Sir Wilfrid Laurier took to his feet in the Commons on this date in 1898 to pay tribute to his fallen hero, William Gladstone, who had passed into history only days before. The latter had, of course, served four-times as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and was one of the greatest Liberals of his era. Laurier visited Gladstone when the Canadian traveled across the Atlantic to celebrate Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897.
“It is no exaggeration to say that he has raised the standard of civilization,” Laurier told his fellow MPs during his tribute to Gladstone. “Indeed, since the days of Napoleon, no man has lived whose name has travelled so far and so wide over the surface of the earth; no man has lived whose name alone so deeply moved the hearts of so many millions of men. This last half-century in which we live has produced many able and strong men who in different walks of life have attracted the attention of the world at large, but of the men who have illustrated this age, it seems to me that in the eyes of posterity four will outlive and outshine all others: Cavour, Lincoln, Bismarck, and Gladstone.”
Laurier then paused briefly. “Mr. Gladstone undoubtedly excelled every one of these men,” he said. “He had in his person a combination of varied powers of the human intellect rarely to be found in one single individual.”
Laurier famed tribute to Gladstone was yet another speech that bound Canadians to their first-ever French Canadian Prime Minister.
Arthur Milnes is an accomplished public historian and award-winning journalist. He was research assistant on The Rt. Hon. Brian Mulroney’s best-selling Memoirs and also served as a speechwriter to then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper and as a Fellow of the Queen’s Centre for the Study of Democracy under the leadership of Tom Axworthy. A resident of Kingston, Ontario, Milnes serves as the in-house historian at the 175 year-old Frontenac Club Hotel.