ey were too advanced for
their day and place. The country as a whole wanted, and doubtless
needed, a period of noncontentious politics, of recuperation after long
agitation, of constructive {23} administration, and this the
Liberal-Conservative majority was for the time better able to give,
even though corruption was soon to vitiate its powers for good.

The alliance of the _Rouges_ with the 'Clear Grits,' who were ever
denouncing French Canada's 'special privileges,' was a great source of
weakness to them in their own province. It was, however, the hostility
of a section of the Catholic hierarchy which was most effective in
keeping these agitators long in a powerless minority. In the early
days of the party this hostility was not unwarranted. Many of the
young crusaders had definitely left the fold of the Church to criticize
it from without, to demand the abolition of the Pope's temporal power
in Europe and of the Church's tithing privileges in Canada, and to
express heterodox doubts on matters of doctrine. This period soon
passed, and the radical leaders confined themselves to demanding
freedom of thought and expression and political activity; but the
conflict went on. Almost inevitably the conflict was waged in both the
political and the religious field. Where the chief question at issue
was the relation of church and state, it was difficult to keep politics
out of religion or religion out of politics. It was {24} to be one of
the signal services of Wilfrid Laurier, in his speech on Political
Liberalism, to make clear the dividing line.

The conflict in Canada was in large part an echo of European struggles.
In the past Canada had taken little notice of world-movements. The
Reform agitation in Upper Canada had been, indeed, influenced by the
struggle for parliamentary reform in Great Britain; but the
French-speaking half of Canada, carefully sheltered in the quiet St
Lawrence valley, a bit of seventeenth-century Normandy and Brittany
preserved to the nineteenth, had known little and cared less for the
storms without. But now questions were raised which were
world-questions, and in the endeavour to adjust satisfactorily the
relations of church and state both ultramontanes and liberals became
involved in the quarrels which were rending France and Italy, and
Canada felt the influence of the European stream of thought or passion.
When in 1868 five hundred young Canadians, enrolled as Papal Zouaves,
sailed fro