Peter McArthur

“ Conservatism, while believing in “the good of things as they are,” has usually grappled with reforms under the stimulus of an increasingly feared and potent democracy. Liberalism has had to wrench from Conservatism responsible government by the people, manhood suffrage, equal taxation, the right of like opportunity for all classes of the community. Conservatism has clung to precedent, the established order, the old authoritarian basis of government, and has yielded but slowly and as a rule only on compulsion. ”

“ Behind all this was a finely cultured intellect, and behind this again was a burning French-Canadian soul that added warmth to all his words, gave action and gesture and fire, and made him from a purely speaking standpoint one of the greatest and most finished orators of his time. But there was more even than this. No man can hold followers simply by words alone. Sir Wilfrid had a wonderfully sympathetic heart, a keen appreciation of the human qualities in man, and coupled with his own personal magnetism, there was a winsomeness that bound his followers to him as with hoops of steel. ”

“ Conservatism finds its well-springs in its own pockets.
The main battlements of privilege and vested authority have been won by Liberalism through centuries of struggle. The fight of democracy for freedom, for equality of opportunity and for substantial justice, to all individuals of the commonwealth still goes on. There are still inequalities of taxation to be righted, the oppression of vested interests in trade and industry to be overcome, monopolies and trusts to be regulated, the rights of society as a whole to be asserted to the wealth that depends on its own collective enterprise. ”

“ France has been an Empire and a Republic, and countless rulers and statesmen have appeared and vanished from her national life. During that period the United States has developed into a great power, fought four wars, and the figures of Lincoln and Grant, of Blaine and Garfield, of McKinley and Roosevelt, have left their imprint and passed away. Meanwhile the British Empire has grown and expanded in size and strength and liberty, and Canada, from the feeble infancy into which the Fathers of Confederation tried to infuse the vitality of unity, has become the great Dominion of 1919. ”

“ If you are a day laborer, there were just such workmen as you showing their respect and mourning; if you are a farmer, there were just such farmers as you standing with uncovered heads when the hearse went by. No matter who you are or what your station in life—high or lowly, rich or poor, proud or humble—you were truly represented at the funeral of this man who, because he was so chivalrous and so human, belonged to all classes and to all the people.
Before Ottawa was stirring, the city was already being filled with the gathering crowd. ”

“ His ideal of a great nation was that of a free, contented, united and intelligent people, living at peace with each other and with the world. He sought to break down the barriers of prejudice and bigotry and ignorance that those of different races and creeds and parties might live together on terms of harmony and good will. His love was for people rather than for material things, and he attracted the love of people in return. No man in Canada ever attracted a more generous or more genuine measure of love. ”

“ Let us always bear in mind our duties, for duty is always inherent in right. Our fathers had to labour to secure these rights. Now let us fulfil our part. Three years ago, when visiting England at the Queen’s Jubilee, I had the privilege of visiting one of the marvels of Gothic architecture which the hand of genius, guided by an unerring faith, had made a harmonious whole, in which granite, marble, oak and other materials were blended. This cathedral is an image of the nations I hope to see Canada become. ”

“ His dignified and courtly bearing as he walked to his seat was that of the French Empire period. Like Gladstone, Disraeli and other great men, his dress was always distinctive without being obtrusive. At all times he looked every inch the type of a statesman and a leader that appealed to the imagination of a people. His great strength as a leader lay in his personal charm and manner. Between Sir Wilfrid and his followers there subsisted the most intimate relations. ”

“ For the distinction of the British Empire consists not in the conquests of its arms, but in the reconciliation of its statesmanship, in the generous wisdom which has shown that the British flag can shelter and respect the traditions, the sympathies, and the consciences of races that are not British by blood or history. This is what was in Sir Wilfrid Laurier’s mind when he pointed with pride to the great British act of the present government. (The Great British Act was the Constitution granted to South Africa, or the Transvaal.) ”

“ Let me tell you that for the solution of these problems you have a safe guide, an unfailing light, if you remember that faith is better than doubt and love is better than hate. . . . Banish doubt and hate from your life. Let your souls be ever open to the strong promptings of faith and the gentle influence of brotherly love. Be adamant against the haughty; be gentle and kind to the weak. Let your aim and your purpose, in good report or in ill, in victory or in defeat, be so to live, so to strive, so to serve as to do your part to raise the standard of life to higher and better spheres. ”

“ Sir Wilfrid, as those who knew his ardent sympathy with small nationalities everywhere, can well understand, readily accepted the invitation. For nearly an hour he spoke with all his intense eloquence upon what trust and self-government had done to build up an united and prosperous Canada, to win the loyalty and devotion of French-Canadians, and toward the close, in a peroration of moving eloquence, asked why trust in the Boers would not achieve in South Africa what it had achieved in Quebec. ”

“ I am here to tell you all that we owe to England and to France. What we want before everything is equal rights for everyone, the rights for which England and France have fought, the respect of minorities and the respect of justice and loyalty, so shamefully outraged by Germany.
“Do not forget that the fact that Britain was at war constituted for Canada a new condition of things, which imposed new duties upon the Government, upon the Opposition and upon the whole Canadian people. The moment that Great Britain was at war, Canada was at war. ”

“ There is a crisis, and we must fight on as fought the pioneers of the early days in Canada, the strong, stern men who kept in sight their goal of Canada’s best interests against all difficulties and obstacles. Let our motto be the same as theirs—‘Fortitude in Distress.’ There are breakers ahead, but we shall reach the shore if we fight on. We can bring to pass in Canada what was prophesied by a distinguished American once—that the twentieth century would be the century of Canada.”—Sir Wilfrid Laurier at Winnipeg, December, 1917. ”

“ England expects every man to do his duty! I am going to do my duty, not only by Canada, but by the Empire. Britain, thank God, does not require help from anybody, but if ever the occasion should arise when Britain is summoned to stand against the whole world in arms, she can depend upon the loyal support of Canada and the Canadian people. The Canadian people are free and loyal; loyal because they are free.
The “Old Chief” as he was familiarly, and lovingly called by his followers, occupied a very large place in the affections of the British people. ”

“ So it will be with Sir Wilfrid Laurier. Intrinsically and essentially he was a great man—great in natural gifts, great in vision, great in heart, great in soul, and “as the greatest only are, in his simplicity sublime.” Great men, it has been well said, are like great mountains. One cannot fully judge of their real grandeur at close range. So it may well be that we shall have to interpose some distance of time between Sir Wilfrid Laurier and ourselves before we can gauge, with anything approximating to adequacy, how much a bigger man he was than any of his contemporaries. ”

“ He did not ignore the material side of nation-building. He realized the importance of the country’s natural resources and the necessity for industrial development; but it was of the very nature of the man that he should think most of the happiness of the people. He saw in Canada the opportunity for a wonderful experiment in nation-making. He realized that wealth and prosperity and national glory are not everything. ”

“ Men got back to work. The waste places of the Dominion became settled with thousands of families from the old lands, a home market was procured and the foreign market was again established. An impetus to the forging of the chains of empire was given when Sir Wilfrid in 1897, and again in 1900, granted the British preference. It is now a matter of history how his pilgrimages to England lifted Canada out of the darkness into the light, how this picturesque Canadian figure dazzled the British people and how under his guidance this Canada became a nation in the eyes of the world. ”

“ Old in years, but young in heart, he had an unquestionable faith in the honesty of this New Democracy and in its ability to solve its own problems in its own way. Not long ago, speaking of the fuller life for the people which might be expected as one of the outcomes of the war, he said that the England of the future would not be so picturesque or so dignified as the old England, but that it would be a far happier England for the masses of the people. ”

“ Fifty-five years ago he graduated at law, and on that occasion said: “Two races share to-day the soil of Canada. The French and English races have not always been friends; but I hasten to say it, and I say it to our glory, that race hatreds are finished on Canadian soil. It matters not the language the people speak or the altars at which they kneel.”
The advice he gave the young men of a Liberal Club in Montreal reveals his philosophic temperament: “Let me give you a word of good counsel. During your career you will have to suffer many things which will appear to you as supreme injustice. ”

“ I want the brainy Englishman to remain the Englishman; I want the warm-hearted Irishman to remain the Irishman; I want to take all these elements and build a nation that will be foremost among the great powers of the world. ”

“ When a man becomes satisfied he becomes a Tory. The life of a Liberal is one of unceasing effort towards progress and encouraging development in all that makes for the betterment of mankind. It is easy to read articles of appreciation upon a man when he is gone, but if anyone is so poor in reflection as to overlook the fact that Laurier worked hard all his life he does an injustice to himself and to the record of Sir Wilfrid. ”

“ In the work of reconciliation of race and country he had but one motive and that was the exaltation of Canada and the development of our national and Canadian spirit and the subversion of all petty and sectional antagonisms. He was the true imperialist, who saw this Empire as a voluntary confederation of free nations. Anything different and more centralized he regarded as a menace to this country and to the Empire as a free system. He left every man to his opinion. ”

“ Well, is it not permissible to hope that a day will come, when, instead of facing each other on hostile purpose intent, the men of the two countries, the descendants of the Britons, Angevins and Normans, who invaded England in the eleventh century, and the descendants of the Angevins, Normans, and Britons, who peopled Canada in the sixteenth, will meet together, not to fight, but to hold the grand assizes of peace and commerce? ”

“ Liberalism is ordained of the common people and sprang from a common resistance to the oppression of arbitrary and self-centred rule. Conservatism had its birth in the doctrine of the divine right of kings. The “governing classes” were ordained of God because they themselves arranged the ordination. Liberalism has its principles embodied in the human heart. ”

“ Appeals to classes, to interests, and to sections—whether to farmers, to labour, to the manufacturers, or what not—are not the appeals that Liberalism makes. For that appeal is to all good citizens. It is to the civic sense of the whole country.
Sir Wilfrid Laurier has not had an approach of an equal during the last generation. It is not easy to exactly define in what his personality consisted. ”

“ There was something romantic about this French-Canadian Prime Minister, who took the premier place at Imperial Conferences, and who argued that formal treaties, and hard and fast agreements were not necessary to bind the Empire together.
“What do you think of the English people?” Sir Wilfrid was once asked.
“The English are all right; they are good sports, good losers, and on the whole I have no reason to complain of their treatment during my long term of public life.”
“Are they not somewhat arrogant?”
“All strong people are somewhat arrogant, but they are fair to a great degree,” he replied. ”

“ Everybody recognizes that manufacturing institutions are necessary to build up a great nation and acknowledges that it would be undesirable to devote our attention purely to pastoral pursuits.
The Liberal Government recognizing all these salient factors endeavoured to strike a fair balance and thereby promote the utmost development in all industrial pursuits. The principal thought in their minds was to provide the maximum of profitable labour for the people in all spheres of activity which surely is the truest and highest duty of statesmanship. ”

“ Their successive acts of genuine, constructive statesmanship along practical lines filled the people with hope, and made them gird up their loins for supreme individual efforts in industrial life. The wisdom of their legislation and administration and its accompanying prosperity of the people attracted the attention of the whole world, particularly the Mother Country, and started a flow of much needed capital to develop our great natural resources, a flow which went on unceasingly throughout the Liberal regime, increasing and increasing all the time as our needs were made manifest. ”

“ Sir Wilfrid Laurier’s message to the students of the University of Toronto in 1913 is recalled as one of the most inspiring utterances of his long career. On that occasion he said:
“My young friends, go out into the world to service. Make the highest thought of service your inspiration. Problems there are—big problems. To-morrow and the day after to-morrow, it will be your turn to grapple with them. Serve God and your country. Be firm in the right, as God gives you to see the right. You may not always succeed. Progress is often punctuated with reverses. ”

“ There came the second crisis, and if that second crisis had not been faced with the courage, genius, and imagination of Liberalism, there would have been no men of Sir Wilfrid Laurier’s race and blood at yesterday’s lunch, and the Colony which is proud to count in its ancestry the heroism of a Montcalm as well as the heroism of a Wolfe would have sent no representative to the capital. ”

“ The Liberalism or the Conservatism that continues to be founded on the accident and the prejudice of birth, that believes in “my party and my father’s party, right or wrong,” is the real cause of the discouraging inertia of public opinion that often allows the self-interested few to practically control elections and governments, that prevents or retards reform and makes of a free democracy a bureaucratic tyranny. ”

“ Liberalism is in essence the problem of realizing liberty. It seeks the setting free of the mass of the people in regard to self-government, trade, religion, education, industry, in all the manifold ramifications of society. Conservatism, on the other hand, means at bottom restriction. ”

“ Those who think of political life as a continuous strife, would be surprised indeed, if they knew of the close friendship that existed between Sir Wilfrid and some of his opponents on the opposite side of Parliament. He was elusive in many ways, difficult to measure by our accepted standards. For many years to come the recollection of his personality has impressed itself upon audiences and upon individuals in every part of Canada will remain to keep his memory green. ”

“ Up to his last days Sir Wilfrid used to laugh over this incident, and he often remarked that it was a great pity the debate was stopped, as the entire international situation in Europe might have been affected by the result of that discussion, participated in by the boys of L’Assomption College. “Of course,” every ready with a joke at his own expense, “very few of us knew what a Huguenot was, but that made no difference. We had started in to settle questions affecting the religious future of humanity, and should have been allowed to accomplish our mission.” ”

“ The function of government is to define the rights of the individual in terms of the common good and to think of the common good in terms of the welfare of the individual. In the case of Liberalism the emphasis has usually been on the “common good.” In the case of Conservatism the emphasis is usually on the “individual.” Historically the particular “individuals” have belonged to the authoritative or vested interest classes. That motto has been “what we have we hold.” Liberalism has found its main support in the masses. ”

“ Sir Wilfrid Laurier The length of Sir Wilfrid’s public career alone challenges admiration and respect. He had been almost half a century in active politics; forty-six years a salient figure in Parliament; a leader of the Liberal party for thirty years; Prime Minister for fifteen years. He saw generations of men and generations of statesmen. He saw Confederation in its cradle and watched it grow to nationhood. Since he entered public life England has had three Monarchs, while the figures of Disraeli and Gladstone, of Salisbury and Campbell-Bannerman have passed across its national stage. ”