f insanity to the fixed idea.
There have been times when Parliament has regarded Michael Clark as a
melancholy victim of this big idea that warped his whole political
mentality. But it was a grand form of insanity. Nobody ever heard Clark
in the House who did not realize that here was a fine British rebel whose
brain should be a great hope to his party. The old chief knew that. He
kept his ear towards Clark when he was sometimes deaf to his ministers.

Clark was the mountain peak which the party had left for its fleshly
sojourn in Egypt. The Liberal party in Canada had once been a free trade
party--somewhat before Clark's time. In free trade and the universal
franchise had been its life. But Liberalism before 1896 was one thing;
afterwards another. Laurier in practice knew that Clark was
magnificently wrong; in theory superbly right. Therefore he indulged and
admired him; sometimes playing with him, conscious that Liberalism was
the only show in which Clark could be a national performer.

In truth Michael Clark was for long enough a man without a party. But
from the benches of the Liberals he could stand and preach his Manchester
doctrines to Hansard and the nation, even when the party yawned and held
dangerously on to the tariff.

It was always a tonic to hear Clark in the House. Like Carlyle he
breathed a certain inexorable vitality into public affairs. To meet
Clark in the corridors was to get a breeze that swept like a chinook
across the frozen waste of old-line politics. In the gloom of the lobby
this apostle of red hair and rubicund visage was a beacon light. I have
met him so, of a Saturday afternoon when the House was out of session,
and when the member for Red Deer was ripe for a free talk to any
stranger. A great friendliness possessed him always. He could laugh at
the besetments of party and the tyranny that opportunism imposes on great
minds. He himself was free. He wanted others to be free. He could
stand for half an hour in one gloomy crypt of those corridors in the old
Parliament and talk of the power of being that kind of Liberal.

It was the wheat that helped to keep Clark where he was on the outpost of
Liberalism. When his old leader became enswathed with election bandages,
Clark looked out upon the landscapes of the wheat, not so long ago the
limitless pasture of the free-trade buffaloes, and felt again the vision
of the life that is Liberal but is sometimes called another name.