he course he had marked out. Repeated and unavailing efforts
were made to find some formula by which a disruption of the party
might be avoided. One such proposition was that the life of the
parliament should be extended. This would enable the government,
with its majority and the support it would get from conscriptionist
Liberals, to carry out its programme accepting full responsibility
therefor. Sir Wilfrid rejected this; an election there must be. This
was probably the only expedient which held any prospects of avoiding
party disruption; but after its rejection Liberals in disagreement
with Laurier still sought for an accommodation. There was a
continuous conference going on for weeks in which all manner of
suggestions were made. They all broke down before Laurier's
courteous but unyielding firmness. There was the suggestion that the
Liberals should accept the second reading of the Military Service
Act and then on the third reading demand a referendum; rejected on
the ground that this would imply a conditional acceptance of the
principle of compulsion. There was the proposal that Laurier should
engage, if returned to power, to resort to conscription if voluntary
recruiting did not reach a stipulated level--not acceptable. Scores
of men had the experience of the writer; going into Laurier's room
on the third floor of the improvised parliamentary offices in the
National History Museum, spending an hour or so in fruitless
discussion and coming out with the feeling that there was no choice
between unquestioning acceptance of Laurier's policy or breaking
away from allegiance to him. Not that Laurier ever proposed this
choice to his visitors. He had a theory--which not even he with all
his lucidity could make intelligible--that a man could support both
him and conscription at the same time. There is an attempt at
defining this policy in a curious letter to Wm. Martin, then premier
of Saskatchewan, which is quoted by Skelton. Sir Wilfrid in these
conversations--as in his letters of that period, many of which
appear in Skelton's Life--never failed to stress conditions in Quebec
as compelling the course which he followed; the alternative was to
throw Quebec to the extremists, with a resulting division that might
be fatal. There was, too, the mournful and repeated assertion--which
abounds also in his letters--that these developments showed that it
was a mistake for a member of the minority to be the leader of the
party. At the