t, Crerar, the avowed apostle of free-trade,
Sifton, the Alberta mystery man, and Rowell, who had won the libel suit
against him for the Globe. It was not to be expected that so complete
and historic a Tory as Sir George could at first easily regard such men
as anything but interlopers, even though he admitted their strength in
the Coalition. One can imagine Meighen making up to his old trade
enemy Carvell, but not Foster making overtures to Rowell.

But the vital element was gone out of the Administration, and Sir
George had to admit it. Cold and repellent as he has always seemed in
politics, without a crony or even a man who cared to make him a
confederate, he has never been a man of implacable resentment. He was
yet to regard Rowell as a real man, worthy his confidence.

A newspaperman sent to Osgoode Hall to report the Globe libel suit for
an Ottawa Liberal paper relates how the night of the conclusion of the
trial he met Mr. Foster at the Toronto Station. The reporter had
already wired the decision of the Court adverse to Mr. Foster, who had
not even taken the trouble to inquire what it was. The two chatted
amiably on the train and met the next morning in Ottawa. On his way
home Mr. Foster saw the Liberal bulletin at the newspaper office. A
few days later he met the scribe.

"Tom," he said, genially, shaking hands, "why didn't you tell me about
that decision?"

"Well, sir, I really thought you knew, and I didn't care to hurt your
feelings."

The member for North York laughed.

"Feelings!" he repeated. "You are the first Grit that ever said I had
any."

A prominent Liberal described to the writer the exit of Mr. Foster from
the House after the Royal Commission investigation into the Union Trust.

"Mr. and Mrs. Foster," he said eloquently, "went together down the
terrace in a fog of rain, into the shadow of the night, under one
umbrella. And I said to myself as they went, dejected and pitiful,
'Well, that's the final exit of Foster from political life.'"

The author of Resurgam knew better. He could always somehow come back
on the stepping stones of a dead self. Something made him feel that
without him the Conservative party would have been like the Liberals
without Laurier, or in an earlier day his own party minus the old chief
Macdonald. He was almost right.

One other episode illustrates how spontaneously the emotional aspect of
things sometimes sways this cold politician who never could l