Sir Thomas White was the world's only continuous Finance Minister for
the whole period of the war--and after; when nobody else cared to have
his job, and Sir Thomas did. He seduced billions of patriotic dollars
out of the pockets of this country and smiled as he did it. No man in
Canada was so exquisitely fitted to the task of making an average
dollar burn a hole in a man's pocket in order to do its bit. It gave
him "the pleasure that's almost pain" to feel that no man except Henri
Bourassa or an Eskimo could escape the snare of a Victory Loan
advertisement prepared by Sir Thomas and his committees of ad-men and
brokers. Never before on this continent had a nation been so
advertised into patriotism. In England some expert had done it for
Kitchener's Army. But it was easier to recruit England, with 30
millions of people within the area of our maritime provinces, than to
mobilize billions from a vast emptiness like Canada.
It must be admitted that the divinity which keeps governments from
wrecking nations had somehow picked the right man for this stupendous
task. Sir Thomas had a quality of mind and a political experience
which made it possible for him to pull the last dollar for victory. In
the war annals of Canada he will have a halo of billions, while Sam
Hughes has one of bayonets. He mobilized our financial resources by a
system that stopped only short of conscription.
I seldom see Sir Thomas standing at a street corner when I do not feel
like urging him to run along and attend to his office and not to be
losing time. He seems to belong to that cold group of men whose time
is naturally money.
In 1912 I asked Mr. White in Ottawa for an interview. He appointed an
hour when I might see him. As soon as I entered the office he began to
talk. The ease and fluency of his conversation amazed me. No other
Minister of that Cabinet could have been so suave and entertaining.
"Er--with regard to the question of railway fin----?"
He saw the question coming in a sort of parabolic curve and he dodged
it. By a neat evasion he got the topic switched to sociology, from
that to philosophy, to heredity, literature, journalism, art, and
finally prenatalism. Every effort I made to probe him on public
finance was met by some calm and smiling barrage of eclectic interest.
For an hour we played conversational pingpong in the most amiable
style. And when Mr. White urbanely confessed that he liked everybody
in the House of Commons, even "Bob" Rogers and Dr. Pugsley, it was time
for the interviewer to go, before so charmed a Utopia should vanish
like a film on a screen, and to conclude that the Finance Minister of
Canada was no novice in a certain species of diplomacy.
Time made some heavy changes in him. A press gallery observer, asked
by a certain Canadian periodical to name a possible successor to Sir
Robert Borden four years before the Premier's resignation, picked Sir
Thomas whom he said he had watched turn grey and careworn in office,
sedulous at his desk, always busy, never at ease. Yet in 1912 he could
lecture hon. gentlemen opposite seasoned in political intrigues as
though he, himself, had discovered some new coefficient in politics.
Sir Thomas White has always been a political emergency, a sort of
administrative occasion. For real politics he was never meant. For
government by business he had great aptitude. To him government is big
business, and the human side of democracy a sealed book. He has an
almost exquisite sense of prerogative. His equilibrium is adjusted to
the niceties of a seismographic instrument. Yet he has never held
himself aloof, and is not commonly proud.
There is an idle story that near the end of his term in office he went
to a bank teller's wicket--being in urgent temporary need of a little
common money--and presented a cheque. On being courteously reminded by
the teller that he had not brought the customary identification, he
blandly announced, "I am the Finance Minister of Canada." The manner
in which the Minister spoke is said to have left no doubt in the
teller's mind that he was indeed the very man whose photograph had
appeared in the newspapers.
There is also a little story that during one of the Victory Loan
conferences in Ottawa, one of his older associates in newspaper work
politely called him Sir Thomas, and that the Minister replied, "Oh,
forget it! Call me Tom."
The first may be fiction. The second is a fact. But the number of men
who without invitation would call him Tom, is not very extensive.
From his youth up Tom White had a powerful capacity for ordered work.
There was "a time to work and a time to play, a time to laugh and a
time to weep." Nor did he acquire this from Sir Joseph Flavelle, with
whom he was so long and intimately associated. He had it from the
cradle, which he must have left at the appointed time with some
impatience at too much rocking. As a student at the University, as a
law student at Osgoode, as a barrister, as reporter on the _Telegram_,
as an employee in the Toronto Assessment Department, he had always a
sort of mathematical regard for the diligence that makes a man fit to
stand before kings, and the sensation of a superbly pigeon-holed mind.
By heredity Sir Thomas was labelled a Liberal, and at the time of the
Taft-Fielding reciprocity junta he sat on the edge of his political bed
pulling the court-plaster off. Next morning, without a single new grey
hair in his head, he found himself a Conservative. The Liberal regime
of shipping in people and booming up speculative towns on the prairies
was a good thing for any Trust. But when the Government began to
barter its preserve for another lease of life, Mr. White decided that
it was time for a change. When he quit the National Trust to take on a
trust for a nation he was a new-born Conservative, and in the eyes of
the new Premier a lovely child. And as Finance Minister in a Tory
Government he became the real author of Coalition.
Mr. White took into the Finance Department the atmosphere and the
technique of the fiduciary corporation. Hence he was never able to
read himself into the life of the country, never became more than a
superficial master of its political forces, never rallied men about him
in a great effort to save anything but a financial situation, and never
lost a superb sense of himself. The fact that without ever having been
elected to Parliament or Legislature, or even a County Council, he
could walk into what is usually regarded as the most important
department of administration in any country, is a proof that government
as big business was more important to him than politics as experience.
The average portfolio is handed to a politician, not because he knows
anything about the matter in hand, but because he is a good politician,
a big enough man to represent some electoral area, and may be left to
learn his public job after he gets it. Such is democracy. White was a
tyro in politics and public administration. But he did know finance.
When Laurier picked editor Fielding from Nova Scotia to look after the
Budget he chose a good deal of a genius. Mr. Fielding was a master of
tariffs and of inspiring fiscal speeches outside the House. He had
almost a Gladstonian faculty for making statistics scintillate with
human interest. He had made a survey of the country on tariff for
revenue; and he usually had a bookkeeping surplus at a time when he
practically boasted on the platform of what it cost to run the country.
Much thanks to him the Liberals had given Free Trade a profoundly
respectable burial, with Michael Clark, headmaster of the Manchester
School in Canada, as chief mourner.
But the ledgers of Canada looked to be in a bad way to Mr. White. "The
cost of high living" had been demonstrated by the Liberal Government
some time before James J. Hill coined the phrase. Laurier monuments to
high living were dotted all over the country in the shape of armouries,
post offices, customs houses, docks, courthouses, the Quebec Bridge,
and vast systems of unpopulated railways.
When Mr. White's sensitive finger came to that prodigal item in the
public ledger he had almost excuse, in spite of his pre-knowledge of
the business, for curling up like a cutworm. His knowledge of banks
and their customers was very extensive. He had dealt with those banks.
The ex-manager of the National Trust had long known that Canada was
overbuilt with railways and going-to-be-bankrupt towns. The orgy of
expansion whose familiar figure was the prodigal with the scoop shovel
in the gold bin by the open window with a huge hole in the ground
beneath, was just about at the crest of its master carousal
[Transcriber's note: carousel?]; and the transcontinental railways with
their entails of cash and land grants and guaranteed bonds was the
thing that gave the new Minister the greatest concern of the lot,
though he never said so. An ex-Cabinetarian who used to agree with Sir
Thomas in politics still stoutly alleges that the 1911 "bolt" of the
famous 18 Liberals, of whom Sir Thomas was one of the leaders, was a
tactical manoeuvre to save the Canadian Northern from bankruptcy by
reciprocity.
Sir Thomas should have made the railways his first drastic item of
reorganization. Here was a Verdun for the Finance Minister to take.
But for two years while the railway cataclysm was coming he went along
with business as usual. It would have been less of a burden to unload
that railway bankruptcy in 1913 than it was during the stress of after
the war.
But of course the Finance Minister was only the chief subordinate in
the Administration. Time would force the railways to terms. The war
and war business came faster than the time. Sir Thomas probably
dreaded the public ownership in which he has never profoundly believed.
In conversation with the President of the Canadian Pacific he
practically admitted that a Government cannot compete with a great
corporation in operating a railway. But in 1912, on the principle that
an egg hatches into a chicken, he must have foreseen that national
ownership of half Canada's railways would be thrust upon him.
It is not explicitly known what are Sir Thomas White's opinions about
the Government ownership of railways; but one can easily imagine what
he would have said prior to 1911 to any proposal of any Government to
begin owning and operating banks and trust companies. And as
Government is the owner of the Royal Mint in Canada and does its own
coining of the metals used in our currency, it would seem to be vastly
easier for a Government to own banks and loan companies than to own and
operate transportation systems. Sir Thomas would scarcely deny that.
He is too shrewd in experience. It is one thing for a municipality to
own street railways, because all the streets are automatically part of
a city's property. It is quite another matter for Government to own
and operate railways, because the routes of these highways and the
machinery necessary to conduct traffic are not naturally the property
of a Government, which exercises its power chiefly through the
regulation of rates and the functions of the Railway Commission.
One imagines that Sir Thomas sincerely hoped that the railways built
from cash borrowed on Government guaranteed bonds, and by direct loans
from the national exchequer would some time develop business enough to
pay their own way. But it is not remembered that he held any
conferences with the Minister of Railways to prepare a public statement
on this question. Both these Ministers had troubles enough without
creating more. The country was on the crest of a wave whose trough was
not far ahead.
Sir Thomas had made but one really constructive budget speech when the
inevitable slump began to come. But as yet he seemed to be rather
charmed with the novelties of Parliament and the ironies of preparing
to win elections. The war plunged him into a system that cared no more
for his budget than a cyclone for a baby carriage. Tariffs, bankrupt
railways, the banking system, exchanges, and the common cost of living
were all but obliterated in the campaign of war loans, not the least
marvellous feature of which was that selling Victory Bonds almost made
the Finance Minister a friend of the common people. The "vicious
circle" of higher wages and higher cost of living was offset by Sir
Thomas White's virtuous circle of money raised in Canada, spent in
Canada, for goods needed by Canada and the Allies at the front. The
formula was 5 1/2 per cent with no taxes, and the best security in the
world--if the war was won, which of course it would be if people bought
Victory Bonds.
In this era of the patriotism of the pocket, common reason almost
tottered from her throne. Ordinary financial logic was forgotten.
Economic delirium took hold of the nation. A broker in those days
could talk in language more mysterious than the polite attentions of a
juggler who pulls an egg from your pocket. Newspapers were full of
jargon that sometimes seemed more fantastic than the theories of the
Holy Rollers. The citizen who could not cash a Victory Bond to pay a
debt was considered behind the times, and the banker who told you that
it was better to sell bonds than to borrow on them at the bank was
regarded as an oracle, even though you could not begin to comprehend
his logic.
But the Finance Minister was as calm as Gibraltar. He was the man
behind the curtain and the show. He was seldom absent from the
Orders-in-Council convention, commonly known as Parliament. He was
again and again acting Premier. He cared little for Imperial
Conferences. His war was at home. His firing line was all over
Canada. He was the most stay-at-home and sedulous of our ministers.
He worked while others slept or sailed the seas. No Victory Loan
advertisement proof escaped the eagle eye of this ex-newspaperman
before it went to press. He scanned and corrected every syllable.
Every advertisement was a sermonette from the Finance Minister.
An independent writer visiting Ottawa in the fall of 1916, wrote
concerning the Finance Minister:
"One of the best evidences of Ottawa's frame of mind is the way it
talks about Sir Thomas White--and the way Sir Thomas talks about
himself. Sir Thomas White has probably rendered more real brain
service to this country in his few years of office than any one man who
has held office as a Minister--I am not now speaking of Prime
Ministers, whose functions are particular and peculiar--since
Confederation. To Ottawa, Sir Thomas is little short of a miracle.
The frame of mind on both sides of politics regarding Sir Thomas is not
unlike that of the farmer who saw a two-humped camel for the first
time. "Hell," said Ottawa, "they ain't no such animal!" Now it calls
Sir Thomas White 'great'--and even Sir Thomas admits it!"
Vol. I., No. 1 of The Onlooker, had this to say on the other side of
the ledger:
"One would gather from the way some of his admirers talk that he, and
he alone, was responsible for the success of the various loans issued
during the war. He had it easy. The country was literally bursting
with money seeking investment. One could almost have raised it with
his eyes shut. The whole community was humming with activity like a
top asleep; and still the orders from abroad came pouring in. Every
fresh loan stimulated activity anew. All that was required was to
issue the prospectus, pass the solicitation of funds to interested
canvassers, newspapers, publications, loan companies, banks, brokers,
and hurrah at the end."
Some things do look easy to the man who is not doing them. Common
sense admits that the man who patriotically juggled the billions from
pocket to exchequer and back to pocket again would have had a much
harder task to undertake what somebody called "the Gethsemane" of
paying the nation's bills when the "hurrah" was over. The method of
financing Canada in the war may be vastly different from the method
necessary in peace. But when money must be had quickly in vast
quantities there is no time to debate on just how you are going to get
it. Sir Thomas White's raid upon the pockets of Canada was a financial
spectacle not to be judged by standards of thrift, for the very good
reason that the people were nauseated with thrift talk, were looking
for something easy, and White had the instinct to know that the easier
and the more spectacular he could make a Victory Loan the better for
the war. He rowed with the current and knew he was doing it. In his
own financial brain, which is not unthrifty, he knew that the "hurrah"
was not healthy in the long run and that it could not last forever.
But once it was started there was no other way but to keep it up.
Thanks to Sir Thomas, every citizen had an opportunity to get himself
rubber-stamped on behalf of the nation; which on general principles was
a good thing, because a large number of people at that time indulged
the fiction that as the Government was paying its debts, a good way to
do it would be to print more paper money. It was the Finance
Minister's opportunity to instruct us, that the Government was not
paying debts--but making it possible to pay wages. Unless the surplus
of every man's earnings was invested in Victory Bonds there would
shortly be no big industries left to pay the earnings at all, Canada
would cease to export munitions--which might be the one thing to lose
the war, in which case nothing would be left for any of us but to pay
war indemnities to the enemy. Critics declared that non-taxable bonds
were an iniquity in favour of the big investor who could heap up
bonanza investments without taxes; another way of accusing the Finance
Minister of being in league with the "big interests." But we must do
Sir Thomas the credit of taking a sure way to encourage the small
investor by refusing to tax his patriotism. A 100th per cent tax on
some people's patriotism might have squelched it altogether. It would
have been a public service if Sir Thomas White had plainly told the
people, not less about why they should buy Victory Bonds during a
period of inflation, but more about what would happen to them when
deflation began to set in; when, ceasing to buy Victory Bonds at a low
price, we should have to buy bread and butter and clothes at higher
prices than ever at a time when money began to sneak away, we knew not
whither.
Perhaps it was too much to expect one man to organize the "hurrah" and
afterwards to conduct the "Gethsemane." At any rate, before we had an
opportunity to test the real size of Sir Thomas as a public servant he
resigned office.
Whether the Finance Minister at the climax of his big _opus_ was shrewd
enough to imagine that the kudos of the loans might get him the
Premiership, we do not profess to know. He is not considered famous as
a political strategist. He has far too much serenity.
In 1917 Sir Thomas was chairman of a monster meeting in Toronto when
ten thousand people who tried to hear Theodore Roosevelt speak on
behalf of that year's Victory Loan of Canada were turned away. For
some hours he had been in company with a man whose mastery of the
unusual was almost the equal of Mark Twain's. If ever he had a chance
to be startled out of his headmaster poise, here it was. But he made a
long, tedious preamble of a speech the only sentence of which that
sticks in my memory is that sincerely girlish utterance of Portia to
Antonio after the trial, "Sir, you are very welcome to our house." It
was like pinning a pink bow knot on the head of a lion.
Sir Thomas showed strategic ability when he refused the Premiership.
After declining the Premiership he was not likely to need a portfolio.
Public life is considerably like war. Every time you move there must
be a motive.
A former political crony of Sir Thomas said to the writer that the
excess profits tax imposed by the Minister was one of the cleverest
political manoeuvres ever perpetrated in Ottawa, because it drove
manufacturers and merchants to advertise in the newspapers in order to
reduce their profits, thus paying part of the excess to the newspapers
rather than to the Government; which was supposed to have made the
Government popular with newspapers on both sides of the political
fence. This is a genially cynical way of saying that every publisher
has his price, and that the Finance Minister had made some startling
progress in his mentality since the day when he was charmed with
everybody in Parliament. But it is a Machiavellian touch quite
uncharacteristic of a man whose friends had designated him for the
Premiership.
The friends of Sir Thomas may have had good reason for considering him
as the next Premier. On the evidence of the mere handling of executive
big business demanding cool judgment, practical vision and powerful
action he was the equal of any other candidate for the office. His
defects were less obvious, but perhaps more vital in the case. Sir
Thomas was not designed to lead, which in these days means to be
constantly recreating a party, not to operate a well-built governmental
machine. In his nine years of public life he did a big national work
and justly earned all the real distinction he ever got. He did so much
in a big, unusual way for the nation that his passing out becomes
another example of how easy it is to cripple administration by
sacrificing public service brains to private business.