religious minorities, and for the protection of freedom of transit and equitable treatment of the commerce of other nations.

6

Such stipulations will be perceived to form an important section of the Peace Treaties. They are to be found in the Treaties with Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Turkey. Consequently, Art. 2 of the treaty with Poland, guarantees to all inhabitants the elementary rights that are secured in every civilised State.' Clauses 3 to 6 are designed to ensure that all the genuine residents in the territories now transferred to Polish sovereignty shall be assured of the full privileges of citizenship. Arts. 7 and 8 assure equality of rights to racial, linguistic, or religious minorities. Art. 9 provides for education of the children of a linguistic minority through the medium of their own language, and for the enjoyment of an equitable share of public educational funds by such minorities. Arts. 10 and 11 confer special protection on the Jews of Poland. Art. 12 places the foregoing stipulations under the guarantee of the League of Nations, and may not be altered without the consent of a majority of the Council of the League.

Chapter II contains economic clauses designed to facilitate reciprocal diplomatic and consular representation, for ensuring freedom of transit of persons, goods, and of postal, telegraphic, and telephonic services. Poland by Art. 18 agrees to apply to the river system of the Vistula the régime applicable to international waterways set out in the Peace Treaty with Germany, and Art. 19 provides for the adhesion of Poland to certain international conventions.

The remaining three subsidiary treaties are framed on the same model, with certain necessary modifications. Thus in the Treaty with the Serbo-Croat-Slovene State, Art. 10 provides for the special interests of Musulmans. Art. 12 recognises as binding on the new State all treaties, conventions, and agreements between Serbia and any of the Principal Allied and Associated Powers which were in force on Aug. 1, 1914. In the Treaty with CzechoSlovakia, Arts. 10 to 13 provide for the fullest degree of self-government of the Ruthene territory south of the Carpathians, compatible with the unity of the CzechoSlovak State. The Treaty with Rumania has an Art. 7

by which Jews inhabiting any Rumanian territory who do not possess another nationality are to be recognised as Rumanian nationals ipso facto and without the requirement of any formality. And as Arts. 8 and 9 correspond to Arts. 7 and 8 of the Treaty with Poland, their rights as Rumanian citizens are fully assured to them. Art. 11 accords to the communities of the Saxons and Szecklers in Transylvania local autonomy in regard to scholastic and religious matters subject to the control of the Rumanian State. Finally, Art. 16 corresponds, as regards the river system of the Pruth, with Art. 18 of the Polish Treaty.

The problems discussed in the volume which stands third on our list relate exclusively to the territorial settlements made by the Peace Treaties (excepting the Turkish Treaty, to which America was not a party). It contrasts favourably with 'The History' inasmuch as it is the work of two writers, each of whom undertook one half of the chapters of which it consists. A general unity of style and treatment accordingly pervades the whole, which is more than can be said of the larger book.

No one will doubt that universal compulsory military service enabled the militarist Great Powers gradually to increase the numbers of their trained men, and eventually to realise the theory of 'the armed nation,' which led to the war being conducted on such a ruinous scale. It must be regretted, therefore, that the History' has a whole paragraph devoted to the glorification of this.

'There is only one vital argument against universal military service, that it increases the chances of war by developing the martial instinct of nations, and by placing in the hands of ambitious rulers a powerful instrument for imposing their will on weaker Powers.'

Perhaps it will be alleged that, most, if not all, of the autocratic rulers having disappeared from the stage, the danger of their example being followed has vanished. But history teaches that nations are just as easily led away by the love of domination as individual rulers, and this passion is also found to animate individuals in a position to aim at its gratification.

ERNEST SATow.

Art. 2.-TWO DOMINION STATESMEN.

I. SIR WILFRID LAURIER.

SIR WILFRID LAURIER, as was the case with at least two of his predecessors in the premiership of the Dominion of Canada-Macdonald and Mackenzie-began his political career with neither material nor social advantages in his favour. Macdonald was the son of an emigrant, who was a wage-earner at Kingston, Ontario, almost to the end of his working life. Mackenzie was a stonemason, who, like the parents of Macdonald, emigrated from Scotland; and he was at work at his trade until he became actively interested in politics. Laurier was the son of a land surveyor, Carolus Laurier, who earned only a meagre income by the practice of his profession. He was born in 1841, at St Lin, a picturesque and typically French-Canadian village, in the county of L'Assomption. His mother, who was of Acadian descent, died when Laurier was only four years old.

Until Laurier made his first communion, he attended the parish school at St Lin. The next three years of his life were passed at a Protestant school at New Glasgow, a small town eighteen miles from his birthplace. At the end of his schooling (1854) he entered the College of L'Assomption. He remained there for the full classical course of seven years. At the age of twenty, he began his short career at the Bar, entering the office at Montreal of Rudolphe Laflamme, who was afterwards a member of the Liberal Administration at Ottawa (18741878). While in Laflamme's office, Laurier took the law course at McGill University, and achieved some distinction as a student. He was admitted to the bar in 1864, and in 1880 was raised to the rank of Q.C.

Laurier practised law first in Montreal, and later at Arthabaska. He was, however, at no time really prominent among the lawyers of the Province of Quebec; nor was he ever, from the point of view of income, more than moderately successful in his profession. Ten years after the completion of his studies at McGill, he was elected to the House of Commons (1874), and politics thereafter were his absorbing interest. During the greater part of his life he lived on his salary ($1250) as a Member of Parliament, with the addition, during his

Premiership, of a Premier's salary ($7500), and during his last phase, as Leader of the Opposition, of the salary of $5000 paid since 1904 to the holder of that position.

Laurier's career in Dominion politics extended over forty-five years. It is a career, in this respect, without parallel in the history of Canada. It is, moreover, without parallel in the history of the Oversea Dominions, as regards its permanent influence on the relations of all the Dominions with Great Britain. Laurier had no part in Confederation. He was beginning his career as a lawyer when the British North-America Act (1867) was passed by the Parliament at Westminster. But no Canadian statesman of his time had more influence on the relations of the Dominions and Great Britain in the twenty-five years that preceded the Great War, than the French-Canadian Premier of 1896–1911.

The long career of Laurier at Ottawa easily divides itself into three well-marked periods. The first extends from 1874 to 1896. Except for four years (1874-1878) the Liberals were in opposition during this period; and for nine of these years (1887-1896) Laurier was leader of the Opposition in the House of Commons, and national leader of the Liberal party. The second period extends from the general election in 1896, to the defeat of the Liberals, on the Taft-Fielding reciprocity agreement, at the general election in September 1911. This was the Laurier era, as the period from 1867 to 1891 had been the Macdonald era. It was the era during which Laurier left his mark on the relations between the Dominions and Great Britain, and, through the British preferential tariff of 1897, on the foreign commercial policy of Great Britain, and also on the trade policy of four of the five Oversea Dominions. The third period extends from the formation of the Borden Government, in the autumn of 1911, to Laurier's death in February 1919. It was marked by the division of the Liberal party over the Conscription Act, and generally by disruption and misfortune without parallel in the history of Liberalism in Canada.

Laurier was thirty-three when, in 1874, he entered the House of Commons. He was returned at the general election in that year by Drummond and Arthabaska, the riding in which he had practised as a lawyer;

in which he achieved the only prize in his profession that ever fell to him-election as batonnier by the Bar of the county; and in which also he had unsuccessfully attempted to establish a Liberal newspaper, published in the language of the province. It is the riding, moreover, in which Laurier established his first home; for in 1868 he was married to Miss Zoe Lafontaine, and until the end of his life his country home was in Arthabaska.

Politics were not a new interest with Laurier when he first entered the House of Commons as a supporter of the Liberal Government of 1874-1878-the Government which had been returned to power as the result of the widespread popular indignation at the grave scandal arising out of the granting, by the Macdonald Government, of the first charter for the Canadian Pacific Railway. In his earlier years in Montreal, and as a lawyer and a newspaper editor at Arthabaskaville, Laurier was a Radical, at times an extreme one; and it was in this period of his career that his Radicalism, especially in the domain of ecclesiastical politics, brought him into collision with the authorities of the Catholic Church.

Before he was elected to Parliament he had served one term of three years (1871-1874) in the Lower House of the Legislature at Quebec. It was his first and only service in provincial politics. In one important respect it was a helpful and memorable term; for, while he was a member of the Legislative Assembly, he greatly distinguished himself by a speech that was remembered to his credit as long as he lived. It was on the relations of French-Canadians in Quebec with the people of the sister provinces-Ontario, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia and on the relations of the Dominions with Great Britain.

In 1871, the year in which Laurier made what became known as his' United Canada' speech, Confederation was still in some degree an experiment. Not all the old British North-American provinces at this time had thrown in their lot with the newly-created Dominion. Nova Scotia was still complaining that it had been hustled into Confederation against its will; British Columbia was driving a hard bargain with Ottawa; and there were still some unsettled and disturbing questions, mostly affecting provincial rights, arising out of Confederation as