lly
shepherded and safely delivered.

Tarte's confidence that Laurier could win Quebec was not based
wholly upon faith in the power of Laurier's personal appeal. He was
himself a Bleu leader brought into accidental relations with the
Liberals. His breach with the Conservatives began as one of the
unending Castor-Bleu feuds. His knowledge of the McGreevy-Connolly
frauds gave him the power, as he thought, to blow the Castor chief,
Sir Hector Langevin--a cold, selfish, greedy, domineering, rather
stupid man--into thinnest air, thus opening the road to the
leadership of the French-Conservatives to his friend and leader, the
brilliant, unscrupulous and ambitious Chapleau. He over-estimated
his power. The whole strength of the government at Ottawa was at
once concentrated in keeping the lid on that smouldering cauldron of
stench and rottenness, the system of practical politics of that day.
The Conservative chiefs tried to suppress Tarte and he refused to be
suppressed--there was not a drop of coward's blood in his veins.
Then they set to work to destroy him. He sought a refuge and he
found it--in parliament, to which he was elected in 1891 as an
Independent as the result of an arrangement with Laurier. As he used
to say, it was a case of parliament or jail for him.

Inevitably, in following up his charges in parliament, Tarte was
thrown into more and more intimate relations with the Liberal
leaders. He knew that for him there was no Conservative forgiveness;
as he was wont to say: "I have spoiled the soup for too many." It
was not long before Sir John Thompson could congratulate Laurier, in
one of the sharpest sayings parliament ever heard, upon having among
his lieutenants--"the black Tarte and the yellow Martin." For ten
years he remained Laurier's chief lieutenant in Quebec, but he never
in any sense of the word became a Liberal, though in 1902, just
before he was thrown from the battlements, he busied himself in
reading lifelong Liberals out of the party. Chapleau, who was
Tarte's confidant and ally, though he was also a member of the
Dominion government, became Lieutenant-governor of Quebec and
retired to Spencer Wood, but not to forget politics among its
shades. When the peculiar developments of the Dominion campaign of
1896 made it evident that Conservative victory in Quebec under the
virtual leadership of the bishops meant the permanent domination of
the Castors, the whole Bleu influence was thrown to the Liberals.