there was a change.  For imperialism is a faith as well as a business; as it grew the mysticism in English public life grew with it and simultaneously a new importance began to attach to the crown.  The need for a symbol—­a symbol of England’s might, of England’s worth, of England’s extraordinary mystical destiny—­became felt more urgently than before.  The crown was the symbol and the crown rested upon the head of Victoria.”

To be translated from the humdrum life of Ottawa to a foremost place in the vast pageantry of the Diamond Jubilee, there to be showered with a wealth of tactful and complimentary personal attentions was rather too much for Laurier.  The oratorical possibilities of the occasion took him into camp; and in a succession of speeches he gave it as his view that the most entrancing future for Canada was one in which she should be represented in the imperial parliament sitting in Westminster.  “It would be,” he told the National Liberal club, “the proudest moment of my life if I could see a Canadian of French descent affirming the principles of freedom in the parliament of Great Britain.”  This, of course, was nothing but the abandonment of the orator to the rhetorical possibilities of the situation.  Under the impulse of these emotions he fell an easy victim to the conspiracy of Lord Aberdeen and Lord Strathcona (of which he later made complaint) by which the “democrat to the hilt” (as Laurier had proclaimed himself but a short time earlier when he had been given prematurely the knightly title at a public function) was transmuted into Sir Wilfrid Laurier.  It was, therefore, not without apparent reason that the imperialists thought that they had captured for their own this new romantic and appealing figure from the premier British dominion.  But when the imperial conference met, Mr. Chamberlain, as colonial secretary, encountered not the orator intent on captivating his audience, but the cool, cautious statesman thinking of the folks at home.  When the proposition for the establishment of an imperial council was made by Mr. Chamberlain it was deftly shelved by a declaration which stated that in the view of the colonial prime ministers “the present political relations are generally satisfactory under existing conditions.”  The wording is suggestive of Laurier, though it is not known that he drafted the statement.  The skilful suspension of the issue without meeting it was certainly the tactics with which he met and blocked, in succeeding conferences, all attempts by the imperialists to give practical effect to their doctrine.

Fifteen years of saying “No”