When Sir Wilfrid reached the Cathedral, another honour awaited him. The
Lord Mayor of London and other dignitaries, no matter how gorgeous their
attire, were sent around to the smaller north or south doors; but Sir
Wilfrid’s carriage was directed by the police to none other than the
Royal and crimson carpeted entrance at the main west door, where the
Bishop of Ripon received him on behalf of the Anglican Church. As he
passed up the steps into the Cathedral, his uniform, slashed with the
blue band of a Knight of the Grand Cross of St. Michael and St. George,
came into full view, and made him a most notable figure.
Some of the notable expressions regarding Sir Wilfrid’s achievements in
1907, in Great Britain were penned by the late Sir Charles Tupper,
ex-Premier of the Dominion of Canada and formerly for some years High
Commissioner at London, England. Writing in the Nineteenth Century, May,
1907, Sir Charles expressed himself as follows:—“My distinguished
successor in the Prime Ministership of Canada has during these past few
memorable days asserted with a persuasiveness all his own that the
British Empire ‘rests upon foundations firmer than the rock and as
endurable as the ages.’”
* * * * *
A noted English writer has said: “I have seen and heard many colonial
public men, but Sir Wilfrid is the only one who would have become a
national figure had he been transplanted to Westminster. I have never
seen him in the Canadian Parliament without wishing that instead he was
at Westminster, for then it would be easy to decide as to the leadership
of the Liberal party.”
* * * * *
In office or out of office, he is the most considerable figure in
Greater Britain. Such was the estimate of Sir Wilfrid Laurier, made by
one of the premier political observers of England, Mr. John L. Garvin.
* * * * *
On the occasion of Sir Wilfrid’s sixty-sixth birthday the London Morning
Post said: “No other statesman could have accomplished so much in the
short space of a life-time as the great French-Canadian who combines an
imaginative eloquence unsurpassed in British history with the charm and
courtesy of a cultivated Frenchman.”
The above writer enumerated some of the outstanding measures of the
Laurier administration and added: “Measures wherein a business capacity
was not less necessary than imagination and courage.”
Moreover, Sir Wilfrid Laurier, the French Roman Catholic Premier of a
self-governing federation in which British Protestants are in the
majority, has expressed more faithfully and more truly than any
statesman who has spoken yet, the temper of the new imperial patriotism
fostered into self-consciousness by the South African war.
* * * * *
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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