s not
paying debts--but making it possible to pay wages. Unless the surplus
of every man's earnings was invested in Victory Bonds there would
shortly be no big industries left to pay the earnings at all, Canada
would cease to export munitions--which might be the one thing to lose
the war, in which case nothing would be left for any of us but to pay
war indemnities to the enemy. Critics declared that non-taxable bonds
were an iniquity in favour of the big investor who could heap up
bonanza investments without taxes; another way of accusing the Finance
Minister of being in league with the "big interests." But we must do
Sir Thomas the credit of taking a sure way to encourage the small
investor by refusing to tax his patriotism. A 100th per cent tax on
some people's patriotism might have squelched it altogether. It would
have been a public service if Sir Thomas White had plainly told the
people, not less about why they should buy Victory Bonds during a
period of inflation, but more about what would happen to them when
deflation began to set in; when, ceasing to buy Victory Bonds at a low
price, we should have to buy bread and butter and clothes at higher
prices than ever at a time when money began to sneak away, we knew not
whither.

Perhaps it was too much to expect one man to organize the "hurrah" and
afterwards to conduct the "Gethsemane." At any rate, before we had an
opportunity to test the real size of Sir Thomas as a public servant he
resigned office.

Whether the Finance Minister at the climax of his big _opus_ was shrewd
enough to imagine that the kudos of the loans might get him the
Premiership, we do not profess to know. He is not considered famous as
a political strategist. He has far too much serenity.

In 1917 Sir Thomas was chairman of a monster meeting in Toronto when
ten thousand people who tried to hear Theodore Roosevelt speak on
behalf of that year's Victory Loan of Canada were turned away. For
some hours he had been in company with a man whose mastery of the
unusual was almost the equal of Mark Twain's. If ever he had a chance
to be startled out of his headmaster poise, here it was. But he made a
long, tedious preamble of a speech the only sentence of which that
sticks in my memory is that sincerely girlish utterance of Portia to
Antonio after the trial, "Sir, you are very welcome to our house." It
was like pinning a pink bow knot on the head of a lion.

Sir Thomas showed strategic abi