In the general election of 1896 the Liberal strategy had been to give the party managers in the English provinces an apparent choice of the best weapons, but with all these advantages the results showed that they had barely held their own. The majority came from Quebec where Laurier had apparently to face the heaviest odds. The natural inference was not lost upon Laurier. If he was to remain in power he must look to Quebec for his majority. A majority was necessary and he must get it where it was to be had. This decision was at first probably purely political. The consequences were not fully foreseen, that to get this support a price would have to be paid—by the Liberals of the other provinces. Still less was it foreseen that the overwhelming support of his own people would become not only politically essential to Laurier but a moral necessity as well—something which in time he felt, by an imperious demand of the spirit, that he must hold even though this allegiance became not a political asset but a liability. Gradually, perhaps insensibly at first, in opposition possibly to his judgment, certainly to his public professions oft repeated, he came to regard it as necessary to so shape party policy as always to command the approval of French-Canadian public opinion. Sir Wilfrid lived to see, as the culmination of 20 years of this policy, the French and the English-Canadians more sharply divided than they had been for 80 years. Such is the capacity of the human mind for self-deception that he could see in this divergence nothing but the proof that his life's work had been destroyed by envious and designing men.
THE FOUNDATION STONE OF POLICY
Quebec in turning Laurierite did not turn Liberal. This was the factor hidden from the public eye that governed the future. The Laurier sweep of Quebec in 1896 was the result of a combination of the Bleu and Rouge elements. The old dominant French-Canadian party had been made up of Bleus and Castors—factions bitterly divided by differences of temperament, of outlook and belief, and still more by desperate personal feuds between the leaders. When the coming of responsible government broke up the solidarity of the French-Canadians they separated into three groups, the controlling factor in each case being religious belief. The Castors were ultra-clerical and ultramontane; the Bleus inherited the tradition of Gallicanism; the Rouges imported and adapted the anti-clericalism of European Liberals. Various influences—the brilliance and resourcefulness of Cartier's leadership and antipathy to Rouge extremism among them—kept Bleu and Castor in an uneasy alliance. This alliance began to disintegrate when Laurier rose to the command of the Liberals. There was a steady drift from the Bleu to the Liberal camp—by this time the old definition of "Rouge" was under taboo; and in 1896 the Bleus moved over almost in a body. This was not an altogether instinctive and voluntary movement; it was suggested, inspired, successfully shepherded and safely delivered.
Tarte's confidence that Laurier could win Quebec was not based wholly upon faith in the power of Laurier's personal appeal. He was himself a Bleu leader brought into accidental relations with the Liberals. His breach with the Conservatives began as one of the unending Castor-Bleu feuds. His knowledge of the McGreevy-Connolly frauds gave him the power, as he thought, to blow the Castor chief, Sir Hector Langevin—a cold, selfish, greedy, domineering, rather stupid man—into thinnest air, thus opening the road to the leadership of the French-Conservatives to his friend and leader, the brilliant, unscrupulous and ambitious Chapleau. He over-estimated his power. The whole strength of the government at Ottawa was at once concentrated in keeping the lid on that smouldering cauldron of stench and rottenness, the system of practical politics of that day. The Conservative chiefs tried to suppress Tarte and he refused to be suppressed—there was not a drop of coward's blood in his veins. Then they set to work to destroy him. He sought a refuge and he found it—in parliament, to which he was elected in 1891 as an Independent as the result of an arrangement with Laurier. As he used to say, it was a case of parliament or jail for him.
Inevitably, in following up his charges in parliament, Tarte was thrown into more and more intimate relations with the Liberal leaders. He knew that for him there was no Conservative forgiveness; as he was wont to say: "I have spoiled the soup for too many." It was not long before Sir John Thompson could congratulate Laurier, in one of the sharpest sayings parliament ever heard, upon having among his lieutenants—"the black Tarte and the yellow Martin." For ten years he remained Laurier's chief lieutenant in Quebec, but he never in any sense of the word became a Liberal, though in 1902, just before he was thrown from the battlements, he busied himself in reading lifelong Liberals out of the party. Chapleau, who was Tarte's confidant and ally, though he was also a member of the Dominion government, became Lieutenant-governor of Quebec and retired to Spencer Wood, but not to forget politics among its shades. When the peculiar developments of the Dominion campaign of 1896 made it evident that Conservative victory in Quebec under the virtual leadership of the bishops meant the permanent domination of the Castors, the whole Bleu influence was thrown to the Liberals.
Professor Skelton's life of Laurier does not take us much behind the scenes. It is in the main a record of political events, with comments upon Laurier's relations to them. Laurier's letters, mostly to unnamed correspondents, are of slight interest, but to this there are a few notable exceptions. There are letters between Laurier, Tarte and Chapleau of the greatest political value. They make clear to a demonstration, what shrewd political observers of that day surmised, that there was a definite political understanding between these three men. This explains the composition of the Quebec delegation in the Laurier government. Apart from Laurier there was in it no representative of French Catholic Liberalism, unless the purely nominal honor of minister without portfolio given to C. A. Geoffrion is to be taken as giving this representation. C. A. did not put the honor very high. "I am," he said, "the mat before the door." Tarte, a Quebecker and a Bleu, became Montreal's representative at Ottawa. Disappointment among the Liberals led first to rage and then to rage plus fear as Tarte with the magic wand of the patronage and power of the public works department, began to make over the party organization in the province. Open rebellion under François Langelier broke out in December: "A coalition with Chapleau," Langelier informed the public, "is under way." But the rebellion died away. The Laurier influence was too strong. Langelier was quite right in his statement. The coalition movement at that time was far advanced. The letter from Chapleau to Laurier, bearing date February 21, 1897, quoted by Professor Skelton, was that of one political intimate to another. Take this paragraph as an illustration: "The Castors in the battle of June 23rd lost their head and their tail; their teeth and claws are worn down; even breath is failing for their cries and their movements and I hope that before the date of the Queen's jubilee we shall be able to say that this race of rodents is extinct and figures only in catalogues of extinct species." The reference to the coming extinction of the Castors had relation to the then pending provincial elections as to which he made certain references to political strokes which "I am preparing." Associated with this Laurier-Tarte-Chapleau triumvirate was a fourth, C. A. Dansereau, nominally postmaster of Montreal, actually the most restless political intriguer in the province of Quebec. Dansereau had been the brains of the old Senecal-Chapleau combination which had dominated Quebec in the eighties. Just what Laurier thought of the company he was now keeping was a matter of record for he had set it forth in a famous article in L'Electeur in 1882 entitled "The Den of Thieves," which led to L. A. Senecal, the Bleu "boss," prosecuting him for criminal libel. Laurier stood his trial in Montreal, pleaded justification, and after a hard fought battle won a virtual triumph through a disagreement of the jury with ten of the jurymen favorable to acquittal.
LAST ROUND WITH THE BISHOPS
Little wonder that Francois Langelier, his brother Charles, and other associates of Laurier in the lean years of proscription were consumed with indignation that Laurier should pass them by to associate with his former enemies. They did not realize the political necessity that controlled Laurier's course. Laurier had great need to hold his new allies for his position in Quebec for the first year or so of office was precarious. The Manitoba school question had still to be settled. Laurier was political realist enough to know that he would have to take what he could get and this he would have to dress up and present to the public as his own child. He knew that the bishops, chagrined, humiliated, enraged by their election experience, were only waiting for the announcement of settlement to open war on him. It would then depend upon whether or not they were more successful than in June in commanding the support of their people. In Laurier's own words: "They will not pardon us for their check of last summer; they want revenge at all costs."
The real fight, it was recognized, would be in Rome. Thither there went within two months of the Liberals taking office, two emissaries of the French Liberals, the parish priest of St. Lin, a lifelong, personal and political friend of Laurier, and Chevalier Drolet, one of the Canadian papal Zouaves, who had rallied to the defence of the Holy City twenty-six years before. There followed swiftly two more distinguished intermediaries, Charles Fitzpatrick, solicitor-general of Canada, and Charles Russell, of London, son of Lord Russell of Killowen. Backing them up was a petition to the pope signed by Laurier and forty-four members of parliament, protesting against the political actions of the Canadian episcopate. Nor did the Canadian hierarchy lack representation in Rome. While this conflict of influence was in progress at Rome, the terms of the Manitoba school settlement were made public in November, 1896. The settlement embodied substantial concessions in fact, but Archbishop Langevin and his fellow clerics at once fell upon it. Langevin denounced it as a farce. To Cardinal Begin it appeared an "indefensible abandonment of the best established, most sacred rights of the Catholic minority." A regime of religious proscription was inaugurated. Public men were subjected to intimidation; Liberal newspapers were banned, among them L'Electeur, the chief organ of the party. The bishops destroyed themselves by their violence. Rome does not lightly quarrel with governments and prime ministers. By March Mgr. Merry Del Val was in Canada as apostolic delegate; and though care was taken to save the faces of the bishops, their concerted assaults upon the government ceased. Laurier had never again to face the embattled bishops, which is not the same thing as saying that they ceased to take a hand in politics. As Professor Skelton truly remarks: "The Archbishop of Montreal, Monseigneur Paul Bruchesi, who kept in close touch with Wilfrid Laurier, soon proved that sunny ways and personal pressure would go further than the storms and thunderbolts of the doughty old warrior of Three Rivers." With the bishops silenced, Laurier's foes in Quebec found the issue valueless to them. Their political associates from other provinces, after the disappointment of 1896, would not consent to a revival of the question. One of the party leaders declared he would not touch it with a forty-foot pole. Tupper formally erased it from the party calendar. The question remained quiescent; but Laurier always remained in fear of its re-emergence; and with cause. The resentments it left went underground and later had a revival in the passionate zeal with which the Quebec clergy embraced the faith of nationalism as preached by Bourassa. In one respect the school question and its settlement proved useful. It was the exhibit unfailingly displayed to prove upon needed occasions that the charge was quite untrue that in directing party policy Laurier was unduly sensitive to Quebec sentiment. In effect it was said: "Laurier made Quebec swallow in 1896; now it is your turn"—a formula which finally became tedious through repetition.