V
THE CAPTAIN OF INDUSTRY
Dr. Grenfell in his battles with profiteering traders has incurred their enmity, of course—but he has been the people’s friend. The favourite charge of those who fight him is that he is amassing wealth for himself by barter on the side, and collecting big sums in other lands from which he diverts a golden stream for his own uses. The infamous accusation is too pitifully lame and silly to be worth denying. The most unselfish of men, he has sometimes worked his heart out for an ingrate who bit the hand that fed him. His enterprise, whose reach always exceeds his grasp, is money-losing rather than money-making.
The International Grenfell Association has never participated in the trading business. Dr. Grenfell, however, started several stores with his own money and took it out after a time with no interest. He delights in the success of those whose aim is no more than a just profit, who buy from the fisherman at a fair price and sell to him in equity. There is a co-operative store of his original inspiration and engineering at Flower’s Cove, and another is the one at Cape Charles, which in five years returned 100 per cent. on the investment with 5 per cent. interest.
Accusations of graft he is accustomed to face, and a commission appointed by the Newfoundland Legislature investigated him, travelled with him on the Strathcona, and completely exonerated him. Some persons had even gone so far as to accuse him of making money out of the old clothes business aboard what they were pleased to term his “yacht.” They descended to such petty false witness as to swear that he had taken a woman’s dress with $12 in it. It is wearisome to have to dignify such charges by noticing them. They are about on a par with the letter of a bishop who wrote to him: “I should like to know how you can reconcile with your conscience reading a prayer in the morning against heresy and schism, and then preaching at a dissenting meeting-house in the afternoon.”
A vestryman objected to his preaching in the church at a diminutive and forlorn settlement because “he talks about trade.”
The Doctor is never embittered by his traducers. He knows the meaning of J. L. Garvin’s saying, “He who is bitter is beaten.” Nothing beclouds for long his sunny temperament, but his unfailing good-humour never dulls the fighting edge of his courage.
“I bought a boat for a worthy soul, to set him on his feet,” the Doctor told me. “She had been driven ashore in North Labrador. I had to buy everything separately—and the total came to $500. The boat was to work out the payment. This she did—Alas! later on she went ashore on Brehat (‘Braw’) Shoals. Only her lifeboat came ashore, with the name—Pendragon—upon it.”
The Doctor put $1,000 of his money into the co-operative store at Flower’s Cove, and when the enterprise was fairly launched and the Grenfell Association decided to abstain from lending help to trade he drew it out, and asked no interest. That store in its last fiscal year sold goods to the value of more than $200,000, paying fair prices and selling at a fair profit. It had three ships in the summer of 1919 carrying fish abroad—“foreigners.” The proprietor bought for $50 a schooner that went ashore at Forteau, dressed it in a new suit of sails worth $1,250, and now has a craft worth $8,000 to him. Dr. Grenfell has personally great affection for some of the traders—it is the “truck system” he hates. “Trading in the old days,” the Doctor observes, “was like a pond at the top of a hill. It got drained right out. The money was not set in circulation here on the soil of Newfoundland. The traders in two months took away the money that should have been on the coast. 1919 was the first year in which the co-operative stores themselves sent fish to the other side. A vessel from Iceland came here to the Flower’s Cove store; another was a Norwegian; a third came from Cadiz with salt; and today a small vessel is preparing to go across.”
At Red Bay is another store to which Dr. Grenfell loaned money, which he drew out, sans interest, when it was prosperous. It has saved the people there, as every soul in the harbour will testify.
The fishermen on the West Coast in 1919 enjoyed something like affluence as compared with their brethren on the East Coast, where the fish were scarce.