Viewed in retrospect most of the domestic occurrences of the Laurier regime lose their importance as the years recede; it will owe its place in Canadian political history to one or two achievements of note.  Laurier’s chief claim to an enduring personal fame will rest less upon his domestic performances than upon the contribution he made towards the solution of the problem of imperial relations.  The examination of his record as a party leader in the prime minister’s chair can be postponed while consideration is given to the great services he rendered the cause of imperial and international Liberalism as Canada’s spokesman in the series of imperial conferences held during his premiership.

Laurier, up to the moment of his accession to the Liberal leadership, had probably given little thought to the question of Canada’s relationship to the empire.  Blake knew something about the intricacies of the question.  His Aurora speech showed that as early as 1874 he was beginning to regard critically our status of colonialism as something which could not last; and while he was minister of justice in the Mackenzie ministration he won two notable victories over the centralizing tendencies of the colonial office.  But Laurier had never been brought into touch with the issue; and when, after assuming the Liberal leadership, he found it necessary to deal with it, he spoke what was probably the belief latent in most of the minds of his compatriots:  acceptance of colonial status with the theoretical belief that some time, so far distant as not to be a matter of political concern, this status would give way to one of independence.  “The day is coming,” he said in Montreal in 1890, “when this country will have to take its place among the nations of the earth. ...  I want my country’s independence to be reached through the normal and regular progress of all the elements of its populations toward the realization of a common aspiration.”  Looking forward to the issues about which it would be necessary for him to have policies, it is not probable that he put the question of imperial relationships very high.  Certainly he had no idea that it would be in dealing with this matter that he would reveal his qualities at their highest and lay the surest foundation for his fame.

In 1890 Laurier, as we have seen, believed the Canadian future was to be that of colonialism for an indefinite period and then independence.  In 1911, the year he left office, in a letter to a friend he said:  “We are making for a harbor which was not the harbor I foresaw twenty-five years ago, but it is a good harbor.  It will not be the end.  Exactly what the course will be I cannot tell, but I think I know the general bearing and I am content.”  The change in view indicated by these words is thus expounded by Professor Skelton:  “The conception of Canada’s status which Sir Wilfrid developed in his later years of office was that of a nation within the empire.”  But between the two quoted declarations there lay twenty-one years of time, fifteen years of prime ministership and the experiences derived from attendance at four imperial conferences in succession—­another record set by Laurier not likely ever to be repeated.