e. At the
University of Toronto he was one of the '95 group that included also
Hamar Greenwood, Arthur Stringer, and the late Norman Duncan and James
Tucker. There was a rebellion during that period in which there is no
record of the grandson of a glorious rebel having taken part. At
college he displayed a passion for pardonable egotism in which there
were elements of a desire for public service. The Family Compact at
Ottawa must have interested him. Liberalism, as understood by the
Laurier group, was emerging from the disreputable mess known as
continentalism, fathered by Goldwin Smith, who was beginning to be
estimated for what he really was, a brilliant philosophical pamphleteer
bent upon the obliteration of Canadian nationality.

After graduation King went for a brief term on the staff of the
_Toronto Globe_. In that year the Liberals came into power. King was
engaged by Sir William Mulock, Postmaster-General, to inquire into
sweatshop methods in contracts for postoffice uniforms. No man could
have done it better. He had a native appetite for that sort of
investigation, and he was helping to establish the new Liberalism.

For the next four years King was out of the country. Had he followed
the academic fashion of that period he would have been in training to
become a citizen of the United States. Chicago University, built by
John D. Rockefeller, attracted him first; Harvard next. He was still
studying economics. No other Canadian had ever spent so much time and
talent on this subject. At Harvard he became a Lecturer, and was sent
to Europe to investigate economic conditions. While there he got a
cable from the Postmaster-General of Canada, who had created the
Department of Labour as an adjunct to the postal department, and
established the _Labour Gazette_, and wanted a deputy who should edit
the _Gazette_ and look after the details of the office. King
courteously declined, saying that he could not accept until the expiry
of his contract with Harvard. The salary of the Deputy-Minister of
Labour was $2,500 under a man whom he tremendously admired, and as yet
with no clear ambition to become a member of the House led by the man
whom he was afterwards to worship, and to succeed.

There is no proof that Laurier took any uncommon interest at this time,
as he afterwards did, in the Deputy-Minister of Labour, though he
noticed that the young man was making a great success of his work.
Much if not most of