many years. Now he was called to constructive tasks. Fortune favored him
by bringing him to power at the very turn of the tide; but he justified
fortune's favor by so steering the ship of state as to take full
advantage of wind and current. Through four Parliaments, through fifteen
years of office, through the time of fruition of so many long-deferred
hopes, he was to guide the destinies of the nation.

Laurier began his work by calling to his Cabinet not merely the party
leaders in the federal arena but four of the outstanding provincial
Liberals--Oliver Mowat, Premier of Ontario, William S. Fielding, Premier
of Nova Scotia, Andrew G. Blair, Premier of New Brunswick, and, a
few months later, Clifford Sifton of Manitoba. The Ministry was the
strongest in individual capacity that the Dominion had yet possessed.
The prestige of the provincial leaders, all men of long experience and
tested shrewdness, strengthened the Administration in quarters where
it otherwise would have been weak, for there had been many who doubted
whether the untried Liberal party could provide capable administrators.
There had also been many who doubted the expediency of making Prime
Minister a French-Canadian Catholic. Such doubters were reassured by
the presence of Mowat and Fielding, until the Prime Minister himself
had proved the wisdom of the choice. There were others who admitted
Laurier's personal charm and grace but doubted whether he had the
political strength to control a party of conflicting elements and
to govern a country where different race and diverging religious and
sectional interests set men at odds. Here again time proved such fears
to be groundless. Long before Laurier's long term of office had ended,
any distrust was transformed into the charge of his opponents that he
played the dictator. His courtly manners were found not to hide weakness
but to cover strength.

The first task of the new Government was to settle the Manitoba school
question. Negotiations which were at once begun with the provincial
Government were doubtless made easier by the fact that the same party
was in power at Ottawa and at Winnipeg, but it was not this fact alone
which brought agreement. The Laurier Government, unlike its predecessor,
did not insist on the restoration of separate schools. It accepted a
compromise which retained the single system of public schools, but which
provided religious teaching in the last half hour of school and, where
numbers