"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.