Part 4 (1/2)

Who was to succeed him? For the moment the leadershi+p was put into co nominated to tide matters over

The Ontario Liberals had always been the backbone of the party, and aht and David Mills stood pre-eminent in experience and ability Yet it was neither of these veterans whom Mr Blake recommended to the party 'caucus' as his successor, but Wilfrid Laurier; and on the ht, seconded by Mr Mills, Mr Laurier was unanimously chosen as the new chieftain

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It ith much difficulty that Mr Laurier was induced to accept the leadershi+p On both personal and political grounds he hesitated He had his share of ambition, but he had never looked for more than success in his profession and a place in politics below the highest

It was not that he underestireatness of the honour; on the contrary, it was his high sense of the responsibilities of the post that gave hi physique, and he knew that the work h his profession now gave him an ample income, he was not a rich man, and much if not most of his law practice would have to be abandoned if he became leader;[1] and parlia the leader of the Opposition a salary

On political grounds he was still e Broelcome a leader from the minority?

The fires of sectional passion were still raging In Ontario he would be opposed as a French Canadian and a Catholic, the resolute opponent of the Governed that the pendulu toward the Liberals in Quebec, while in Ontario they were round, the irony of the situation was such that in Quebec he was regarded with suspicion, if not with open hostility, by the ressive leaders of the Church

Yet the place he had won in parliaues believed that he had the ability to lead them out of the wilderness, and for their faith he accepted At first he insisted that his acceptance should be tentative, for the session only; but by the time the session ended the party would not be denied, and his definite succession to the leadershi+p was announced

The Canada of 1887, in which Wilfrid Laurier thus cah and responsible position, was a Canada very different fro Canadians of the present generation It was a Canada seething with restlessness and discontent The high hopes of the Fathers of Confederation had turned to ashes On every handthat federation had failed, that the new nation of their dream had remained a dream

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At Confederation h place in the E the nations of the world Yet, twenty years later, Canada remained unappreciated and unknown In Great Britain she was considered a colony which had ceased to fulfil the principal functions of the traditional colony, and which would probably soo the way of all colonies: in the nored, alike in official and in private circles In the United States, in those quarters where Canada was given a thought at all, curious misconceptions existed of her subordination to Great Britain, of her hopelessly Arctic climate, and of her inevitable drift into the arms of the Republic Elsewhere abroad, Canada was an Ulti and i odds and ends of the earth which one caht of otherwise

Twenty years earlier glowing pictures had been painted of the new heights of honour and of usefulness which the new Dominion would afford its stateserrymanders and political {95} trickery, of Red Parlor funds and electoral bribery

The canker affected not one party alone, as the fall of Mercier was soon to show The whole political life of the country to sank low and stagnant levels, for it appeared that the people had openly condoned corruption in high places, and that lavish prolad hand'

were a surer road to success than honest and efficient administration

Sectional discontent prevailed That the federation would be sments' seemed not beyond possibility We have seen that a racial and religious feud rent Ontario and Quebec Nova Scotia strained at the leash Her people had never forgotten nor forgiven the way in which they had been forced into Confederation

'Better terh tariff restricted their liberty in buying, and the home markets pro year the provincial legislature had expressed the prevalent discontent by flatly de the repeal of the union

Manitoba chafed under a thirty-five per cent tariff on farm implements, and complained of the retention by the Dorievances in respect to transportation would not down The Canadian Pacific Railway had given the ht tens of thousands of settlers to the province, but it had not brought abiding prosperity or content The through rate on wheat fro to Montreal was ten cents a bushel more than from St Paul to New York, an equal distance; and, from the farm to Liverpool, the Minnesota fare of his Manitoba neighbour Local rates were still heavier 'Coal and lueneral merchandise cost from two to four times as much to shi+p as for equal distances in the eastern provinces'[2]

Why not bring in competition? Because the Dominion Government blocked the way by its veto power In the contract with the Canadian Pacific Syndicate a clause provided that for twenty years the Do road between the co south or southeast or within fifteen miles of the boundary; it was provided also that in the formation of any new provinces to {97} the west such provinces should be required to observe the saed by the railway authorities that foreign investors had demanded a monopoly as the price of capital, and that without the assurance of such a monopoly the costly link to the north of Lake Superior could never have been built The ter railways: the Dominion had indeed no power to forbid it in advance, and it was explicitly stated by Sir John Macdonald at the tiht to charter one railway after another, the Dominion disallowed every act and repeatedly declared that it would use its veto power to compel Manitoba to trade with the East and by the Canadian Pacific Railway Abetween East and West and of discouraging iration to the prairies could hardly have been devised

Against these conditions Manitoba protested as oneBoard of Trade denounced the policy of 'crushi+ng and tra pioneers of this prairie province to secure a purely iain to one soulless corporation' Every Conservative candidate {98} for the House of Coed himself to vote for a motion of want of confidence if the Macdonald Government persisted in its course The Conservative administration of the province was overthrown because it did not go fast or far enough in the fight At last, in 1888, Ottawa gave way and bought off the Canadian Pacific by a guarantee of bonds for new extensions After soht into Canada; and if this did not work all the miracles of cheap rates that had been expected, Manitoba at least kne that her ills were those which had been iraphy and not by her sister provinces

It was not only in Manitoba that econorievances so concrete and so irritating

Throughout the Dohties had vanished After the conation was everywhere the rule Foreign trade, which had reached a total of 217,000,000 in 1873, was only 230,000,000 in 1883 and 247,000,000 in 1893; these were, however, years of falling prices Bank discounts, the {99} nueneral business activity showed creeping progress and so back Homestead entries had risen to nearly seventy-five hundred in 1882, when the construction of the Canadian Pacific was bringing on the first western booreat part of these had been cancelled, and up to the ed fewer than three thousand a year in the whole vast West

The movement of population bore the same melancholy witness Even the West, Manitoba and the North-West Territories, grew only frorew from 135,000 to 510,000 in the same period The Dominion as a whole increased at less than half the rate of the United States, and Sir Richard Cartwright had little difficulty in establishi+ng the alar fact that in recent years one out of every four of the native-born of Canada had been compelled to seek a horants to Canada had followed the same well-beaten trail

There were in 1890 more than one-third as many people of Canadian birth and descent in the United States as in Canada itself Never in the world's history, save in {100} the case of crowded, faoverned Ireland, had there been such a leakage of the brain and brawn of any country

Perhaps no incident reveals e of this period than the break-down of the negotiations carried on in 1895 for the entrance of Newfoundland, then still more nearly bankrupt, into Confederation, because of the unwillingness of the Canadian Government to meet the financial terms Newfoundland demanded For the sake of a difference of fifty thousand dollars a year the chance to round out the Dominion was let slip, perhaps never to recur Ten years later fifty thousand a year looked seneration the defects of its qualities; in one prudence degenerates into parsiance

[1] After 1887 he rarely, and after 1892 never, appeared in court