ore Laurier became Premier, in the golden age of Liberalism
triumphant, when "freer" trade was emerging as a symbol of that brand
of democracy in opposition to free trade in a minority. How we have
fallen upon evil days! Farmers' sons at college no longer regard free
trade as the forerunner of political absorption by the United States,
but as the vindication of the farmer as a group in government.

Mackenzie King is a man about whom nobody ever could have a lukewarm
conviction. He is either cordially liked or disliked. More than most
other men in public life he has become the victim of violent opinions.
For this he is temperamentally responsible. People consistently
decline to reason about him. They speak of him vehemently. His
dominant note of character is rampant enthusiasm. King is always
intensely in love with whatever interests him. His enthusiasms are not
so much on the surface for many people, as underneath for causes--and
for a few men. Gifted with an uncommon capacity for absorbing
impressions and collecting data for research, he has made himself a
sort of pathological study to other people. In mastering economics he
has himself been enthralled by his own enthusiasm.

At the time of Laurier's speech on democracy King was peculiarly
enthusiastic about John D. Rockefeller, Jr., head of the Rockefeller
Foundation. But he had lost no jot of his fervent admiration for
Laurier in Ottawa and was still passionately devoted--as he remains--to
Sir William Mulock, his political godfather. Nobody has ever
criticized him for his ardent discipleship to the two older Canadians.
There is an old-fashioned spontaneity about this mutual regard much
above the common commercial admiration of one man for another in
business. Many have blamed King for his attachment to Rockefeller, and
have used that connection to his detriment as Liberal leader.

In April, 1920, he was flatly accused of having been an absentee from
Canada during the war, employed by the Rockefeller interests and so
"entangled in the octopus" that as leader of the Liberal party he would
become a menace to Canada. It was the old bogey of continentalism in a
new setting, and it took Mackenzie King twelve pages of Hansard to make
his defence in the House. The incident forms a hinge to a career which
is worth a brief survey.

King was born in Berlin, Ontario, son of a subsequent lecturer in law
at Osgoode Hall and of a daughter of William Lyon Mackenzi