high intentions, persuaded by Bingham and the rest that they were not yet “in shape” to talk about.  So that his address on this memorable evening would have a different stamp from the one he designed in the early burning hours of his candidature.  He had postponed those matters, under advice, to the hour of practical dealing, when a Government which it would be his privilege to support would consider and carry them.  He put the notes of his original speech away in his office desk with solicitude—­it was indeed very thorough, a grand marshalling of the facts and review of the principles involved—­and pigeonholed it in the chambers of his mind, with the good hope to bring it forth another day.  Then he devoted his attention to the history of Liberalism in Fox County—­both ridings were solid—­and it was upon the history of Liberalism in Fox County, its triumphs and its fruits, that he embarked so easily and so assuredly, when he opened his address in the opera house that Tuesday night.

Who knows at what suggestion, or even precisely at what moment, the fabric of his sincere intention fell away?  Bingham does not; Mr Farquharson has the vaguest idea; Dr Drummond declares that he expected it from the beginning, but is totally unable to say why.  I can get nothing more out of them, though they were all there, though they all saw him, indeed a dramatic figure, standing for the youth and energy of the old blood, and heard him, as he slipped away into his great preoccupation, as he made what Bingham called his “bad break.”  His very confidence may have accounted for it; he was off guard against the enemy, and the more completely off guard against himself.  The history of Liberalism in Fox County offered, no doubt, some inlet to the rush of the Idea; for suddenly, Mr Farquharson says, he was “off.”  Mr Farquharson was on the platform, and “I can tell you,” said he, “I pricked up my ears.”  They all did; the Idea came in upon such a personal note.

“I claim it my great good fortune,” the young man was suddenly telling them, in a note of curious gravity and concentration, “and however the fight goes, I shall always claim it my great good fortune to have been identified, at a critical moment, with the political principles that are ennobled in this country by the imperialistic aim.  An intention, a great purpose in the endless construction and reconstruction of the world, will choose its own agency; and the imperial design in Canada has chosen the Liberal party, because the Liberal party in this country is the party of the soil, the land, the nation as it springs from that which makes it a nation; and imperialism is intensely and supremely a national affair.  Ours is the policy of the fields.  We stand for the wheat-belt and the stockyard, the forest and the mine, as the basic interests of the country.  We stand for the principles that make for nation-building by the slow sweet processes of the earth, cultivating the individual rooted man who draws his essence and his