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 narrow majority would not have kept them in office a year in view of the death of Sir John A. Macdonald in June, 1891, and the stunning blows given the government by the "scandal session" of 1891, had it not been for two disasters which overtook the Liberals: The publication of Blake's letter and the revelation of the rascalities of the Mercier regime. Perhaps of the two blows, that delivered by Blake was the more disastrous. The letter was the message of an oracle. It required an interpretation which the oracle refused to supply; and in its absence the people regarded it as implying a belief by Blake that annexation was the logical sequel to the Liberal policy of unrestricted reciprocity. The result was seen in the by-election campaign of 1892 when the Liberals lost seat after seat in Ontario, and the government majority mounted to figures which suggested that the party, despite the loss of Sir John, was as strong as ever. The Tories were in the seventh heaven of delight. With the Liberals broken, humiliated and discouraged, and a young and vigorous pilot, in the person of Sir John Thompson, at the helm, they saw a long and happy voyage before them. Never were appearances more illusory, for the cloud was already in the sky from which were to come storm, tempest and ruinous over-throw. THE TACTICS OF VICTORY