and ambitious Chapleau.  He over-estimated his power.  The whole strength of the government at Ottawa was at once concentrated in keeping the lid on that smouldering cauldron of stench and rottenness, the system of practical politics of that day.  The Conservative chiefs tried to suppress Tarte and he refused to be suppressed—­there was not a drop of coward’s blood in his veins.  Then they set to work to destroy him.  He sought a refuge and he found it—­in parliament, to which he was elected in 1891 as an Independent as the result of an arrangement with Laurier.  As he used to say, it was a case of parliament or jail for him.

Inevitably, in following up his charges in parliament, Tarte was thrown into more and more intimate relations with the Liberal leaders.  He knew that for him there was no Conservative forgiveness; as he was wont to say:  “I have spoiled the soup for too many.”  It was not long before Sir John Thompson could congratulate Laurier, in one of the sharpest sayings parliament ever heard, upon having among his lieutenants—­“the black Tarte and the yellow Martin.”  For ten years he remained Laurier’s chief lieutenant in Quebec, but he never in any sense of the word became a Liberal, though in 1902, just before he was thrown from the battlements, he busied himself in reading lifelong Liberals out of the party.  Chapleau, who was Tarte’s confidant and ally, though he was also a member of the Dominion government, became Lieutenant-governor of Quebec and retired to Spencer Wood, but not to forget politics among its shades.  When the peculiar developments of the Dominion campaign of 1896 made it evident that Conservative victory in Quebec under the virtual leadership of the bishops meant the permanent domination of the Castors, the whole Bleu influence was thrown to the Liberals.

Professor Skelton’s life of Laurier does not take us much behind the scenes.  It is in the main a record of political events, with comments upon Laurier’s relations to them.  Laurier’s letters, mostly to unnamed correspondents, are of slight interest, but to this there are a few notable exceptions.  There are letters between Laurier, Tarte and Chapleau of the greatest political value.  They make clear to a demonstration, what shrewd political observers of that day surmised, that there was a definite political understanding between these three men.  This explains the composition of the Quebec delegation in the Laurier government.  Apart from Laurier there was in it no representative of French Catholic Liberalism, unless the purely nominal honor of minister without portfolio given to C. A. Geoffrion is to be taken as giving this representation.  C. A. did not put the honor very high.  “I am,” he said, “the mat before the door.”  Tarte, a Quebecker and a Bleu, became Montreal’s representative at Ottawa.  Disappointment among the Liberals led first to rage and then to rage plus fear as Tarte with the magic wand of the patronage and power of the public works department, began to