or fifteen years with patience, sagacity and imperturbable firmness
against the enraged and embattled imperialists, both of England and
Canada. Laurier, in the comment quoted above, said that in 1897 the
imperialists had looked to him to act as the bell-wether. They had
good reason to be hopeful about his usefulness to them. The imperial
preference just enacted by the Canadian parliament had been hailed
both in Canada and Great Britain as a great concession to
imperialistic sentiment, whereas it was in reality an exceedingly
astute stroke of domestic politics by which the government lowered
the tariff and at the same time spiked the guns of the high
protectionists. In 1897, when Laurier first went to England, the
imperial movement was at its crescent, synchronous with the great
welling up of sentiment and reverence called forth by the Diamond
Jubilee of Queen Victoria. Strachey has a penetrating word about the
strength which Queen Victoria's "final years of apotheosis" brought
to the imperialistic movement:

"The imperialist temper of the nation invested her office with a new
significance exactly harmonizing with her own inmost proclivities.
The English policy was in the main a common-sense structure; but
there was always a corner in it where common-sense could not enter.
. . . Naturally it was in the crown that the mysticism of the
English polity was concentrated--the crown with its venerable
antiquity, its sacred associations, its imposing spectacular array.
But, for nearly two centuries, common-sense had been predominant in
the great building and the little, unexplored, inexplicable corner
had attracted small attention. Then with the rise of imperialism
there was a change. For imperialism is a faith as well as a
business; as it grew the mysticism in English public life grew with
it and simultaneously a new importance began to attach to the crown.
The need for a symbol--a symbol of England's might, of England's
worth, of England's extraordinary mystical destiny--became felt more
urgently than before. The crown was the symbol and the crown rested
upon the head of Victoria."

To be translated from the humdrum life of Ottawa to a foremost place
in the vast pageantry of the Diamond Jubilee, there to be showered
with a wealth of tactful and complimentary personal attentions was
rather too much for Laurier. The oratorical possibilities of the
occasion took him into camp; and in a succession of speeches he gave
it as his