From a Photograph] [by Lafayette.
THE RT. HON. SIR WILFRID LAURIER,
Premier of Canada.
Born at St. Lin, Quebec, 1841. Educated for the Law, and called to the Bar at Montreal in 1861. In 1871 he entered the Legislature of Quebec, and, three years later, the Dominion Parliament. Up to this time his speeches had been delivered in French; he now spoke in English with equal eloquence. He became Minister of Inland Revenue in 1877, and Premier in July 1896. He is of French descent, a Roman Catholic, and a strong supporter of Imperial unity.
Nor were the decorations confined to the streets. Every errand boy wore his Jubilee favour days before the event. From every whip fluttered a little pennant of the national colour. Scarcely a bicycle passed that had not on its handle-bar gay streamers of red, white, and blue, and even the practical top-hatted city man sported in his button-hole the colours which rule the world.
Long before these preparations were completed, the invasion of London by visitors from the country, from America, and from the Continent had commenced. |Influx of Visitors.| The streets, always pretty-well congested with the great press of traffic, were now almost impassable. Vast good-humoured crowds surged up and down the principal thoroughfares, and travelling from one part of the town to another became a matter of increasing difficulty. Where all the people were accommodated it would be difficult to say. Certain it is, that all the rooms in the better-known hotels were taken weeks beforehand, and the landladies of Bloomsbury reaped a rich harvest.
In addition to the vast amount of accommodation afforded by the houses lying along the route, every available coign of vantage was seized upon for the erection of a stand. Churches were lost to view beneath vast tiers of red upholstered seats reaching half way up their towers, and what had been known as Charing Cross Station was buried from sight under a mammoth thousand-seated stand. |Grand Stands.| “Can our City Princes not have noticed,” asks a writer in the Daily Mail with quaint humour, “that somebody has stuck a lot of carpentry on the very pediment of the Royal Exchange? Somebody else has boarded up the Law Courts, and barristers and solicitors stoop and dive in as if they were going to clean out their chicken houses. The Houses of Parliament are all scaffolding too, and at first, seeing no reports in the papers, I thought they had been abolished while I was away.... Even to take a penny boat at Westminster you have to go under a sort of triumphal arch of joinery.... They are actually changing all London from building into furniture.”
Photographed at the Crown Studios, Sydney.