His speaking tour of the west in 1910 bought Laurier into touch with some interesting people. He came by Melville, Lanigan, Humboldt, and Prince Albert to Saskatoon, with the cheers of Germans, Frenchmen, Italians, Scandinavians, Poles, Armenians, Galicians, Doukhobors, and Russian Jews ringing in his ears. Saskatoon, the village with a hundred people five years before, was now a city of fourteen thousand, an Athens along the Saskatchewan, building its own university. Under a forest of bunting Laurier laid the cornerstone and told the crowd of a lad he had met that morning by the name of John Diefenbaker. "You have some remarkable newsboys here. This one talked to me for a half an hour at the railway station and then said, 'Well, Mr. Prime Minister, I can't waste any more time. I have to deliver my papers.'"
Joseph Schull, Laurier: The First Canadian (1965) in Jack McCleod, The Oxford Book of Canadian Ancedotes, (Oxford University Press: 1988).
