LO OF BILLIONS

HON. SIR THOMAS WHITE

Sir Thomas White was the world's only continuous Finance Minister for
the whole period of the war--and after; when nobody else cared to have
his job, and Sir Thomas did. He seduced billions of patriotic dollars
out of the pockets of this country and smiled as he did it. No man in
Canada was so exquisitely fitted to the task of making an average
dollar burn a hole in a man's pocket in order to do its bit. It gave
him "the pleasure that's almost pain" to feel that no man except Henri
Bourassa or an Eskimo could escape the snare of a Victory Loan
advertisement prepared by Sir Thomas and his committees of ad-men and
brokers. Never before on this continent had a nation been so
advertised into patriotism. In England some expert had done it for
Kitchener's Army. But it was easier to recruit England, with 30
millions of people within the area of our maritime provinces, than to
mobilize billions from a vast emptiness like Canada.

It must be admitted that the divinity which keeps governments from
wrecking nations had somehow picked the right man for this stupendous
task. Sir Thomas had a quality of mind and a political experience
which made it possible for him to pull the last dollar for victory. In
the war annals of Canada he will have a halo of billions, while Sam
Hughes has one of bayonets. He mobilized our financial resources by a
system that stopped only short of conscription.

I seldom see Sir Thomas standing at a street corner when I do not feel
like urging him to run along and attend to his office and not to be
losing time. He seems to belong to that cold group of men whose time
is naturally money.

In 1912 I asked Mr. White in Ottawa for an interview. He appointed an
hour when I might see him. As soon as I entered the office he began to
talk. The ease and fluency of his conversation amazed me. No other
Minister of that Cabinet could have been so suave and entertaining.

"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 co