ilanthropic works were inspired by his faith. But many men have had
as much faith with less works, because of too much dissipating emotion.
Sir Joseph with all his juvenility of impulse had a way of hitching his
emotions up to a job. The church needed organization. Other
wealth-getting Methodists were prominent in pews, public donations and
conferences. Flavelle believed in the seven days' work. He had a
programme of action for the Sabbath. Church, social work, business,
were to him very much one thing; all in need of organization to get
results. He had no use for the idle church and less for what he called
"the dead hand"--referring to the influence of his old adversary, Dr.
Carman, who thought it presumption in a wealthy pork-packer to regard
himself as a critic of clerical authority.

It is tolerably certain that had Flavelle made less of a business of
religion, the public would have had less business condemning him on the
bacon inquiry evidence. Here was a man who all his life had been a
tremendous organizer of the church and a professor of a peculiarly
active faith, president of a company which in one year had made an
alleged profit of $5,000,000 on a capital investment of less than
$14,000,000. Bacon at that time--1917--cost the consumer 50 cents a
pound. The price was considered outrageous. Bacon afterwards went to
80 cents at a time when nobody blamed Sir Joseph; and when he had
disposed of his interest in bacon altogether. But the alleged
extortion of this powerful and baroneted Christian stuck in the public
mind. Bacon was the pioneer in exposed "profiteering." O'Connor's
report was made public at a time when it was yet the private property
of the Cabinet. There was politics here. And the Premier was away.
Other men afterwards made much more amazing profits that never were
mentioned in the press; men who never went to church; who had never in
public said such words as "let war profits go to the hell where they
belong."

It was not the actual profit, but the alleged hypocrisy of Flavelle
that roused the detestation of a large section of the public. And to
the end of his life this man will never erase from the minds of many
people the notion that he was of all profiteers the worst, because the
most hypocritical.

Then there was the baronetcy. For a man who had preached Christ so
much this seemed a thin business. A man's Christianity, if he works
hard at it, becomes advertised without poster