e a survey of the country on tariff for
revenue; and he usually had a bookkeeping surplus at a time when he
practically boasted on the platform of what it cost to run the country.
Much thanks to him the Liberals had given Free Trade a profoundly
respectable burial, with Michael Clark, headmaster of the Manchester
School in Canada, as chief mourner.

But the ledgers of Canada looked to be in a bad way to Mr. White. "The
cost of high living" had been demonstrated by the Liberal Government
some time before James J. Hill coined the phrase. Laurier monuments to
high living were dotted all over the country in the shape of armouries,
post offices, customs houses, docks, courthouses, the Quebec Bridge,
and vast systems of unpopulated railways.

When Mr. White's sensitive finger came to that prodigal item in the
public ledger he had almost excuse, in spite of his pre-knowledge of
the business, for curling up like a cutworm. His knowledge of banks
and their customers was very extensive. He had dealt with those banks.
The ex-manager of the National Trust had long known that Canada was
overbuilt with railways and going-to-be-bankrupt towns. The orgy of
expansion whose familiar figure was the prodigal with the scoop shovel
in the gold bin by the open window with a huge hole in the ground
beneath, was just about at the crest of its master carousal
[Transcriber's note: carousel?]; and the transcontinental railways with
their entails of cash and land grants and guaranteed bonds was the
thing that gave the new Minister the greatest concern of the lot,
though he never said so. An ex-Cabinetarian who used to agree with Sir
Thomas in politics still stoutly alleges that the 1911 "bolt" of the
famous 18 Liberals, of whom Sir Thomas was one of the leaders, was a
tactical manoeuvre to save the Canadian Northern from bankruptcy by
reciprocity.

Sir Thomas should have made the railways his first drastic item of
reorganization. Here was a Verdun for the Finance Minister to take.
But for two years while the railway cataclysm was coming he went along
with business as usual. It would have been less of a burden to unload
that railway bankruptcy in 1913 than it was during the stress of after
the war.

But of course the Finance Minister was only the chief subordinate in
the Administration. Time would force the railways to terms. The war
and war business came faster than the time. Sir Thomas probably
dreaded the public ownership in which