having much business on their hands," says Benjamin Franklin, "do
not like to take the trouble to consider and carry into execution
new projects." This is a political law to which all governments
conform. Even the great reforming administration of Gladstone which
took office in 1868, had earned five years later the famous jest of
Disraeli: "The ministers remind me of one of those marine landscapes
not very unusual off the coast of South America; you behold a range
of extinct volcanoes; not a flame flickers upon a single pallid
crest."

Fifteen years of Liberal rule in Canada furnish a complete field for
the study of the party system under our system. In 1896 a party
stale in spirit, corrupt and inefficient, went out of office and was
replaced by a government which had been bred to virtue by eighteen
years of political penury. It entered upon its tasks with vigor,
ability and enthusiasm. It had its policies well defined and it set
briskly about carrying them out. A deft, shrewd modification of the
tariff helped to loosen the stream of commerce which after years of
constriction began again to flow freely. There was a courageous and
considered increase in expenditures for productive objects. A
constructive, vigorously executed immigration policy brought an ever
expanding volume of suitable settlers to Western Canada which in
turn fed the springs of national prosperity. This impulse lasted
through the first parliamentary term and largely through the second,
though by then disruptive tendencies were appearing. By its third
term the government was mainly an office-holding administration on
the defensive against an opposition of growing effectiveness. And
then in the fourth term there was an attempt at a rally before the
crash. The treatment of the tariff question, always a governing
factor in Canadian politics even when apparently not in play, is an