mind was typically French with something also Italianate about it, an inheritance perhaps from the long-dead Savoyard ancestor who brought the name to this continent.  Later when Laurier had proved his quality and held firmly in his hands the reins of power, the fatuous Ontario Liberal explained him as that phenomenon, a man of pure French ancestry who was spiritually an Englishman—­this conclusion being drawn from the fact that upon occasion the names of Charles James Fox and Gladstone came trippingly from his tongue.  The new relationship between the Liberals and Laurier was entered upon with obvious hesitation on the part of many of the former and by apparent diffidence by the latter.  It may be that the conditional acceptance and the proffered resignation at call were tactical movements really intended by Laurier to buttress his position as leader, as most assuredly his frequent suggestions of a readiness or intention to retire during the last few years of his leadership were.  But, whatever the uncertainties of the moment, they soon passed.  Laurier at once showed capacities which the Liberals had never before known in a leader.  The long story of Liberal sterility and ineffectiveness from the middle of the last century to almost its close is the story of the political incapacity of its successive leaders, a demonstration of the unfitness of men with the emotional equipment of the pamphleteer, crusader and agitator for the difficult business of party management.  The party sensed almost immediately the difference in the quality of the new leadership; and liked it.  Laurier’s powers of personal charm completed the “consolidation of his position,” and by the early nineties the Presbyterian Grits of Ontario were swearing by him.  When Blake, after two or three years of nursing his wounds in retirement, began to think it was time to resume the business of leading the Liberals, he found everywhere invisible barriers blocking his return.  Laurier was, he found, a different proposition from Mackenzie; and there was nothing for it but to return to his tent and take farewell of his constituents in that tale of lamentations, the West Durham letter.  The new regime, the new leadership, did not bring results at once.  The party experienced a succession of unexpected and unforeseen misfortunes that almost made Laurier superstitious.  “Tell me,” he wrote to his friend Henri Beaugrand, in August, 1891, “whether there is not some fatality pursuing our party.”  In the election of 1891 not even the theatricality of Sir John Macdonald’s last appeal nor the untrue claim by the government that it was about, itself, to secure a reciprocal trade arrangement with Washington, could have robbed the Liberals of a triumph which seemed certain; it was the opportune revelation, through the stealing of proofs from a printing office, that Edward Farrer, one of the Globe editors, favored political union with the United States, that gave victory into the hands of the Conservatives.  But their relatively