his
frequent suggestions of a readiness or intention to retire during
the last few years of his leadership were. But, whatever the
uncertainties of the moment, they soon passed. Laurier at once
showed capacities which the Liberals had never before known in a
leader. The long story of Liberal sterility and ineffectiveness from
the middle of the last century to almost its close is the story of
the political incapacity of its successive leaders, a demonstration
of the unfitness of men with the emotional equipment of the
pamphleteer, crusader and agitator for the difficult business of
party management. The party sensed almost immediately the difference
in the quality of the new leadership; and liked it. Laurier's powers
of personal charm completed the "consolidation of his position," and
by the early nineties the Presbyterian Grits of Ontario were
swearing by him. When Blake, after two or three years of nursing his
wounds in retirement, began to think it was time to resume the
business of leading the Liberals, he found everywhere invisible
barriers blocking his return. Laurier was, he found, a different
proposition from Mackenzie; and there was nothing for it but to
return to his tent and take farewell of his constituents in that
tale of lamentations, the West Durham letter. The new regime, the
new leadership, did not bring results at once. The party experienced
a succession of unexpected and unforeseen misfortunes that almost
made Laurier superstitious. "Tell me," he wrote to his friend Henri
Beaugrand, in August, 1891, "whether there is not some fatality
pursuing our party." In the election of 1891 not even the
theatricality of Sir John Macdonald's last appeal nor the untrue
claim by the government that it was about, itself, to secure a
reciprocal trade arrangement with Washington, could have robbed the
Liberals of a triumph which seemed certain; it was the opportune
revelation, through the stealing of proofs from a printing office,
that Edward Farrer, one of the Globe editors, favored political
union with the United States, that gave victory into the hands of
the Conservatives. But their relatively narrow majority would not
have kept them in office a year in view of the death of Sir John A.
Macdonald in June, 1891, and the stunning blows given the government
by the "scandal session" of 1891, had it not been for two disasters
which overtook the Liberals: The publication of Blake's letter and
the revelation of the rascal