Early in 1917 he was offered coalition by the Premier. He refused. Laurier knew that coalition meant conscription, and conscription meant dragooning Quebec.
It came home vividly to the old leader in Opposition, whatever it may have done had he been in power, that to advocate conscription would drive Quebec into the camp of Bourassa from which he and Lomer Gouin had between them managed to save a large majority of French-Canadians. The struggle of Bourassa to oust Laurier began with the Boer War. It was fated not to end until either leader or the other should quit. Before the war Bourassa was flamboyant and defiant. After it began he was openly and brazenly disloyal, when the doctrines he preached were inflammably acceptable to people uneducated to citizenship in so conglomerate a thing as Empire. The easiest thing in the world is for a high wind to sweep a prairie fire. The war and Bourassa together had the power to sweep Quebec, had Laurier and Gouin shown signs of yielding to the demand for conscription. I am told that Laurier personally believed in conscription but saw this terrible danger of disrupting the nation over Quebec. The war only had staved off the Irish question, a conference on which was in session when war was declared. Laurier dreaded the spectre of a second Ireland in Quebec. He knew all the forces and how they would operate. By his own methods, mistaken or otherwise, he had spent most of his life to achieve unity. He dreaded to see that unity imperilled. I think he would have been glad to see Quebec enlist as Ontario and other Provinces had done. That was impossible. Conscription was a menace in Quebec to the man who had failed to estimate the jack-boot menace in Germany, but who had not failed to oppose the idea that navalism in England was as bad as militarism anywhere.
No judgment of Laurier, when it comes to be adequately made by the historian, can fail to take account of this sentiment in an old leader to whom the unity of Canada had become an obsession far transcending his original passion for the solidarity of Empire.
The Winnipeg convention of 1917 was a piece of almost calculated cruelty on the part of men who should have known that the old chief's day was politically done. His party which for years he had penetrated with his personality was slipping into disunion. Vaguely he knew that the western wing of it was almost gone over to Radicalism such as he could not control. But in Ottawa there was an even more direct split. There, conscriptionist Liberals called the Convention for the purpose of proclaiming win-the-war independence of Laurier and considering Coalition on its merits. But the western Liberal machine captured it by a fluke. For a few days the old chief dreamed that the West had rallied to his standards. Then he awoke to the reality that even in the east he was head of a divided house.
The man who in 1916 had been painted as a ruler of men found in that summer of 1917 the Win-the-War Liberals deserting him, some of them with sobs. They loved him well. He was the old king. Conscription was now the issue. The Government had decided upon it late in 1916. In 1917 the Military Service Act was brought down in the House. Laurier knew at what it was most directly aimed—Quebec. He fell back on the ruse of invoking the Militia Act which called for defence only. There was no defence. He knew it. He moved for a Referendum, knowing that in the West, sore over the Wartime Elections Act, and in Quebec, and in the absence of the soldier vote it might carry by a majority sufficient to defeat the Government, to force an election and send him back to power. He was beaten. Conscription became the law. To enforce it came the Coalition. The election was held. The Liberals were again beaten—partly by men from their own ranks.
Still the old king hung on. He was now too old to let go. Even the Coalition might fail. Or the war might be ended And then——? The last fighting act of his life was to call the Ottawa Liberal Convention, of the men who had not abandoned his colours; the men for whom he was not still holding the open door. But a few months before he died here he was "up on his toes," as George Graham said of him, sending out battle calls for some election that must come now. The war was over; the army coming home. The Coalition's day was "done." Those stalwarts must return to the fold.
But most of them came not. There was still work for them to do, and surely no haste for an election.
What? No more elections for Laurier? Not one more chance, after all the waiting, for him to finish his work? Poor old infatuate! splendid even in his illusions. There was no work for Laurier to do now. There was no room for him to do it if there had been. There were few to follow him except in Quebec—for in his dotage he would not believe that the West had so forsaken him.
In a few months he was dead. And when dead, once again men forgot their political opinions and for a brief while somehow worshipped the memory of the man whose life was almost the coming true of a dream, whose work was never done, whose evening of life was a tragedy. And case-hardened politicians who had borne the burden and the heat of the day with Laurier, wept.
But the power of Laurier is not dead. In the long perspective of history the figure of this great Canadian, with his "sunny ways" and his bewildering Atlas load, will stand out vividly when many of his successors will be scarcely visible in the haze.