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.