ly by the means of
reason applied to the case.' Now he was suddenly called upon to decide
one of the most momentous issues that had ever confronted the Canadian
people. He had to decide it in the midst of a rising tide of popular
enthusiasm in the English-speaking provinces. Equally he had to take
into account the lukewarmness or hostility of Quebec. The majority of
French Canadians stood where their English-speaking fellow-citizens had
stood ten or twenty years before. They were passively loyal, content
to be a protected colony. The instinctive sympathies of many would be
for the Boer minority rather than for the English Outlanders in the
Transvaal. We may read the prime minister's thoughts on this aspect of
the problem from his own words, addressed to an audience in Toronto:

{189}

Blood is thicker than water, and the issue may not appeal to my
fellow-countrymen of French origin as it appealed to you.... Still we
are British subjects, and claim the rights of British subjects, and we
assume all the responsibilities this entails. There are men foolish
enough, there are men unpatriotic enough, to blame us and to say that I
should have rushed on and taken no precautions to guide public opinion
in my own province. That is not my way of governing the country. I
told you a moment ago that I would not swim with the current, that I
would endeavour to guide the current, and on this occasion I tried to
do so.

Moreover, parliament was not in session, and British precedent required
the consent of parliament for waging war.

In an interview given on the 3rd of October, a week before the war
broke out, Sir Wilfrid denied a report that the Government had already
decided to send a contingent, and stated that it could not do so
without parliament's consent. On the same day a dispatch was received
from Mr Chamberlain expressing thanks for individual offers of service,
and stating that four units of one hundred and twenty-five men each
would gladly be accepted, to be equipped and sent to Africa at their
own or Canada's cost, and thereafter to be maintained by the Imperial
Government. {190} Ten days later, three days after the declaration of
war, the Government at Ottawa issued an order-in-council providing for
a contingent of one thousand men.[2]

The decision once made, the Government lost no time in equipping and
dispatching the contingent. On the 30th of October the troops sailed
from Quebec. A week later th