ities of the Mercier regime. Perhaps of
the two blows, that delivered by Blake was the more disastrous. The
letter was the message of an oracle. It required an interpretation
which the oracle refused to supply; and in its absence the people
regarded it as implying a belief by Blake that annexation was the
logical sequel to the Liberal policy of unrestricted reciprocity.
The result was seen in the by-election campaign of 1892 when the
Liberals lost seat after seat in Ontario, and the government
majority mounted to figures which suggested that the party, despite
the loss of Sir John, was as strong as ever. The Tories were in the
seventh heaven of delight. With the Liberals broken, humiliated and
discouraged, and a young and vigorous pilot, in the person of Sir
John Thompson, at the helm, they saw a long and happy voyage before
them. Never were appearances more illusory, for the cloud was
already in the sky from which were to come storm, tempest and
ruinous over-throw.

THE TACTICS OF VICTORY

The story of the Manitoba school question and the political struggle
which centred around it, as told by Prof. Skelton, is bald and
colorless; it gives little sense of the atmosphere of one of the
most electrical periods in our history. The sequelae of the Riel
agitation, with its stirring up of race feeling, included the Jesuit
Estates controversy in parliament, the Equal Rights movement in
Ontario, the attack upon the use of the French language in the
legislature of the Northwest Territories and the establishment of a
system of National schools in Manitoba through the repeal of the
existing school law, which had been modelled upon the Quebec law and
was intended to perpetuate the double-barrelled system in vogue in
that province. The issue created by the Manitoba legislation
projected itself at once into the federal field to the evident
consternation of the Dominion government. It parried the demand for
disallowance of the provincial statute by an engagement to defray
the cost of litigation challenging the validity of the law. When the
Privy Council, reversing the judgment of the Supreme Court, found
that the law was valid because it did not prejudicially affect
rights held prior to or at the time of union, the government was
faced with a demand that it intervene by virtue of the provisions in
the British North America act, which gave the Dominion parliament
the power to enact remedial educational legislation overriding
provi