The role which Laurier had to play in the successive conferences was not one agreeable to his temperament.  It gave no opening for his talent.  It supplied no opportunities for the making of the kind of speeches at which he was a master.  It kept him from the centre of the stage, a position which Sir Wilfrid Laurier had no objection to occupying.  It obliged him to courses which, in the setting in which he found himself, must at times have seemed ungracious, and this must have been a trial to a nature so courtly and considerate.  To the successive proposals that came before the conference, togged out in all the gorgeous garb of Imperialism, he was unable to offer constructive alternatives; for his political sense warned him that it was twenty years too soon to suggest propositions embodying his conception of the true relations of the British nations to one another.  There was nothing to do but to block all suggestions of organic change designed to strengthen the centralizing of power and to await the development of a national spirit in Canada to the point where it would afford backing for a movement in the opposite direction.  So Laurier had to look pleasant and keep on saying no.  To Mr. Chamberlain’s proposal in 1897 “to create a great council of the Empire,” No.  To the proposal made at the same time for a Canadian money contribution to the navy, No.  To these propositions and others of like tenor urged in 1902 by Mr. Chamberlain with all his persuasive masterfulness, No.  No naval subsidy because it “would entail an important departure from the principle of Colonial self-government.”  No special military force in the Dominion available for service overseas because it “derogated from the powers of self-government.”  To the Pollock-Lyttleton suggestion of a Council of advice or a permanent “secretariat” for an “Imperial Council,” No, because it “might eventually come to be regarded as an encroachment upon the full measure of autonomous, legislative and administrative power now enjoyed by all the self-governing powers.”

Sir Wilfrid’s policy was not, however, wholly negative, for he was mainly responsible for the formal change in 1907 in the character of the periodical conferences.  The earlier conferences were between the secretary of state and representatives of “the self-governing colonies.”  They were colonial conferences in fact and in name—­a fact egregiously pictured to the eye in the famous photograph of the conference of 1897, revealing Mr. Chamberlain complacently seated, with 15 colonial representatives grouped about him in standing postures.  In 1907 the conference became one between governments under the formal title of imperial conference, with the prime minister the official chairman, as primus inter pares.  It was the first exemplification of the new theory of equality.