LEGISLATIVE ENERGY OF HINCKS' GOVERNMENT. 579 Provinces. The remarkable feature of the Session was its railway legislation. Fifteen bills were placed on the Statute Book, which included the Act relating to the Grand Trunk Railway. Mr. Hincks also passed an Act enabling municipalities to borrow money on the credit of the Province for local improvements, railways, bridges, and macadamized roads, and the like: an Act which had an incalculable influence in developing the country, but which undoubtedly led to much extravagance. The legislation of 1852, greatly increased the liabilities of the two Provinces, and led to the annual deficit of succeeding years. The whole debt of Canada at the close of 1852, was $22,355, 413; the revenne, $3,976,706; the expenditure, $3,059,081. This prosperous state of things raised the credit of the country, and Canadian six per cents began to be quoted at sixteen per cent premium on the London Stock Exchange. On the 10th of November, the Legislature adjourned until the 14th of February, 1853. The sleepless energy of Mr. Francis Hincks' Government is attested by the fact that ere the Parliament adjourned, the Governor assented to one hundred and ninety-three Bills, of which twenty-eight reflected the railway mania of the hour. The Parliamentary Representation Act raised the number of members in the Assembly to a figure more in accordance with the progress the country had made since Lord Sydenham's time. The constituencies were redistributed, and the representation increased from eighty-four to one hundred and thirty-sixty-five for Upper and sixty-five for Lower Canada. After the termination of the sitting Parliament, Toronto would return two members instead of one; Montreal and Quebec three members each; some of the smaller towns had townships attached to them for the purpose of representation; nor was Parliament less busy in the spring. When the House rose in June, Lord Elgin was able to dwell on a Municipal Act; a School Act; an Act to regulate the practice of the Superior Courts; with many other useful measures. Meanwhile, the Imperial Parliament had empowered the Canadian Legislature to deal with the Clergy Reserves as they might think fit, saving only existing interests and annual stipends of clergy during the lives of the incumbents. The last days of the session passed away amid the excitement caused by Father Gavazzi's lectures in Quebec. There was a riot. The mob went in search of Mr. Brown, on whom they wished to wreak their vengeance. The riot led to an informal discussion in the House of Assembly. Gavazzi now proceeded to Montreal, where his lectures gave rise to still greater rioting than disgraced Quebec. On the 9th of June he was lecturing in Zion Congregational Church, when a vast crowd attacked the building, notwithstanding the presence of a strong force of military and police. Stones flew, pistols were fired; the audience broke up. But while they went homewards, the military, acting, it was alleged under the orders of Mr. Charles Wilson, the Mayor of the City, fired into them, killing five persons and wounding many more. The Mayor was a Roman Catholic. The Protestant public received the impression that the Government did not make a sufficiently thorough inquest into his conduct, and their indignation knew no bounds. The Protestant sense of injustice tended to swell the stream of Mr. George Brown's rising popularity in Upper Canada. He and Lyon Mackenzie were now shelling the Ministerial breast-works with much skill and energy. Hincks had made the mistake of not surrounding himself with ability. Sullivan, Blake, Baldwin, Lafontaine, had dropped away, and the only firstclass man in the Government was Hincks himself. When, in July, on the death of Sullivan, Richards, the Attorney-General, appointed himself to the vacant judgeship, the Ministry became still further attenuated. The people never like to see weak men ruling them. Rumours got abroad that there was no intention of dealing immediately with the Clergy Reserves. These rumours received colour from letters of Hincks and Rolph, and from a speech of Malcolm Cameron. Worse rumours still gathered round the declining Administration. Charges of corruption were insinuated and sometimes openly made. People talked about stories of investments made by men who a few months before were not worth a cent or a sou. One Cabinet Minister had invested $100,000 in real estate. He had purchased, it was said, Castleford on the Ottawa, above Bytown, for $27,500; a private residence near Quebec for $30,000. He had a large interest in a purchase of $40,000 made near Montreal. One thing was certain. The members of the Administration were known to have been individually poor men; some of them embarrassed: yet though living in a style DISCONTENT AMONG THE REFORMERS. 581 commensurate with their position, they could afford to make investments! All this was very extraordinary. A similar phenomenon was presented by their subordinates, who, from being pinched and starved, as the Apothecary in Romeo and Juliet, now appeared in all the sublime magnificence of small capitalists. Such was the tone held by correspondents of hostile journals. In Canada, opposition papers do not spare ministerial character, and the moment a man takes a portfolio, he is assailed as if he had picked a pocket. The people might, therefore, have paid little attention to these charges of corruption had not damaging facts been brought out in the chancery suit in which Mr. Bowes, the Mayor of Toronto, was the defendant. It was proved that Mr. Hincks and Mr. Bowes had purchased $250,000 worth of the debentures of the Ontario capital at a discount of 20 per cent, and that the Premier had a Bill afterwards passed which raised the debentures to par. Other charges followed. Public lands at Point Levi and elsewhere had been bought by Ministers with the view of being re-sold to railway corporations. The public had taken alarm and nothing was too bad to be believed. Nor unhappily did the Parliamentary inquiry which took place in 1853 rehabilitate the Hincks Administration in the mind of the people. It must be said, however, that Hincks, when his Government fell, was still a poor man. Some of his colleagues, perhaps certainly Malcolm Cameronhad amassed money. Dissatisfaction was created among the Reformers by the appointment of Tory magistrates. Mr. James Harvy Price was so indignant on the subject that he wrote a letter to the papers complaining that he had been included in the list of new magistrates, while so many of those whose names were in a draft he had prepared when in the Government, were left out. The excitement about the Gavazzi riots was kept up. The relations of some of those killed in consequence of the supposed order of the Mayor, served him with notices of action laying damages at five and ten thousand dollars. Mr. Drummond, the Attorney-General East and the Premier Mr. Hincks were seen publicly in company with him. The popular sentiment of a large portion of the community may be gathered from the fact, that he was hissed at the St. Hyacinthe races. The enemies of the Government accounted for the conduct of Ministers by saying that there was a good deal of Ministerial paper at one of the banks with Wilson's endorsement. Mr. Drummond, a Catholic frishman, made an excellent speech immediately following the Gavazzi riots; but he displayed little energy as Attorney-General in bringing the offenders to justice. The Solicitor-General for Lower Canada, M. Chauveau, was as apathetic as his chief, and was described by the Opposition press as a young gentleman who wrote novels himself and trusted to others for his law. The Irish period, that period during which the foundation of our present constitution was laid, during which nearly all the great reforms were passed, was about to pass away, to give place to what may be not inappropriately termed the Scotch period, during which the leading forces have been the Hon. George Brown and Sir John A. Macdonald. The former was now swelling the ranks of opposition and with sleepless activity leading a charge against the Government, in which Hincks alone represented the genius and energy which had within a few years achieved so much. man. Mr. Brown has from the first been a remarkable man. He has not in recent years done justice to himself as a politician, but perhaps he has not been therefore less useful to the country. Indeed he insists that he has retired from politics. The rising generation can hardly realize the restless fiery ambition of Mr. Brown twenty years ago. Then he was full of hope, and his sanguine mind laid the future under all sorts of tribute. At that time he was still a rising There were heights yet to climb. By reason of his energy and ability, and as yet undivided heart, the George Brown of twenty years ago was, apart from any paper, a formidable man, and calculated to do great harm to whatever Ministry he opposed, but more especially to a Reform Ministry. A Reform Ministry he could attack in flank with guns on which they were in the earlier hours of battle accustomed to rely. When indignant-and he was often indignant-he wrote and spoke like a man who had been from youth up in one long towering passion. This gave him great force. His style was that of rapids rather than rivers, and seemed to break and bear all before it with resistless fury. Of late years, MR. BROWN'S HOSTILITY TO THE GOVERNMENT. 583 Mr. Brown has been and might well be content with the influence given him by his paper, and the real though not nominal headship of a great party. When in the Rape of the Lock, the guardian Sylph of the heroine explains to her the transition of fine ladies on their death into Sylphs, she says :— "Think not when woman's transient breath is fled That all her vanities at once are dead: And tho' she plays no more, o'erlooks the cards.” This might be parodied in the case of party leaders, and where a party leader owns the leading organ of his party, I don't see how his abdication is possible. It was of course necessary, if possible, to account for Mr. Brown's hostility to the Government, on grounds which would blunt the point of his attack. The Ministers and their leading supporters were feasted in Upper Canada during the months succeeding the rising of Parliament. At a dinner at Berlin, Mr. David Christie, the present Speaker of the Senate, said that Mr. Brown's hostility to the Hincks' administration arose from the fact that the Government would not take him in, or even recognise his newspaper as the Ministerial organ.* Mr. George Brown, in his newspaper, characterised this as an infamous falsehood, whereupon Mr. Christie appealed to Mr. Wm. MacDougall, then editor of the North American. Mr. MacDougall wrote that what Mr. Christie said was strictly true. Mr. Brown denounced both as in the same boat, and stigmatized the Government organ as the "Pope's brass band." In modern times, when we no longer have the duel, over the decline of which Mr. Goldwin Smith sometimes utters a pensive sigh, though of course he would "I wish to say a word or two about the union of Reformers, which led to the formation of the present Government, in reply to what has been said by Mr. Brown. He has stated that he dropped the matter because he had no confidence in the arrangements. The reverse is the case-he was dropped because confidence could not be placed in him. (Loud laughter and applause.) Even then he would have gone with us had he been continued as the organ. On being informed that a union of parties had been effected, the first question he put was, 'What about newspapers?' From the reply made to this query, he argued that the Globe would not be the organ; he then said, ‘I'll knock the bottom out of it-I'll smash it up.' As yet he has not been able to do this, but he has tried hard to effect his object."-Speech of Mr. David Christie, M.P. at Berlin, |