the edge of Labrador almost by
telegraph poles. You recall that the French in Canada evolved the
modern census with its intimate penetration into the affairs of the
people, some time before the Germans did it. The Premier of Quebec was
a handbook encyclopaedia of Quebec. He knew the precise location by
the roads of almost any white village, pulp-mill, water-power, mine,
timber limit; knew as much as a man can about the number of horses and
cattle and cradles to a township; could talk with enthusiasm about the
pioneer arts of the habitant--the rugs, the baskets, the furniture, the
hand-made churns, the open-air bake-ovens. He could give the address
and the full name of many and many a priest.

But beyond this there is a Quebec which Sir Lomer Gouin did not know,
because he himself with his _bourgeois_ excellences and his great good
citizenship has not the Gallic sparkle in his mentality. He never
deeply knew the soul of Quebec. He was too much concerned with its
practical and useful politics to be conscious of its passions. From
the shrug of his shoulder, and a certain twinkle in his eye when he
mentioned diplomacy with clerics, one surmised that among the clergy he
was the master among politicians who must walk warily. But he was too
stout, too thrifty, too much of a high type of budgeteer to be
spiritually informed of the crude but basically beautiful passions that
undercurrent all peasant communities. There was no poetry in Gouin.
No fire. Little imagination.

"Those Nationalists?" he repeated shrewdly, slowly. "Yes, I know their
talk. Oh, they are not so dangerous, but a troublesome minority. I
think--I know Quebec better than they do. You have, I daresay,
Nationalists in Ontario?"

What he perhaps expected was some statement about Orangemen, who of
course are nearly all Imperialists. Yet these very Orangemen represent
an intense phase of Canadian life; the backwoods era, the simple
industries, the old villages, the quaint settlements of the U.E.
Loyalists as picturesque on the Upper, as the dormer-windowed villages
of the French are on the Lower St. Lawrence. To these men the Empire
is as visual, as to the intense Quebecker it is nebulous. And as the
politician in Ontario has to regard carefully the Orange vote, so the
Premier of Quebec had to be wary of the franchises of his emotional
friends, the Nationalists. He was somewhat afraid of the minority as
all masters of majorities are. Clearly--