ts. Men came to believe that
when there was a public task to perform, Flavelle was the man to take
it. He was almost forced into service, often by the public indolence
of other men. Canada has always played the professional grandstand
method of getting things done for the public. Before the advent of
Rotary and Kiwanis Clubs our two chief cities systematically advised
the humble philanthropist without pull to go to such men as Flavelle,
Edmund Walker, one of the Masseys, E. R. Wood, J. C. Eaton, Thomas
Shaughnessy, Herbert Ames and P. S. Meighen--because these men were in
the habit of doing or giving or organizing for the public interest,
which is supposed to be a game for experts, not amateurs.

Flavelle's investment in things that made him no money was one of great
ability, hard work and conscience. His returns on such capital were in
the efficiency and usefulness of things which he had helped to create;
the need for which he had observed as clearly and calmly as ever he had
foreseen the scope of a great business.

Yet for much of his life he has been a creature of impulse, powerfully
attracted by things not in business. He left his seat once in a great
Buffalo hall to stand at the door that he might judge the effect of a
certain decrescendo from a choir. To a group of musical enthusiasts in
Chicago he suddenly suggested a trip to the Cincinnati May Festival.
Speaking to the boys of Upper Canada College, he drew from his pocket a
piece of putty to illustrate the plasticity of character. Standing
amid heaps of luggage at the docks in St. John, he looked at the
immigrant sheds and said, "What a very human picture!" Pocketing the
proof of an hospital article, which as proprietor of the _Toronto News_
and Chairman of the Hospital Board he had withdrawn from publication,
he said to the reporter, "Old man, a place of suffering should not be
described in the language of the racetrack." When Pastor Wagner,
author of "The Simple Life", was in Toronto, he was the guest of Mr.
Flavelle, who for a time was as much absorbed in the peasant
philosopher as he often was in the "Meditations" of Thomas a Kempis.

Considering these impulses to express himself, it is not hard to
understand how Sir Joseph came to say to the Toronto Board of Trade
that war profits should go to the hell to which they belonged. He was
speaking under a sense of emotion. All through his enormously
successful career he had been energized by a sudde