eir
experiences with the electors they had good reason to believe that
this buncombe would go down. But in Quebec they would pose as the
defenders of the oppressed, loyal co-operators with the bishops in
rebuking, subduing and chaining the Manitoba tyrants. Obviously they
would carry the province; if Laurier opposed their legislation they
would sweep the province and he would be left without a shred of the
particular support which was supposed to be his special contribution
to a Liberal victory. The calculation looked good to the
Conservatives; also to most of the Liberals. As one Liberal veteran
put it in 1895: "If we vote against remedial legislation we shall be
lost, hook, line and sinker." But there was one Liberal who thought
differently.

His name was J. Israel Tarte. Tarte was in office an impossibility;
power went to his head like strong wine and destroyed him. But he
was the man whose mind conceived, and whose will executed, the
Napoleonic stroke of tactics which crumpled up the Conservative army
in 1896 and put it in the hole which had been dug for the Liberals.
On the day in March, 1895, when the Dominion government issued its
truculent and imperious remedial order, Tarte said to the present
writer: "The government is in the den of lions; if only Greenway
will now shut the door." At that early day he saw with a clearness
of vision that was never afterwards clouded, the tactics that meant
victory: "Make the party policy suit the campaign in the other
provinces; leave Quebec to Laurier and me." He foresaw that the
issue in Quebec would not be made by the government nor by the
bishops; it would be whether the French-Canadians, whose imagination
and affections had already been captured by Laurier, would or would
not vote to put their great man in the chair of the prime minister
of Canada. All through the winter and spring of 1895 Tarte was
sinking test wells in Quebec public opinion with one uniform result.
The issue was Laurier. So the policy was formulated of marking time
until the government was irretrievably committed to remedial
legislation; then the Liberals as a solid body were to throw
themselves against it. So Laurier and the Liberal party retired
within the lines of Torres Vedras and bided their time.

But Tarte had no end of trouble in keeping the party to the path
marked out. The fainthearts of the other provinces could not keep
from their minds the haunting fear that the road they were marching