d so
much drab common sense in a leader.

Sir Robert's Premiership was a desperate inheritance. The direct
plunge into the Naval Aid Bill was a badly staged attempt to capitalize
the reaction against restricted reciprocity. That first session of the
Borden Parliament goes on record as the most complete one-act farce
ever inflicted upon a patient country. The Imperial issue was a play
to the gallery, and it is the one clear issue that seems to remain of
all the Borden idea.

Sir Robert in his whole life never constructed an epigram. His two
great predecessors had made several. Epigrams sometimes outlive
policies. He never delivered a great passionate speech. He had
opportunities but could not meet them. Fine speeches enough, to be
sure; many of them instinct with a sort of ethical nobility; but a
great palpitating speech, never.

It is not likely that if left to the logic of ordinary evolution Sir
Robert ever would have recreated his party even on Imperial issues; or
convinced the West that Conservatism was not merely anti-agrarian; or
shewn Quebec that Conservatives in the second decade of the twentieth
century are better Laurentians than the Liberals by preserving better
the anti-continental idea. Such things call for leadership by
imagination and a Cabinet of strong men. Sir Robert had neither. Even
in the House he was not the party leader. Conservatism established by
Macdonald as a great system of damnation to the Grits, was on the low
road to extinction. It was not in the power of Robert Borden to save
it. The country was swept by a new Liberalism that by astute
manipulation had kept sympathetic both manufacturers and radicals.

Long before the war came, Canada recognized in Mr. Borden a Premier who
knew the meaning of moral caution so well that he knew not boldness at
all except that his cause was right. Borden had the ethical stolidity
of Asquith without the latter's personal weaknesses or his powers of
oratory. He needed somebody with him as stage manager and makeup
artist. Even his virtues might have been advertised with
effect--though as a rule, except in characters like Lincoln, it takes
the perspective of time to put those into a poster. So eminently
respectable; so high in honour; so fair in judgment; so irresolute in
action; so defective in imagination; so content to be overshadowed by
lesser men in his own party even though he never was intimidated by
bigger men in the Opposition: su