emembered the power of an earlier day.

Early in 1917 he was offered coalition by the Premier. He refused.
Laurier knew that coalition meant conscription, and conscription meant
dragooning Quebec.

It came home vividly to the old leader in Opposition, whatever it may
have done had he been in power, that to advocate conscription would
drive Quebec into the camp of Bourassa from which he and Lomer Gouin
had between them managed to save a large majority of French-Canadians.
The struggle of Bourassa to oust Laurier began with the Boer War. It
was fated not to end until either leader or the other should quit.
Before the war Bourassa was flamboyant and defiant. After it began he
was openly and brazenly disloyal, when the doctrines he preached were
inflammably acceptable to people uneducated to citizenship in so
conglomerate a thing as Empire. The easiest thing in the world is for
a high wind to sweep a prairie fire. The war and Bourassa together had
the power to sweep Quebec, had Laurier and Gouin shown signs of
yielding to the demand for conscription. I am told that Laurier
personally believed in conscription but saw this terrible danger of
disrupting the nation over Quebec. The war only had staved off the
Irish question, a conference on which was in session when war was
declared. Laurier dreaded the spectre of a second Ireland in Quebec.
He knew all the forces and how they would operate. By his own methods,
mistaken or otherwise, he had spent most of his life to achieve unity.
He dreaded to see that unity imperilled. I think he would have been
glad to see Quebec enlist as Ontario and other Provinces had done.
That was impossible. Conscription was a menace in Quebec to the man
who had failed to estimate the jack-boot menace in Germany, but who had
not failed to oppose the idea that navalism in England was as bad as
militarism anywhere.

No judgment of Laurier, when it comes to be adequately made by the
historian, can fail to take account of this sentiment in an old leader
to whom the unity of Canada had become an obsession far transcending
his original passion for the solidarity of Empire.

The Winnipeg convention of 1917 was a piece of almost calculated
cruelty on the part of men who should have known that the old chief's
day was politically done. His party which for years he had penetrated
with his personality was slipping into disunion. Vaguely he knew that
the western wing of it was almost gone over to R