The

"which His Excellency could constitutionally extend to them." memorandum concluded with a reference to the "unprecedented and unparliamentary" course of the House in voting want of confidence in the absence of newly created ministers.

The Governor in his reply enumerates all the reasons he can with the diligence of an extreme party man. He admits being "bound to “deal fairly with all political parties." He was, however, only called to deal with the men he had himself called to his aid. They were more than a "political party," they were his constitutional advisers. The mere fact that the vote against late ministers did not, as he says, "assert directly any want of confidence in them," was no reason why he should refuse his confidence to the men he had called to fill their places. It might, as has been stated, be a reason why he should call on some one else to form a government. He might have known, and did know, that the elements hostile to Mr. Brown when he asked him to assume the duties of office were strong enough to vote want of confidence in him. It was the duty of His Excellency to see that the action of the House towards the man who had accepted the trust at his hands was contrary to " parliamentary courtesy." He was bound, as a ruler and as an honest man, to see that no impediment should be thrown in the way of his new advisers getting fair play in submitting their policy to the country through the medium of a new election. He does not in a single paragraph discuss his duty as a constitutional governor towards his ministers. On the contrary, he urges that the business is not finished yet; that items of the estimates are not passed; that the Hudson Bay resolutions were not passed; the time of the year inconvenient; pressure of money crisis not passed away; that an election took place only last winter; and the cost and inconvenience of an election.

He then devotes the remainder of his paper to a carping criticism of the ministerial paper. What assurance could he have, he asks, that

a new election would in its results differ from the last? He asserts that a general election should be avoided until more stringent laws are made. If it could be "conclusively established," he says, that Mr. Brown's measures respecting the sectional difficulties "between Upper "and Lower Canada would prove a specific." He also wished it conclusively established that the members of the present council were the only men to allay the jealousies so unhappily existing! Imagine a demand from the Crown to "conclusively establish" the exact result of some amendment to the law or constitution at a moment when there was no time to do more than indicate the line to be taken. To be more emphatic, he gravely adds that "the certainty, or at any rate "the great probability, of the cure by the course proposed, and by that

"alone, would require to be proved!" Mr. Brown's reply to this gubernatorial tirade was simple, short, and dignified; he resigned for the reason that the advice of the council was refused.

Many of Mr. Brown's friends considered that the Governor's paper should have been answered in detail, so as to place him clearly and at once in the wrong. There was a great temptation to do so, for a more vulnerable and scandalous state paper it would be difficult to find in modern times. It was not necessary, so far as public opinion was concerned, for the minister to criticise this paper. His Excellency's conduct provoked a feeling of great indignation amongst liberals and lovers of fair play of all shades of opinion, and it was only defended by rabid party organs on his own political side. The transaction will be ever remembered as a shameful violation of constitutional usage on the part of a Governor-General, apparently entered upon for the benefit of the Tory party. The following extract from the Globe of August 5th gives a fair view of the feeling of the people generally regarding the Governor-General's conduct :

Sir Edmund Head has chosen deliberately to place himself in an attitude of hostility towards his advisers and the people. Influenced by the secret counsels of a cabal, he has openly insulted the men to whom he had entrusted the administration of affairs; he has preferred obedience to back stairs dictation to the constitutional requirements of his ministers. The convenient veil of executive neutrality is thrown off at last; and he stands revealed the active and unscrupulous partisan of men who are the convicted apologists of frauds the most gross. The demeanour of His Excellency throughout the ministerial crisis is unintelligible, except on the hypothesis that his determination was to play into the hands of the Macdonald-Cartier alliance. Mr. Macdonald was allowed to patch a cabinet and dissolve: Mr. Brown is not permitted to appeal to the people for judgment on a cabinet and a policy entirely new. He has displayed a contempt for the decency common to gentlemen. We refer to the observance of the sincerity and frankness which are the main strata of honourable conduct. . Examine point after point in the transactions of the last eight days, and say whether any other conclusion can be arrived at than that the resignation of Mr. J. A. Macdonald, the sending for Mr. Brown, the refusal of Mr. Brown's constitutional demand, and the final resort to Mr. Galt, are not all parts of a deep laid plot. We think that we are safe in prophesying that the result will be most damaging to the Governor and his allies. Do Sir Edmund Head and his closet conspirators believe that they have strengthened themselves in any respect by the plot they have apparently ended?

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It was commonly alleged that Sir Edmund Head was, during these two eventful days, consulting with leading men on the Tory side of party politics. There may be no proof of this available, but it would not be difficult to believe that the man who could act with such perfidy to his own ministers would not hesitate to perpetrate the further crime of consulting their enemies as to the best means of destroying them.

CHAPTER XI.

THE "DOUBLE SHUFFLE."-LIBERAL CONVENTION OF 1859.

By the unconstitutional course pursued by parliament, and the unfair course of the Governor-General, Mr. Brown and his colleagues were at once out of office and out of parliament. Mr. Brown again appealed to his Toronto constituents for re-election, where he was opposed by the Hon. J. H. Cameron, supported by the whole influence of the government and Government House, and such influences with a city constituency were very great. In the meantime, the old government were recalled, when the political trick known as the "double "shuffle" was performed, whereby the ministers were enabled to avoid going to their constituencies for re-election. The Independence of Parliament Act provided that a minister resigning one office and accepting another within one month would not require re-election. In this case all the ministers accepted other offices than those held before their resignation, and again changed to those they were to keep. It was said at the time that before midnight they were all sworn in to the changed offices with all due solemnity, and at the same sitting, after midnight, resigned such offices and were sworn into the others. Ministerial oaths are administered by the Governor-General in person. must have been a melancholy sight to see the Governor winking at what was a violation of the spirit of the law, and-until a judgment was delivered affirming its legality-was believed to be contrary to its letter, and contrasting his conduct then towards his own political friends with the treatment he had given to Mr. Brown. It need only be added that, except with extreme partisans, his conduct found no defenders, while the liberals held his conduct and memory in execration, and few, if any of them, again accepted any invitation to Government House until a new incumbent reached it. How different was Lord Dufferin's conduct towards Mr. Mackenzie in 1873, under precisely similar circumstances.

It

The Toronto election was fought with great bitterness on both sides: ministers thought they were sure of defeating Mr. Brown, and made desperate efforts to accomplish this, while his supporters were naturally indignant at the action of the Governor and his ministers, and worked all the harder on that account. Mr. Brown succeeded, however, in carrying the day, and sat for Toronto until the dissolution in 1861.

The conspirators had failed in one important part of their programme. Mr. Brown continued his agitation for representation by population, having already impressed the public mind so thoroughly with its justice and reasonableness, that much of the discussion after this period was devoted to the plan by which it could be carried out. The members of the Brown-Dorion government were pledged to propound a plan for dealing with the question, but of course had no time to mature the scheme. Mr. Laberge, his Solicitor-General (east), had afterwards some misunderstanding with Mr. Brown as to the extent of the agreement, and some correspondence ensued on the subject.

Mr. Brown has been frequently assailed because of an alleged hostility to Mr. Baldwin by the small class of conservatives who call themselves Baldwin reformers. In fact, there was no hostility existing. There was not a sentence or word in Mr. Brown's articles or speeches which could be complained of by that gentleman or his friends. Criticisms on his public course on subjects of great importance to the country were undoubtedly indulged in towards the end of his parliamentary life. Such criticisms were not only just and fair, but -in the public interest, in the interest of the reform party-they were unavoidable. He was at the time, in that sense, public property, and had he continued to sit in parliament after 1851, he must necessarily have taken his share of censure from reformers in common with Mr. Hincks and others. In this year Mr. Baldwin was persuaded to emerge from his retirement and become a candidate for the Legislative Council. He failed to announce any views of public policy, or in any way to show his sympathy with the late reform ministry, which had a few weeks before been made the victims of an unconstitutional

exercise of gubernatorial power. Mr. John Hillyard Cameron had barely finished his contest with Mr. Brown in East Toronto, when he signed a requisition to Mr. Baldwin to bring him out as a candidate for the upper House. In this Mr. Cameron was joined by several other leading conservatives. The following extracts on the subject are from an article in the Globe of September 3rd, 1858 :

We would not willingly utter a sentence depreciatory of Mr. Baldwin. Recognizing the value of much of his public service, estimating highly the integrity of his character and the excellence of his private life, according to him most sincerely credit for fidelity to his convictions, whatever they may be, we have no inclination to say a word that can be construed into personal suspicion or personal disrespect. And though of late years we have worked in opposition to the party with whom Mr. Baldwin is understood to have sympathized, we have never entertained any opinion derogatory to his personal worth. We differed from him politically; as a man we never mentioned him without respect.

If, then, Mr. Baldwin desires success as a candidate for the council, it is due to the public, due to himself, that he should afford the means of

determining his position in regard to the existing position of public affairs. This is rendered the more necessary, since we find amongst his advertised requisitionists names that are certainly not entitled to confidence. Despite of inclination, we are constrained to seek information of a practical character when he reappears associated with Mr. John Hillyard Cameron, Mr. George Platt, Mr. James Beaty, Mr. John Crawford, and other representatives of the same school, all gentlemen whose political affinities are such that no reformer can consistently co-operate with them for the accomplishment of any party object. Under any circumstances, this contest will assume a party complexion.

In what light, moreover, does he view the recent ministerial crisis? Does he approve of the course pursued by the Governor-General in his dealings with the Brown-Dorion administration? Does he hold that His Excellency violated the spirit of the constitution when he rejected the reasonable counsel of his sworn advisers, and attempted to dictate the action of parliament on questions before it? Does he approve or condemn the unlawful and unconstitutional proceedings of the Cartier-Macdonald government in accepting and transferring offices without appealing to their constituents for re-election?

On the appearance of this article Mr. Baldwin withdrew from the contest, and the same parties who brought him out brought out the Hon. George Allan, and elected him as the conservative candidate. No person can be justly blamed for declining to allow personal excellences to atone for political error. It is sufficient to recognize such excellences, but the political failings must be exposed after such recognition. This was done by Mr. Brown as a journalist, and nothing more. The veteran statesman made no complaint himself of ill treatment, and doubtless he felt less offended by fair criticisms on his public acts than at the use made of his name by men who shared all his mistaken views, but who possessed none of his strict integrity.

The population of western Canada in 1858 was estimated as being 1,300,000, while that of Lower Canada was only estimated at 1,000,000, showing practically that 300,000 were without representation. It was also shown that the most important legislation regarding Upper Canadian matters was forced on the latter by a Lower Canadian majority. This state of affairs could not possibly last, and the treatment given by Governor and parliament to the only ministry which had determined to grapple with the evil intensified the demand for some constitutional changes. This demand was thenceforth scarcely opposed even by conservatives.

Mr. Brown called a meeting of the reform members of both Houses for the 23rd of September, 1859, to consider the state of affairs. This meeting decided to call a convention of the liberal party on the 9th of November. In response to this call 570 delegates met on the appointed day and discussed very fully the mode of remedying the existent evils. The result was the passage of certain resolutions affirming the failure of the existing union, the non-remedial character of the double majority plan, and that the true remedy lay in a federal