acceptance of the principle of compulsion.  There was the proposal that Laurier should engage, if returned to power, to resort to conscription if voluntary recruiting did not reach a stipulated level—­not acceptable.  Scores of men had the experience of the writer; going into Laurier’s room on the third floor of the improvised parliamentary offices in the National History Museum, spending an hour or so in fruitless discussion and coming out with the feeling that there was no choice between unquestioning acceptance of Laurier’s policy or breaking away from allegiance to him.  Not that Laurier ever proposed this choice to his visitors.  He had a theory—­which not even he with all his lucidity could make intelligible—­that a man could support both him and conscription at the same time.  There is an attempt at defining this policy in a curious letter to Wm. Martin, then premier of Saskatchewan, which is quoted by Skelton.  Sir Wilfrid in these conversations—­as in his letters of that period, many of which appear in Skelton’s Life—­never failed to stress conditions in Quebec as compelling the course which he followed; the alternative was to throw Quebec to the extremists, with a resulting division that might be fatal.  There was, too, the mournful and repeated assertion—­which abounds also in his letters—­that these developments showed that it was a mistake for a member of the minority to be the leader of the party.  At the close of the session, when it became increasingly evident that a party split was impending, there were reports that Laurier proposed to make way for a successor upon some basis which might make an accommodation between the two wings of the party possible; and there was an attempt by a small group of Liberal M.P.’s to bring this about.  The treatment of this incident in Professor Skelton’s volume is obscure.  In any case it had no significance and it came to nothing.  Laurier alike by choice and necessity retained the leadership.

Sir Wilfrid misjudged, all through the piece, the temper and purpose of the Liberals who dissented from his policy.  For his own courses and actions there was a political reason; he looked for the political reasons behind the actions of those in disagreement with him.  He found what he looked for, not in the actual facts of the situation but in his imagination.  He saw conversion to the Round Table view of the Imperial problem and the acceptance of dictation from London—­a very wild shot this!  He saw political ambition.  He saw unworthy desires to forward personal and business ends.  But he did not see what was plain to view—­that the whole movement was derived from an intense conviction on the part of growing numbers of Liberals that united national action was necessary if Canada was to make the maximum contribution to the war.  There was very little feeling against Sir Wilfrid—­rather a sympathetic understanding of the position in which he found himself; but they were wholly out of agreement with his view that Canada was in the war on a limited