SIR WILFRID LAURIER

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIV, Issue 62, 4 September 1911, Page 7

SIR WILFRID LAURIER

i AX INTERESTING PEN PICTURE. | The cables tell us tint. Si.r Wilfrid Laurier lias informed the people of Can- | tida that if tliey reject, the proposed Reciprocity Treaty with the United States, on which the present election is being fought, his heart will be broken. It is peculiarly human statement to make, but it is very like Sir Wilfrid Laurier, who is an essentially human statesman. In a recent issue of the American Review of Reviews, a brilliant s'ketch of Canada's great Premier is given. The following extracts will be read with special interest: "Sir Wilfrid Laurier, most illustrious of living Canadian*, and the one Colonial statesman of international significance anvwhere in the world, anticipated Joseph Chamberlain in urging a preferential tariff within the British Empire. Sir Wilfrid made an end of the Tory attitude to the I'nited States which once swayed patriotic Canada — Anglo-Saxon as well as French. Sir Wilfrid Laurier taught the Dominion to think nationally, to look upon Canada less as a. dependency than as a sister nation with other dominions forming a great empire. He won for Canada a leal treaty-making power, independent of the Government at Home. Downing I Street was slow in yielding this last | point, but, when it did, Sir Wilfrid took j instant' advantage of it. His success is explicable only in the light of his incomparable and persuasive personality. A graeiousnes® of manner that gives fine expression to the Gallic temperament of the' man is, perhaps, next to a genius for statesmanship, the most splendid asset of Sir Wilfrid Laurier. The college in bis native parish of Assomption afforded him his academic training, and there he seems to have acquired likewise that mastery of the technical side of oratory to which the French attach rather more importance than do Anglo-Saxons. Very early in life the youth learned that clearness of enunciation and that readiness of extemporisation which to this day characterises his public addresses. He went up to that alma mater of great Canadians, McGill University, while he was the merest youth. Nothing seems to have been alien to the genius of his mind, whether science, the arts, or that kind of literature which is called polite. Wide as was his reading, however, and eager as grew his intellectual curiosity, he seems never to have wavered in devotion to the faith of his fathers. He I was as regular in youth in his attendance to mass as he has remained in the days of his greatness and power. Sir Wilfrid Laurier never permits himself to omit a punctual attendance at church on Sundays and holy days of obligation whether lie be at home or abroad, for he is Catholic to the core, as were his parents before him. l?y the time he had attained manhood, tlie future Prime, Minister of the Dominion was ft lawyer in Montreal. It cannot be said that his rise was rapid, but it was certainly steady. He displayed that aptitude for cementing personal friendships which has remained his most wonderful asset as a political leader. Handsome in his appearance, exquisite in his manners, kindly in his bearing, the young Montreal lawyer won respect for his sincerity no lesH than for his ability. The severest critic of Sir Wilfrid has yet to accuse him of concealing beneath a polished manner the real sentiments of his heart. A man may smile and smile and be a Sir Wilfrid Laurier without imputations discreditable to his candour. His one difficulty appears to have been then and since a luck of the robust .constitution. Wen Sir Wilfrid was thirty the legislature of his native Quebec had long been a most dignified but highly conservative body. No doubt it was Sir Wilfrid's sense of humor that helped h ; s tact in so delicate a dilemma as his race and religion on the one hand created for his liberal politics 011 the other, for he has an inimitable humour—something quite unlike the story-tilling jocosity of the American politician, of course, yet absolute in its sphere and in every way as effective. His most exquisite device would be described on our side of the frontier as giving himself awav. Sir Wilfrid Laurier dearly loves to tell an audience that whatever his opponents alleged against liU case is p, riYcily true. Only the conclusions lie draws from the circumstance are never disconcerting to himself. B"ho!d the young buirier, then, a self-made man at the age of thirty-three, wedded already to the .Montreal belle, Mademoiselle Zoe Lafontaine, and a member of what may be called the Federal Assembly of the Dominion. Me was already famed as the most brilliant orator in Canada, employing with equal mastery the two languages, and insisting everywhere that his allegiance was to Britain. It was a new note for a French Canadian, i but he sounded it high and clear. Uia rißc was hailed synipathically in Paris, whither he proceeded not long after his Ministry came into being. He must have had the reflection forced upon him, as the London Times dryly observed amid the medley of compliments paid him in France, that as a French Canadian and a Catholic he has no reason to prefer the rule of the French Republic to that of the British Empire. Such seems to have been Sir Wilfrid's idea then and long before, lie has emphasised the British connection ever since. Nor has he lost prestige with his own race therebv. One fact, emerges clearly. Joseph Chamberlain's preferen-, tial tariff crusade was banod unblushinglv ujion polities that, took shape or'viually in the brain of the greatest Colonial statesman the British Empire has ever possessed. However. Sir Wilfrid never blinked the awkward fact that he rules a new manufacturing country. He is a theoretical free trader only. The political policy to which he has adhered ever since the day, fifteen years back, upon which he assumed the post of Prime .Minister, has been called a national policy, a policy of building up the Canadian State. The aims of Sir Wilfrid are to unify if not to amalgamate the French Canadians and Canadians of Anglo-Saxon origin, to establish the economic independence of the Dominion as against both Great ' Britain and the I'nited States, to secure for Canada the position of a kingdom within the British Empire as independent, let us say, as Hungary is of Austria, to erect a protective tariff wall of defence about Canadian industries as a basis for reciprocity negotiation in the direction of freer trade—let it be repeated that Sir Wilfrid is a theoretical free trader—to span the Dominion with transcontinental railroad svstems. to develop export markets within the British Empire, That is nearly all. The remaining part of the Uiurier policy concerns us vitally. It is reciprocity."