Addressing a great gathering of new foreign settlers in western Canada as Premier, in welcoming them and bidding them partake of the advantages of British citizenship, he feelingly and significantly alluded to this step in his career.
“I live myself in this land,” said he, “as an example of the breadth and freedom of British institutions. It is an illustration of that thing upon which the British system is based. I am not of English blood. My ancestors were of the French race. Yet I am acknowledged as the leader of the Parliament of Canada, irrespective of the blood in my veins. Twenty-two years ago I took the leadership of the Liberal party. Friends came to me after Mr. Blake’s retirement and offered me the leadership. I hesitated. I told them that I thought it was not fitting that I, coming from the race of the minority, worshipping with the minority, should accept it. In reply they told me that the Liberal party knew neither race nor creed. They said: ‘Whoever is worthy of our land is worthy of our leadership.’ And I accepted.
“The race is open to all. Any man may come to this land who is willing to work. It matters not who his father was or from what land he came, or at what altar he bows, he can aspire to the best and the highest this land has to offer. Whatever a Briton-born can claim he may claim. British institutions know no difference whatever.”
He had great differences to reconcile, and he had more especially to meet and overcome the presumptions which would naturally bar the way to leadership and popularity in the case of a public man whose native tongue was French, but who aspired to rule a community predominantly English in blood and speech.
It is a tribute to the greatness of his character and to his memory to reflect that even in Opposition he was the great outstanding figure in the political life of the country. He did not need office to clothe himself with the dignity that came to a public man. And he was equally a political force in or out of office. There was a glamor that hung over him that attracted men to him. He was the very incarnation of the political aspirations of thousands of men and women, who never saw him in the flesh. To his own immediate followers and political friends he was the proverbial guide, philosopher and friend.
It was with great misgivings that Sir Wilfrid accepted the leadership of the Liberal Party, when Edward Blake gave it up. He realized that for a young man of French-Canadian extraction and a Roman Catholic in religion, the road would be difficult for him to traverse. And truth to say, not a few of the Liberals felt dismayed at the prospect. But Sir Wilfrid was not long in showing the people of Canada that they had in him a leader who was guided solely by a desire to do his best for his country no matter who would suffer.
When he took office in 1896, Canada was in a state of business stagnation. Factories were closed, thousands of men were walking the streets for lack of work, and thousands more were fleeing to the United States as from a pestilence. Soup kitchens were kept busy doling out food to those who could pay for none, and it is a fact that idle men in some cities, had to stay in the house for fear of being arrested as vagrants. This was the condition of affairs when Sir Wilfrid took the reins of office.
The change that came over the country was magical. People took new heart. Factories began to fire up. 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.