Читать книгу Ordeal by Fire - Ralph Allen - Страница 6

Table of Contents

WILFRID LAURIER’S first Canadian ancestor arrived in New France less than forty years after Champlain, more than a hundred years before the Plains of Abraham. He was one of the tiny band of lay pilgrims who helped Maisonneuve found and hold Montreal against the godless savages who skulked outside the palisades; he died at the hands of the Iroquois.

With such antecedents and others whose sole distinctions were warmth of heart and good sense, the Lauriers of St. Lin, Quebec, had already, by the time of Wilfrid’s birth in 1841, achieved a serene though by no means common family philosophy. Their pride in their roots was so calm and sure that they felt no need to proclaim it. Their faith was strong enough for them to have no fear of its being shaken by heretics.

Thus to Laurier’s father it had seemed a natural and useful thing to send his son for two years to an English-speaking school in a nearby village. Though he was not yet in his teens, Wilfrid went to live for several months with a family of Scots Presbyterians. The question of attending the Protestant family’s nightly prayers was left to him. He attended.

During the almost sixty years since his early schooldays, Laurier’s genuine regard for the open mind had been one of the chief instruments in the shaping of an extraordinary human being. He went on to seven more years of classical study at a secondary school controlled by the Church and broke up the school debating society by arguing that Canada would have been better off if the French kings had encouraged the Protestant Huguenots to settle there. He read widely in French, English, Greek, and Latin and later became an admiring student of Lincoln.

As valedictorian of his law class at McGill he made an impressive plea for tolerance between the two races. In his early post-graduate days he twice earned the official displeasure of the hierarchy, and a bishop’s ban drove him out of business as editor and proprietor of a small newspaper. Throughout his early and middle life he and the Church continued to send out skirmish parties against each other in the arena of politics; in matters of faith their good relations never faltered.

An early opponent of Confederation, he soon became one of its most eloquent and effective defenders. He combined a great devotion to British institutions and the British concept of liberty with an amiable suspicion of British statesmen and their intentions.

Steeped though it was in its climate of absolutes and either-or’s—right or wrong, French or English, Catholic or Protestant, Yankee or redcoat, high tariff or low tariff—Canada for fourteen years had accepted this inconsistent and various man in the spirit in which it had accepted his late opponent, John A. Macdonald. He was clearly the best man to lead the country and therefore it was best to let him lead it.

As the years went on, this pragmatic alliance grew far beyond a marriage of convenience. Perhaps John A., with the help of a few endearing weaknesses, had commanded more of the country’s affection, but Laurier did not lack for affection and no Canadian politician had ever had so much respect. In a time when well-turned-out, well-spoken gentlemen were objects not merely of curiosity but of admiration, Laurier might have stood as a living inventory of the ideal: slender, graceful body, patrician face and carefully groomed mane of silver hair; pure, resonant voice; flawlessly cut waistcoats, frock coats, and striped trousers; tall black hats and tall white collars; pince-nez dangling from a silken thread; small jeweled pins nestling in well-arranged cravats.

His opponents might have been tempted to make capital in the backwoods of this almost too perfect figure, but Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, many years earlier, had taught them that he made a very bad target. His triumph at that glittering and cosmopolitan concourse had been second only to Her Majesty’s own. She had selected him, alone among the dignitaries from the Empire, to receive his knighthood in the Order of St. Michael and St. George. When Joseph Chamberlain summoned a meeting of the premiers of the self-governing colonies, it was Laurier who stood at Chamberlain’s right in the group photograph. The Canadian Prime Minister was warmly received by the aged Gladstone, then in retirement. During a short visit to the Continent he met the President of France, was made a Grand Officer of the Legion of Honor and had an hour-long interview with the Pope. These gleaming adventures raised Laurier’s stock everywhere. In the fuss that London made over him, arch-Imperialists could perceive that he must, per se, be more loyal to the Crown than they had guessed, while ultra-nationalists could mutter grudgingly that at last the English had come up against a Canadian they considered important enough to flatter. Unabashed snobs could rejoice in his knighthood, while democrats of the more belligerent stripe could take solace in the discreetly circulated report—which happened to be true—that Sir Wilfrid hadn’t wanted his title and had accepted it only because he had been given no chance to refuse without insulting the Queen. Most of his countrymen were too dazzled and proud for him to notice the condescension in the remark of a London newspaper: “For the first time on record a politician of our New World has been recognized as the equal of the great men of the Old Country.”

Now, in 1910, the patina of these glories had faded a little. The administration had spent the last half of the Parliament of 1904-8 answering, with nothing like uniform success, to charges of graft and bribery against its supporters and the civil service. But the electors regarded it as more important that Laurier had attended two more Colonial conferences and showed himself a man of far tougher substance than the social lion of the Jubilee. In the face of much further lionizing and much argument, he had opposed and defeated British proposals for an Imperial Council binding in part on all members, for Imperial free trade as contrasted to Imperial preferences and for a joint and binding Imperial military policy. The English-speaking provinces, for all their cultural and sentimental ties with Drake and the Thin Red Line, conceded that his motive was perhaps no worse than a desire to avoid one-sided bargains. They gave him a majority of four seats in the election of 1908. This, with the now habitual landslide in Quebec, left him with an advantage in the Commons of 134 to 87, and nothing in the visible future seemed likely to upset it.

Nominally the chief threat to Laurier’s indefinite continuance in office was the leader of the Conservative party, Robert Laird Borden. The threat did not look formidable. Shaken by scandals and age, the great party of Macdonald, Carrier, and Tupper had fallen on dismal times. In the election of 1900 Sir Charles Tupper had lost his own seat and resigned the leadership. Robert Borden agreed under pressure from fellow Nova Scotians to become acting leader for a year. His only discernible qualifications were that he was a successful lawyer and came of a good and well-regarded family. With his strong head, well anchored to a strong body, his abundant graying hair parted in the middle, his thick no-nonsense mustache, and his kind, mild eyes, he contrasted so remarkably with the picturesque and volatile Laurier that they might have been actors made up for opposite roles in a play.

For a decade they had faced each other across the floor of the Commons and all the good lines had been Laurier’s. Laurier’s too had been incomparably the more exciting delivery. Borden thus far had generated no more enthusiasm inside his party than outside it. Perhaps he would have given up the leadership long since, in accordance with his original wish, if his pride had not compelled him to stay and put down revolts. After decisive defeats in two general elections his political career appeared to be in danger of permanent stagnation.

But help for Borden and danger for Laurier lay in another quarter.

Henri Bourassa once was described as “the most openly mysterious character in Canadian public life.” That was in his own time, when his real shape and meaning were obscured by thickets of passion and stormy incident. He is a little easier to see today, through the filter of years. Physically there never was any mystery. Bourassa was almost theatrically good-looking, with a nearly perfect profile, strong and determined, set in and dramatized by a black well-tended beard that ran into a great shock of dark hair. His eyes were dark and brilliant and the lights did not desert them even after the beard turned white, the hair fell away, and the flesh above the high imperious cheekbones began to droop a little. Like Laurier, he was an elegant dresser, partial to gates-ajar collars and dove-gray vests; he could and often did wear a modernistic bow tie without loss of dignity even in those more formal times.

On the sum of these outer aspects Bourassa’s contemporaries found it perpetually impossible to agree, as they found it impossible to agree on the sum of the man within. To his enemies, who became many and whom he made more than welcome to his enmity, he had the dark and glinting look of Mephistopheles. To his friends, who also were many and wholly welcome, he bore the unflinching iron aspect of a Jesuit martyr.

For Bourassa, a great political orator in the last great days of political oratory, and a great personal journalist in the golden twilight of personal journalism, the first two decades of the twentieth century were made so much to order that they might have been commanded by his private saints. The unaided tongue, the hurrying, urgent pen, the white-hot printing press, were the sturdiest, almost the only, vehicles of human communication. Men of affairs frequently wrote, and they nearly always talked; talked partly for pleasure and partly through duty, in the full expectation of being listened to and, if they talked well enough, of being heeded. The human voice was no mere convenience, no mere electronic nuisance, no mere instrument for selling soap or razor blades. A man who spoke no more than loud and clear could always attract some kind of audience. It was not unusual for a man who talked really well, and on matters of moment, to draw a crowd of ten or fifteen thousand and bring them cheering to their feet at will, like a grandstandful of baseball fans.

Like Laurier, Bourassa was both an exceptional stylist and an exceptional dramatist in either language. Since Bourassa had stalked out of the House of Commons as a protest against Canada’s entry into the Boer War, the direct comparison of their oratorical powers had depended on the memory of a constantly receding past; their respective supporters were united on one article of faith at least: one or the other was the finest speaker in the land. Laurier was famous for soft cadences. Bourassa was more robust and usually more strident, but he too was an actor. Once, trying to describe his delivery, a newspaper reporter from Ontario wrote: “How his voice swooped and curved and beat upon the walls! It was like the scream of a war trumpet or the wail of the northeast wind down an old chimney; at times like the whisper of a cobold in a cave—weird and creepily intense.”

Bourassa talked so persuasively and so much and wrote so vigorously and so much that inevitably he contradicted himself. Often too—for he carried the blood of rebels—he obviously said more than he meant (though he almost never said less). Thus, to distill his goals and his principles is not much easier than to distill his private nature. Perhaps the only word that encompassed all his complexities and all his inconsistencies was the word that finally settled on him and that he did not challenge—the word “nationalist.” He believed that, at least for his time and in his time, nationalism in all its insular, aloof, and proudest senses was the one dependable star by which Canada could hope to set her course amid the chaotic scurrying of other nations. He described this basic nationalism in many ways, depending on the occasion and the mood, and his elaborations, amplifications, and arguments ran into the hundreds and thousands. None was crisper or more specific than this, uttered at the beginning of the century: “What I would wish is that between the old English frigate about to sink and the American corsair preparing to pick up the wreckage we should manoeuvre our barque with prudence and firmness, so that it will not be swallowed up in the vortex of one nor be carried away in the wake of the other. Let us not sever the chain too soon, but let us not rivet the links too closely.”

This, for him, was the physical end—or, it might be safer to say, one of the physical ends. The philosophy behind it he once put in three theatrical but precise sentences: “Nations have to choose between British ideals and British domination. I stand for ideals against domination. I may be hanged for it in the name of British liberty but that does not matter.”

These were the larger outlines of Bourassa’s nationalism as a Canadian. But within the larger frame he came to develop—if he did not always have—a second strain of nationalism, a French-Canadian nationalism. Like a very high proportion of that already high proportion of Canadians whose origins were French, Bourassa knew from birth the instinct to withdraw from the roiled main current of his country’s history and seek a haven in the clearer, quieter eddies of its first great tributary. But perhaps even he could not have said, truly and finally, which urge came first with him: to isolate Canada from the dangerous and disreputable turmoils of the outside world or to isolate Quebec from the romantic, bloody, unjust, and generally foolish affairs of Canada. During three wars, when there was no time and little inclination on any side to ponder such distinctions, Bourassa’s two kinds of nationalism were to become inseparable. His foes scornfully denied the difference, if they had ever really recognized it. Most of his friends, some of whom had found it only a confusing nuisance anyway, ignored it. Bourassa himself found it simpler to forget. And thus the most passionate and effective of Canada-firsters was to be discovered time without number in attitudes that could be described in equal logic—depending on whose variety of logic was being used—as gloriously Canadian or treacherously un-Canadian.

Like Laurier, Bourassa came from an old Canadien family. His grandfather, Louis-Joseph Papineau, had won an important place in Canadian history as French-speaking leader in the revolts of the 1830s against the Family Compact, the cabal of well-to-do dignitaries who governed Canada as concessionaires. Papineau encouraged, then tried to arrest, and finally became the symbol of an uprising in Lower Canada at about the same time that the much more agitated grandfather of William Lyon Mackenzie King was inciting rebellion in Upper Canada.

It is a common notion that Henri Bourassa took his character and his example from Papineau. This is only partly so. It is true that Bourassa spent many of his early years in the old Papineau seigniory near Montebello. It is true that he revered the old man for his independence of mind and his willingness to fight for what he believed. But to his lasting sorrow Bourassa in his later years found it necessary to spend almost as much time apologizing for his late grandfather as in praising him. For Papineau left the Church in his younger days, and to the devout Bourassa, to have had a heretic in the family was a catastrophe, even if the heretic also had happened to be a hero. Once Bourassa wrote: “I thank God every day that I have not submitted to the influence of the ideas of Papineau in religious matters. He lost his faith and ceased to practice his religion at the seminary of Quebec. He lived and he died without practicing his religion.” Bourassa was only three years old when Papineau died, but he always claimed to remember him “like yesterday”; to remember walking hand in hand with him through the quiet lanes of rural Quebec, finally to remember stealing into the room where the old rebel lay dead, still wearing, perhaps, the fierce disdainful look of a highborn bandit.

From the other side of his family Bourassa took other things. His grandfather Bourassa had gone from Canada to the United States when in his early teens and had once worked as a servant for a Presbyterian family. There he had learned to read English through a Protestant Bible, and to Henri’s eternal shame he never did learn to read French. Ultimately this Protestant Bible was bequeathed to young Henri. He made a point of saying many years later in his autobiography: “In a moment of scruple I threw it into the fire.”

Henri’s father was a gentle architect and painter who claimed not to understand politics and certainly had no sympathy with his son’s tempestuous methods. Once he said pointedly to young Henri: “I don’t like bright colors either in painting or in politics.”

Like Laurier, Bourassa had been sent to an English school in his youth. There he learned to read and admire Scott, Fenimore Cooper, and other English traditional writers, along with the French classicists. When he burst on the public scene in Canada, as a writer and orator, he was, as young political thinkers went in those days, rather inclined to mildness. His attitude toward les Anglais had a fey and twinkling quality. It would have been better expressed by a chuckle than by a roar. So far he was not ready to pay the English the compliment of resentment or of rage. Perhaps in this he was merely reflecting some of the wry indulgence of an uncle of his. The uncle sat in Parliament for forty-two years, the last of these after Confederation as a follower of John A. Macdonald. The uncle neither spoke nor understood a word of English but faithfully sat through every debate in the House of Commons rather than run the risk of being absent when his leader might need his vote on a division. Once Macdonald asked the uncle, in French, why he always attended the debates when he understood not a word of them. Bourassa replied: “That’s why I stay here; if I understood them I’d go away.” It was a remark that Henri was fond of quoting.

Laurier shared a magnificent jest with Henri in the days when Henri’s public career was still very young. Laurier had asked him to join the government, and Bourassa had refused. Laurier then wrote him a letter full of wit, irony, and shared knowledge of the racial struggle. In one place Laurier said: “Puisque vous êtes un Britisher je puis vous dire that we can agree to disagree.”

This was the third of the three men who now stood on the verge of a struggle far more precarious and complex than any in their country’s previous history.

The immediate symbol of the struggle, Laurier’s naval service bill, at first found the two strongest of them on substantially the same ground. Laurier and Borden both believed the time had come when Canada, which possessed not a single sailor or a single fighting vessel of her own, must prepare to help Britain maintain mastery of the high seas or at least to help in the defense of her own coastal waters. It seemed less a question of politics than of what a later generation would call enlightened self-interest. The German Kaiser still quite clearly had his shrewd, cold eyes fixed on the goal he had set for Admiral Tirpitz long before: “The trident must be in our fist.” How far the goal was from attainment no one now knew. But after nearly two decades of alternately belittling his strength and magnifying it, denouncing him and soothing him by turns, the senior statesmen of England had arrived, in 1909, at a terrifying and unanimous conclusion. The Kaiser was already in sight of naval equality, perhaps even of superiority. At the current rate of building, Herbert Asquith estimated, he would have seventeen dreadnoughts to Britain’s twenty by 1912. Arthur Balfour predicted more direly that he would actually be ahead twenty-five to twenty.

These forbidding prophecies brought almost identical reactions from the principal spokesmen of the two main branches of the Canadian family. Laurier declared without hesitation: “The supremacy of the British Empire is absolutely essential, not only to the maintenance of the Empire but to the civilization of the world. ... If the day should come when the supremacy of Britain on the high seas will be challenged, it will be the duty of all the daughter nations to close around the old Motherland and make a rampart about her to ward off any attack.... The salvation of England is the salvation of our own country ... therein lies the guaranty of our civil and religious freedom and everything we value in this life.”

Borden, the Tory custodian of all that lay deepest in the British part of the nation’s blood stream, could not have been more staunchly explicit. In the spring of 1909 he had given his full support to a parliamentary resolution calling for a Canadian navy. The resolution had passed the Commons without a dissenting vote.

But it was not until nine months later, after a summer recess and another Imperial Defense Conference, that Laurier was ready to chart the details of his naval bill and bring in the enabling legislation.

In that brief summer, fall, and early winter sleeping dogs began arising, at first almost unnoticed but bristling with baneful augury. Bourassa had recently been concentrating on provincial politics as co-leader of a loose Nationalist-Conservative alliance in the Quebec provincial legislature. He remained at first silent on the naval proposal, but several of the fiery young journalists he had gathered around him denounced it.

Far more crucial at this stage were the unexpectedly savage attacks on the thought of a Canadian fleet from two opposite wings of Borden’s already divided and half-demoralized Conservative party. The Quebec wing was flatly against a Canadian navy or any kind of naval aid to Britain, in cash, in ships, or in men; the people must be consulted first, through an election or a plebiscite. The arch-Imperialist wing, centered in Ontario, stood for more aid than it seemed likely that the government was willing to send. It also endorsed the Admiralty’s frequently stated preference for a single Imperial navy with units from the colonies and dominions under direct Imperial command. Canada wasn’t ready to build, run, and man her own navy; give Britain the cash and Britain would furnish the tools.

The unhappy and hard-pressed Borden at first had seen in the naval proposals one of the few chances in his political lifetime for a few blessed months to be at peace both with his friends and with his enemies. But now he found himself at the eye of a building cyclone. Frederick Monk, his Quebec lieutenant, told a banquet gathering that the policy Borden had endorsed was “costly and useless”; he spoke darkly of the crushing burden of militarism. At the opposite pole, Sir Rodmond Roblin, the Conservative premier of Manitoba, cried for all-out aid to England, under English control and England’s terms, and coined a scornful and durable nickname for the tiny, unborn autonomous Canadian armada: “tin-pot navy.”

Laurier, of course, had begun to feel some of the same conflicting pressures within his Liberal party. But he was in much better control of his followers than Borden and he was full of easy confidence when he introduced his naval service bill to the House of Commons. The much discussed fleet was to consist of five cruisers and six destroyers. It was to be manned by a small permanent force, with a reserve and a militia behind it. It was to be under Canadian command, although, in an emergency, Parliament could place it under direct Imperial orders. The capital cost was estimated at eleven million dollars and the annual cost for personnel and maintenance about three million. The annual national budget would thus be increased by about 3 per cent.

Throughout the long debate that followed, Laurier was far more at home than Borden in their common role of man in the middle. It was the kind of issue in which Laurier gloried, one of great principles clearly set forth on a compact stage. He proceeded straight ahead, with unconcealed zest for the passage as well as for the harbor and little visible heed for the shoals on either side.

To the two kinds of opposition, inside his own party and outside, he offered a common greeting: “There sit the two extremes, side by side, cheek by jowl, blowing hot and cold.” For those who blew hot, he had words of loyal reassurance (“When Britain is at war Canada is at war”); words of caution, bearing the imprimatur of Kipling himself (“Daughter I am in my mother’s house, But Mistress in my own”); and finally words of scorn (they who “carry abroad upon their foreheads the Imperial phylacteries, who boldly walk into the temple and there loudly thank the Lord that they are not like other British subjects, that they give tithes of everything they possess and that in them alone is to be found the true incense of loyalty”).

For those who blew cold, Laurier had equal reassurance (“If we do have a navy, that navy will not go to war unless the Parliament of Canada chooses to send it there”); equal words of caution (“Do they forget that Canada is expanding like a young giant? Are we to be told that we do not require a naval service? Why, Sir, you might as well tell the people of Montreal, with their half-million population, that they do not need any police protection”); and derision (if the Canadian navy should be compelled to fight, those who preferred could sit at home and “enjoy the security and comfort procured for them by the self-sacrifice of more generous men”).

The more pedestrian Borden possessed neither this joyful vitality of utterance nor, had he possessed it, any immediate occasion to give it rein. For him the seeming choice was narrowed to the least awkward of all impossible worlds. If he stuck by the promise of support for an independent Canadian navy which he had given less than a year before, the credit for the navy would still be Laurier’s. The two dissident factions of his own party might be lost to him forever; indeed, they were so far apart from him already that Borden was referring to them in his private papers as “cabals.”

Thus, for the harassed leader of the Opposition it had become essential to find something in the Laurier bill that he could oppose, or at least improve upon. Whether he could sell that something to his own party or to the country was a question that could be answered later. He had to take action now.

He found his succor in the politician’s traditional wild card—the blessed word “emergency.” Laurier did not realize, Borden warned the House of Commons, how desperately close the war might be. He far underestimated the appalling rate of Germany’s military growth. There simply was not time enough to build, man, and train the autonomous Canadian navy that both leaders approved of in principle. Let that come later, if the people themselves approved of it. But now, to tide over the emergency, the most effective thing Canada could do was to make a gift to the Admiralty sufficient to build or buy three additional dreadnoughts for the Royal Navy (the sum of thirty-five million dollars was suggested). Later a more lasting and far-reaching naval policy could be settled on, but only after consulting the electorate.

Obviously there was meat in this for Tory Ontario—meat for all those who, in Borden’s phrase, were “ready to assume their full share of meeting any peril that shall assail the Empire, come what may.” For Quebec there was, if not meat, at least a milder form of poison than in the Laurier scheme. For although Borden’s proposed cash gift to Britain had no more real appeal to French Canada than had Laurier’s autonomous fleet, it did not invite the nightmare of Canadian boys dying in distant places for distant causes. It did not recall the still recent memory of misguided patriots rushing a third of the way around the world to defend their country by shooting and being shot by Dutch farmers in South Africa. It bore at least a slightly lesser threat of personal and automatic involvement in possible future enterprises of a similar nature. To spend Canadian dollars for someone else’s war was, true enough, bad; but it was not quite so bad as spending Canadian lives.

But at first it looked as though Borden was getting nowhere, even with such persuasive, if diametrically opposite, arguments on his side. Laurier’s bill passed the Commons without ever being in serious jeopardy. The isolationist Monk continued to oppose both his own Tory leader and the Liberal leader. Borden became so despondent that between second and third readings of the bill he wrote a formal letter to his party’s whip announcing that he intended to resign when the session was over. He withdrew the letter before it could be submitted to caucus. But the fact that it was written reflected a conviction most of his fellow M.P.s took home to their constituencies for the summer vacation: if Sir Wilfrid’s control of the country was to be disturbed in the discernible future it would take more than a mere parliamentary skirmish to do it.

The extra element was soon provided by Henri Bourassa.

Preoccupied mainly with the smaller stage of the Quebec legislature and with the launching of the new newspaper Le Devoir, Bourassa had been, for him, strangely silent during the months before the naval debate. But when the bill came down he surfaced with all the commotion of a long submerged and angry whale.

Laurier’s declaration that when Britain was at war Canada was at war, he branded angrily as “the most complete backward step Canada has made in half a century ... the gravest blow our autonomy has suffered since the origin of responsible government.”

In Le Devoir he pictured the consequences: “Let the notion occur to a Chamberlain, a Rhodes, a Beers, to gold-seekers or opium merchants, of causing a conflict in South Africa or India, in the Mediterranean or the Persian Gulf, on the shores of the Baltic or the banks of the Black Sea or in the China seas, we are involved, always and regardless, with our money and our blood.”

He took to the public platform to drive the point home again and again. For a packed meeting in Montreal he listed more than twenty British wars since 1812. He asked with telling sarcasm how Canada had been saved thereby from invasion by the Boers, the Russians, the Afghans, the Sepoys, or the Sudanese.

He returned with new vehemence to an old point of contention—Laurier’s coolness toward the fight for separate Catholic schools in the West, an end approved of and sought by most Catholics except the Prime Minister. Laurier remained firm in his conviction that, since education was a provincial matter under the Constitution, federal interference would be folly. Moreover, it might lead to the loss in Quebec of the Catholic rights which the Constitution now protected. He struck back heatedly against “the Pharisee end of Canadian Catholicism; those who have constituted themselves the defenders of a religion which no one has attacked; those who handle the holy-water sprinkler as though it were a club; those who have arrogated to themselves the monopoly of orthodoxy; those who excommunicate right and left and whose stature is little greater than theirs; those who seem to have only hatred and envy for their motive and instinct.” The Church officially supported neither the Prime Minister nor Bourassa, but among the clergy, high and low, Bourassa’s strength grew by the day as Laurier’s diminished.

Still, as Laurier knew full well, Bourassa himself had been heard to repeat Daniel O’Connell’s firm declaration: “I take my religion from Rome, but my politics from home.” Many a habitant quite as devout as either Bourassa or Laurier felt the same, had proved it in the past, and was quite capable of proving it again. Moreover, in the general election that everyone now saw could hardly be postponed beyond another year, the schools would be a minor issue. On the more pressing naval question it seemed unlikely that Bourassa could throw himself wholly behind the Tories. If Laurier’s plan to build a Canadian navy to help Britain could be said to represent a surrender of independence, Borden’s defeated amendment proposing a cash grant to Britain must surely be considered a greater surrender.

Thus, as he prepared to face Parliament again in the fall, Sir Wilfrid’s composure was still relatively intact. So much so that he was led into one of the greatest tactical blunders of his career.

Since the death of a sitting member in February, there had been a Quebec vacancy in the Senate. Now, in October, Laurier filled the vacancy with the M.P. from Drummond-Arthabaska, thus in turn creating a Commons vacancy and calling for a by-election. By clear implication this dared Bourassa to nominate a candidate of his own and submit his quarrels with Laurier to the decision of their fellow French-Canadians.

As both men knew, the challenge was heavily loaded in Laurier’s favor. Drummond-Arthabaska was Laurier’s own old riding; he had practiced law there as a young man and still made his summer home there.

Though Bourassa rose to the bait, it was only because to have done less would have involved a confession of defeat or timidity. He fully expected his man to lose. Indeed, he had already written, before the ballots were counted, an editorial intended for Le Devoir in which he attributed the victory of his opponent to “drunkenness, debauchery, tumult ... appeal to the lowest passions under the serene eye and with the tacit and complacent connivance of the Right Honorable Sir Wilfrid Laurier, P.C., G.C.M.G., K.C., D.C.F., LL.D., etc.”

At the nominating convention to choose the Liberal candidate Laurier himself was in the chair. The man chosen by his party had an impeccable background and connections. Bourassa’s Nationalist candidate was a young farmer.

Bourassa, despite his gloomy expectations, took to the stump with style and vigor. He painted a painful picture of draft officers “scouring the country and compelling young men to enlist in the navy or in the army, to go to foreign lands and fight the battles of Great Britain, to co-operate with Downing Street in the oppression of weak countries, and to maintain, at the price of their blood, the supremacy of the British flag in Asia or Africa.” His lieutenants outdid him: “Those who disemboweled your fathers on the Plains of Abraham are asking you today to go and get killed for them”; “I come from a parish where the church still bears the mark of English bullets.”

Officially the Conservatives were on the sidelines, although Monk and other Quebec Tories supported Bourassa’s Nationalist candidate with enthusiasm. When the ballots were counted Laurier’s certain victory emerged as a 200-vote defeat—and as a disaster of two dimensions. In the first and simplest dimension, it was a serious blow to the Prime Minister’s personal prestige. In the second and perhaps more important one, it represented a transferal of images and of targets. Through two months of high passion and unbridled invective between Laurier’s Liberals and Bourassa’s Nationalists, the traditionally pro-British Tories had achieved the advantage of being almost unnoticed. To many of his compatriots, Laurier was at the same time becoming, through one of the most grotesque cases of mistaken identity ever to confuse the passage of history, a stranger in a hand-me-down red coat. Many years later Laurier’s official biographer, the brilliant historian O. D. Skelton, called this “the most important by-election in Canada’s history.”