amiably on the train and met the next morning in Ottawa. On his way
home Mr. Foster saw the Liberal bulletin at the newspaper office. A
few days later he met the scribe.
"Tom," he said, genially, shaking hands, "why didn't you tell me about
that decision?"
"Well, sir, I really thought you knew, and I didn't care to hurt your
feelings."
The member for North York laughed.
"Feelings!" he repeated. "You are the first Grit that ever said I had
any."
A prominent Liberal described to the writer the exit of Mr. Foster from
the House after the Royal Commission investigation into the Union Trust.
"Mr. and Mrs. Foster," he said eloquently, "went together down the
terrace in a fog of rain, into the shadow of the night, under one
umbrella. And I said to myself as they went, dejected and pitiful,
'Well, that's the final exit of Foster from political life.'"
The author of Resurgam knew better. He could always somehow come back
on the stepping stones of a dead self. Something made him feel that
without him the Conservative party would have been like the Liberals
without Laurier, or in an earlier day his own party minus the old chief
Macdonald. He was almost right.
One other episode illustrates how spontaneously the emotional aspect of
things sometimes sways this cold politician who never could lead a
party. When the Premier by request called a caucus of his Union
supporters for the purpose of discovering what could be done with the
Coalition to make it a party, it was not the Premier who held the
floor, but Sir George, who made a long passionate speech upon the
vicissitudes of men who--like the Premier and himself--had carried the
burden and the heat of the political day. When Foster had finished,
there were tears on case-hardened faces and the caucus adjourned.
Asked later for a copy of his great speech, Sir George said he had not
even prepared any notes; when he went to the caucus he had not intended
making any such speech; he did not now remember what he had said.
Can we call such a man anything but a genius? As Minister of Trade he
may be a poor salesman. He is not less a poor salesman of his party,
his country, or his big original belief in the Empire, whatever form of
government it might become, or of his birthright to spend his
tremendous talent in public service rather than in private gain. And
he has been for almost a generation the most interesting personality in
the ranks of the Conservative party.
There is but one other politician in America with the political
vitality of Sir George Foster. "Uncle Joe" Cannon is the man. In
Washington Cannon is regarded as a miracle because he was once the
autocrat of Congress and is still a member of the House and a very old
man. Sir George Foster is almost as old a man and has been in public
service much longer. He has held portfolios under all the Conservative
Premiers that Canada ever had--Macdonald, Thompson, Abbott, Bowell,
Borden, Meighen. There have been times in the shuffles of these men
when for ability he, rather than Abbott or Bowell or Borden, should
have been Premier. But there was always a fatal obstacle in the
personality of the man whose leadership always depended upon making a
great speech. When he was first Minister under Macdonald, a lad named
Arthur Meighen was getting ready to attend a High School. Could that
Minister and that lad have been introduced, would Ezekiel have
prophesied that in 1920 he would be holding office under the lad,
Premier of Canada?
Anomalies like these are the rule in a life of a man so unusual as Sir
George, who is now a Senator. Even in the Senate he is not dead; for
in Ezekiel, 37th chapter, it is written, "Son of man, can these bones
live? And I answered, O Lord God, thou knowest."