$160,000,000? $1,600,000,000?] in
value.

At that time an editor wrote Sir Joseph asking for a statement of what
his Board had done. Within a few hours of receiving the letter Sir
Joseph forwarded an itemized statement a column long, of which one
paragraph read:

"Upwards of 56,000,000 shells have been produced; 60,000,000 copper
bands; 45,000,000 cartridge cases; 28,000,000 fuses; 70,000,000 lbs. of
powder; 50,000,000 lbs. of high explosives; 90 ships built, or under
construction aggregating 375,000 tons; 2,700 aeroplanes have been
produced."

He stated also that 900 manufacturers had taken contracts in all the
Provinces except Prince Edward Island. The great ex-Minister of
Munitions himself, reading that report, might have said: "Flavelle?
Yes--he is mighty clever." And Flavelle had been for one year then a
baronet. That also was clever; and just in time. The man who happened
to be in England when war was declared and sold war bacon in August,
1914, was not to be caught napping in 1917; neither after he had got
his title was he to be found slacking in his marvellous work in 1918.
Flavelle earned a title--even after he had taken it.

"Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do!" Yea, verily. I have been fairly
well acquainted with Sir Joseph for a good many years. I do not know
him. Yet his altogether uncommon personality has almost frozen itself
into my memory. Whenever I see that thick-shouldered,
whitening-whiskered man of sixty-three hastening afoot up the street,
or driving his little runabout, or wiping his glasses every minute in
some office, or coming becaped and crush-hatted to a concert, I can
hear that high-keyed, slow voice, the calm dispassionate utterance with
never a syllable misplaced, and feel the energy of a nature that of all
men I ever met is the oddest compend of clear thinking, cool judgment,
strength of grip and juvenility of impulse.

The story of his struggle to affluence is not much different in basic
outlines from that of any average, self-made man; differing vastly in
the character of the man. A year after he was forced out of Lindsay by
boycott because of his Scott Act campaign, the freezing of a car of
potatoes on a Toronto siding almost wiped out his business. Frankly
and modestly, yet with a sort of fatalistic assurance, he discusses the
kind of man he thinks himself to have become since he lost those
potatoes. He denies that he has ever been interesting; rather
bewildered