r desire is for absolute and continuing control to
which they come to think they have a prescriptive right; and they
never leave office without a sense of outrage. There never yet was a
party ejected from office which did not feel pretty much as the
Stuarts did when they lost the throne of England; the incoming
administration is invariably regarded by them in the light of
usurpers. This was very much the case with the Conservatives after
1896; and the Liberals had the same feeling after 1911, that they
had been robbed, as they deemed, of their rightful heritage. Parties
are not, as their philosophers claim, servants of the state
co-operating in its service; their real desire is the mastery of the
state and the brooking of no opposition or rivalship. Nevertheless
the people by a sure instinct compel a change in administration
every now and then; but they move so slowly that a government well
entrenched in office can usually outstay its welcome by one term of
office. The Laurier administration covering a full period of fifteen
years illustrates the operation of this political tendency. The
government came in with the good wishes of the people and for nearly
ten years went on from strength to strength, carrying out an
extensive and well-considered domestic programme; then its strength
began to wane and its vigor to relax. Its last few years were given
up to a struggle against the inevitable fate that was visibly rising
like a tide; and the great stroke of reciprocity which was attempted
in 1911 was not nearly so much a belated attempt to give effect to a
party principle as it was a desperate expedient by an ageing
administration to stave off dissolution. The Laurier government died
in 1911, not so much from the assaults of its enemies as from
hardening of its arteries and from old age. Its hour had struck in
keeping with the law of political change. Upon any reasonable survey
of the circumstances it would be held that Laurier was fortunate
beyond most party leaders in his premiership--in its length, in the
measure of public confidence which he held over so long a period, in
the affection which he inspired in his immediate following, and for
the opportunities it gave him for putting his policies into
operation.

Viewed in retrospect most of the domestic occurrences of the Laurier
regime lose their importance as the years recede; it will owe its
place in Canadian political history to one or two achievements of
note. Laur