Mr. Joseph Chamberlain and his Colonial Premiers

A Pilgrimage to Hawarden .

Group of Ministers

PAGE

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LIFE AND LETTERS OF SIR

WILFRID LAURIER

CHAPTER X

THE FIRST LAURIER MINISTRY

Speeding the Parting Guest-Forming the Ministry-The Laurier-Greenway Settlement-An Episcopal Challenge-An Appeal to Rome The Beginning of Prosperity-The Opening of the West-The British Preference.

A

FTER eighteen years' wandering in the wilder

ness of opposition, for half the time under Wil

frid Laurier's leadership, the Liberal party had come to power. For fifteen years, the longest unbroken stretch of authority in the country's annals, Mr. Laurier was destined to remain prime minister of Canada. They were to be years crowded with opportunity and with responsibility, a testing-time sufficient to search out every strength and every weakness of the leader or of his administration. It was Mr. Laurier's fortune, and Canada's, that he was to be in control of the country's affairs at the most creative and formative period in its history, in the years when the Dominion was attaining at once industrial maturity and national

status.

Mr. Laurier had to hold the balance fairly between his own parliamentary followers and the men in the provincial administrations, between the old Liberal war horses and the eleventh-hour converts, between past service and future capacity, between debating skill and executive power, between province and province and between section and section, alloting Quebec its English-speaking Protestant minister and Ontario its Irish Catholic minister. But the range of choice had been closely narrowed before the election, and it was only necessary now to make some last-moment shifts because of election fatalities or personal idiosyncracies. By July 13 all the new ministers but three had been sworn in.

Mr. Laurier, profiting by the experience of Mackenzie and of Macdonald, determined not to take charge of a department. That would have meant that either, as in Mackenzie's day, the work of policy shaping and party guiding or, as in Macdonald's day, the work of the department would often go undone. As President of the Council, he would be free to give to all the tasks of the government the general supervision he had planned.

For the important portfolios of Justice, Finance, and Railways, Mr. Laurier turned to the provinces. Sir Oliver Mowat, appointed to the senatorial vacancy which Sir Charles Tupper had sought to preëmpt, be

"I have given this question very ample consideration, and as I am responsible for the guidance of the party in these matters, I think I can claim that our friends generally should give way to my own judgment in this instance, the amount involved after all not being very considerable."