Damn if I care whether he is a Tory. My middle name is--Boost! I want
to help."

We walked up to the Department of Trade and Commerce together.

"Just what line of industry are you interested in?" I asked.

"Boilers--steam boilers. Vancouver. Little Van-cou-ver. That's my
town."

"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 tra