Yet for much of his life he has been a creature of impulse, powerfully attracted by things not in business. He left his seat once in a great Buffalo hall to stand at the door that he might judge the effect of a certain decrescendo from a choir. To a group of musical enthusiasts in Chicago he suddenly suggested a trip to the Cincinnati May Festival. Speaking to the boys of Upper Canada College, he drew from his pocket a piece of putty to illustrate the plasticity of character. Standing amid heaps of luggage at the docks in St. John, he looked at the immigrant sheds and said, "What a very human picture!" Pocketing the proof of an hospital article, which as proprietor of the Toronto News and Chairman of the Hospital Board he had withdrawn from publication, he said to the reporter, "Old man, a place of suffering should not be described in the language of the racetrack." When Pastor Wagner, author of "The Simple Life", was in Toronto, he was the guest of Mr. Flavelle, who for a time was as much absorbed in the peasant philosopher as he often was in the "Meditations" of Thomas à Kempis.
Considering these impulses to express himself, it is not hard to understand how Sir Joseph came to say to the Toronto Board of Trade that war profits should go to the hell to which they belonged. He was speaking under a sense of emotion. All through his enormously successful career he had been energized by a sudden enthusiasm to take hold of something, and afterwards to make it go. "Whatsoever thy hand findeth."
Flavelle's hand found many things. Among them was the Toronto News, his one recorded failure. This also was an impulse; precisely the same as had led him years before to subscribe $5,000 to a fund for the better education of the Tory party. The News cost him one hundred times as much, for much the same reason on a larger scale; and he lost it. But he has never regretted the loss, because he gained the experience. The News did a valuable work. But its rather Utopian resurrection had a sad sequel in Toryism such as Flavelle never could have endorsed, and its ultimate extinction seemed to prove that newspapers cannot be operated by ideals.
Again, reconstructing enthusiasm followed him to Ottawa. He went there at the instigation of the Imperial Government. Whether he himself made the original suggestion of the need, I do not know. But he obeyed the need when he saw it. Impulse drove him to meet it in the greatest work of public organization ever done in so short a time in this country, except the sending of the First Contingent.
Flavelle had never liked Ottawa. Ordinarily he had a sort of contempt for its waste of time and its dissipation of morality. It is not conceivable that he would have taken Munitions under any Canadian department. Nor was it necessary. Canada was to produce munitions for much more than the Canadian Army.
The work was vast and varied; the man at the head of it capable, exacting and impartial. His sole aim was to produce and to export munitions at a price high enough to attract industry and low enough to prevent profiteering. For three years he was the superman of Canada's industrial fabric. The C.M.A. and the Department of Trade became mere annexes to munitions, at a time when Davies' bacon clamoured for ship-room needed by Flavelle munitions.
Official Ottawa had never known a man like this. He was not popular. The Government had no control of him. Ottawa had never cared for super-men. Flavelle was there without politics. He had a department greater than any in the Administration. He was never responsible to Parliament. Ministers to him were not necessary. He had no favours to ask of members. He never even looked in at the Commons which he would like to have reformed. People sometimes ask why such a man does not go into Parliament. Impossible. He regards government as sheer business, when it is often a passing show. Foster's Business Conference that never met would have caused him to discharge the department for incompetency. Sir Thomas White had no desire to lift his eyes unto the hill Flavelle, the super-Minister who for years had been a critic of his own party, and now believed it more inept than ever in spite of the great work of the Finance Minister. Sir Sam Hughes had never wanted Flavelle. There was a good reason. Sir Sam had started the munition industry in Canada as a branch of war, not as a department of mere business. Flavelle was all business. War was business. There was the rub. The nearer the war came to a climax, the more men like Flavelle at home became part of the machinery. Foster never could have salaamed to this super-man of trade and commerce. Did even Sir Robert Borden ever feel comfortable with him? Back from Europe in a fit of impulse more powerful than he had ever known, impressed by the success of Coalition in England, Sir Joseph wanted to see it established in Canada. The nation was united for munitions; why not for national business? The Premier was away in the West. Sir Joseph wired him asking permission to urge coalition at a certain public dinner. There was no response. Evidently the Government wanted no advice from a man who had nothing whatever to do with it and represented merely big business.
Something must have caused the Premier to treat Sir Joseph coolly. Afterwards at the bacon investigation there was cause for a change in temperature. The Premier had been negligent about some documentary evidence extenuating to the Flavelle presentation of the case. The two had warm words. Sir Joseph told the Premier one thing which, as it was repeated to me without reference to use in publication, had better be omitted here. But it was scathing. Sir Joseph is no mean master of the kind of language that hurts. But he has the Christian spirit—which in this case he laid aside. I should like to know what the Premier said to Sir Joseph; and precisely what were the Premier's opinions, before and after, concerning the baronetcy.
In his quiet moments Sir Joseph does not rebuke himself more than he regrets the moral myopia of other people. I think he is somewhat disillusioned as to what it is worth to gain a good deal of the world at the risk of a lot of people thinking he has lost his soul. He does not believe that his soul was ever in danger of being lost. Often he goes to rugby games. In this he sees again the virtue of struggle, probably wishing he himself had played rugby in youth.
"When a man gets old," he said lately, "he loves to sit at home."