it in the chambers of his mind, with the good hope to bring it forth
another day. Then he devoted his attention to the history of Liberalism
in Fox County--both ridings were solid--and it was upon the history of
Liberalism in Fox County, its triumphs and its fruits, that he embarked
so easily and so assuredly, when he opened his address in the opera
house that Tuesday night.

Who knows at what suggestion, or even precisely at what moment,
the fabric of his sincere intention fell away? Bingham does not; Mr
Farquharson has the vaguest idea; Dr Drummond declares that he expected
it from the beginning, but is totally unable to say why. I can get
nothing more out of them, though they were all there, though they all
saw him, indeed a dramatic figure, standing for the youth and energy
of the old blood, and heard him, as he slipped away into his great
preoccupation, as he made what Bingham called his "bad break." His
very confidence may have accounted for it; he was off guard against the
enemy, and the more completely off guard against himself. The history
of Liberalism in Fox County offered, no doubt, some inlet to the rush
of the Idea; for suddenly, Mr Farquharson says, he was "off." Mr
Farquharson was on the platform, and "I can tell you," said he, "I
pricked up my ears." They all did; the Idea came in upon such a personal
note.

"I claim it my great good fortune," the young man was suddenly telling
them, in a note of curious gravity and concentration, "and however the
fight goes, I shall always claim it my great good fortune to have been
identified, at a critical moment, with the political principles that are
ennobled in this country by the imperialistic aim. An intention, a great
purpose in the endless construction and reconstruction of the world,
will choose its own agency; and the imperial design in Canada has chosen
the Liberal party, because the Liberal party in this country is the
party of the soil, the land, the nation as it springs from that which
makes it a nation; and imperialism is intensely and supremely a national
affair. Ours is the policy of the fields. We stand for the wheat-belt
and the stockyard, the forest and the mine, as the basic interests of
the country. We stand for the principles that make for nation-building
by the slow sweet processes of the earth, cultivating the individual
rooted man who draws his essence and his tissues from the soil and so,
by unhurried, natural, healthy growth, labour swea