One evening in 1900, a round-faced young Canadian named William Lyon Mackenzie King walked alone on the Palatine hill in Rome. He was threshing out a personal problem. A graduate in arts, law, economics and political science from three universities (Toronto, Chicago, Harvard), he had accepted an appointment from Harvard as a lecturer. While he was in Rome a cable had come from Canada offering him the job of helping to organize a Department of Labor in the Canadian government.
It was an event of some consequence in Canada's history that young Willie King decided that night to switch to government service....
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