Anglo-American Memories

by George W. Smalley

CHAPTER XXVIII
SIR WILFRID LAURIER AND THE ALASKA BOUNDARY

I

The name of Empire-builder is used freely of late, perhaps too freely. It is so great a name that it ought to be kept for the great men, for the real builders and creators; for Clive, for Rhodes, and their like. There is another class, somewhat more numerous, but not much, who keep together the great Imperial patrimony which others have handed down to them. They might perhaps be called Wardens of Empire, of whom Sir Wilfred Laurier may stand for an example.

My memories of Sir Wilfrid Laurier go back to those years when the Alaska boundary dispute between Canada and the United States approached its crisis. Lord Minto was then Governor-General of Canada; Mr. McKinley was President of the United States; Mr. Hay was the American Secretary of State. There was strong feeling on both sides. It appeared later that it was stronger in Canada than in the United States, but in both countries there was hot blood and in both the controversy turned in part upon gold. We were carrying on under a modus vivendi; a state of things which tended to tranquillize the minds of men. But the modus vivendi did not cover the whole of the Alaskan territory then in dispute, and there was anxiety both at Washington and Ottawa.

I went to Ottawa on a visit, spent a week at Government House, and there first came to know Sir Wilfrid Laurier, who had been Prime Minister of the Dominion since 1896. First impressions are best and I set down my first impressions, though they do not much differ from the last, and though, in one way, they were wholly deceptive and misleading.

For Sir Wilfrid came so softly into the drawing-room at Government House that you would never have thought him a leader of men. He had something of the ecclesiastic about him, and something of the diplomatist. The first perhaps suggested itself because he was a Roman Catholic, and to that faith all my Puritan prejudices were alien. As I think it over, I know of no fact in the current history of the British Empire more significant than the fact that the greatest Dominion of this great British and Protestant Power should have been governed for thirteen years by a Roman Catholic and a Frenchman. That is Catholicism in its broadest sense, and not in the sense of mere loyalty to a Pope and to a particular Church. Taking the population of Canada as something over six millions to-day, nearly one half are Roman Catholics. The other half are implacable Protestants. How are they to live together in amity? But they do, and one of the reasons of this amity is Sir Wilfrid Laurier. If he were a leader of men in the military sense, or as Chatham was a leader, one of two things would have happened. Quebec and Ontario would have quarrelled, or Sir Wilfrid would have ceased to be Prime Minister. Booted and spurred and in the saddle—not so is Canada to be ruled, nor are the conflicting interests and sentiments of the eastern and western sections of the great Dominion so to be harmonized. But the smooth subtlety of the priest and the suavity of the diplomatist are means of conciliation. Thus, I imagine, has Sir Wilfrid worked.

Thus does he present himself to the company at Government House. He glides into the room. He is not humble; far from it, but his is perhaps the pride which apes humility. Sweetness enters with him, and light, if I may once more unite rather overworked substantives which have come down to us from Swift. He does light up the room as he enters, and the faces of those who are already in it. His coming is a delight to everybody and now we know what is before us.

His manner as he receives and returns the greetings of his friends is distinctly French. After all the guests have arrived and the Governor-General and Lady Minto have entered the room, Sir Wilfrid's homage to the representative of the sovereign and to Lady Minto has an essentially Parisian elegance. Nobody would mistake him for an Englishman by birth or race. He is English politically and officially; none more loyal to the King of England and England herself than he; but personally he is French; taller, however, than the average Frenchman, and of a larger frame. The head is well set, the forehead broad and high, a soft light in the eyes till something is said which sets them burning, the mouth firm, and the whole face, in contour and expression, quite as much that of the man of thought as action. There are not many men of whom another man uses the word charm but Sir Wilfrid is one; and women use it of him more freely still.

He talked easily and well. He speaks English and French with equal fluency, with finish also, and is never at a loss for an idiomatic phrase. Yet the English is not quite the English heard to-day in London, nor is his French Parisian. The Canadians have, in addition to many other kinds, the patriotism of language. Quebec has its own French, the French of the eighteenth century or of Touraine to-day; and Toronto its own English, also now and then slightly archaic. Yet in Toronto dwells, and has long dwelt, the first of living writers of living English. I mean Mr. Goldwin Smith; the fires of his intellectual youth still, at eighty-three, unquenched, and by another paradox the English author of the best political history of the United States. Canada does not like his Canadian views, but they remain his views, just as he, for all his Canadian residence remains English.[[1]] Perhaps it is part of Sir Wilfrid's diplomacy that he practises both these varieties of French and English speech. He takes liberties with each language, as a man who is master of both is entitled to, and in each his soft tones are persuasive.

[[1]] Mr. Smith died, June, 1910.