e kind of man to whom other people naturally happened.
He was a human solar system in which many kinds of people wanted to
gravitate, even to the ragged little girl on the prairie who picked him
the wild flowers that he wore in his coat as far as she could see him
on the train platform. He discovered early in life that he could
interest other people much as some men find out they can juggle or
sing. It was a fatal gift. Laurier was far too long in this country,
much too interesting. Women in Ottawa could make delirious
conversation out of how this man at 72 got into a taxi. He was more
phenomenal to English than to French. He never cultivated Paris and
would not have been at home there. At Imperial Conferences and
Coronations he was an Imperial matinee idol in London. In Ontario he
was regarded with much the same awe as the small boy views the
long-haired medicine man. To the Quebecker he was the grand magic;
until Bourassa came, irresistible, incomparable on stage. But Laurier
had no great intensity; no Savonarola gift to sway a crowd; he just
charmed them; when they came to remember his song--what was it?
Earlier in life he was a sort of Ulysses, led by magic. He loved the
_petit ville_ of Lin where he was born. But it was too small for him.
He was lured into studies, to college, to the bilingual university
McGill, to law, to discourse with learned Anglo-Saxons, to the study of
British Government by democracy, to the translation of himself into
English. The translation, which was almost a masterpiece, made him the
first and perhaps the last French Premier of Canada, and in many
respects the greatest Premier we ever had.

This alone was something. Speaking their own tongue, Laurier could
impress the English. He could tour Ontario and feel grandly at home in
the Liberal shires, among the men of the Maple Leaf. He could follow
one of his two transcontinentals up the Saskatchewan, and to multitudes
of many nations led from Europe by his own immigration policy conduct a
Pentecost for the two new Provinces. He could fling magic over
Manitoba, and on the Pacific he had power. But in Nova Scotia he could
never equal the memory of Joseph Howe, a greater orator than Laurier.

What this man's sensations were as he studied himself in the art of
politics may be compared to what an English Canadian of similar
temperament would feel like if he could fling a spell over Quebec.
Laurier made a second conquest of Cana