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."