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.