"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.