and the north of England, the mechanics of Alsace, the weavers of Flanders, and the artisans of Germany, rather than endeavoring to recruit solely agricultural immigration. The agricultural population of Quebec, he acutely insisted, would never be increased from outside. "Our climate is too severe, and the development of our lands too costly and difficult. The children of the soil will not be deterred by these obstacles, but the stranger will simply pass through our territory and locate on the rich prairies of the West." The FrenchCanadians themselves should take on a more industrial character. "We are surrounded," he declared, "by a strong and vigorous race who are endowed with a devouring activity and have taken possession of the entire universe as their field of labor. As a French-Canadian, sir, I am pained to see my people eternally excelled by our fellow-countrymen of British origin. We must frankly acknowledge that down to the present we have been left behind in the race. We can admit this and admit it without shame, because the fact is explained by purely political reasons which denote no inferiority on our part: after the conquest, the French-Canadians, desirous of maintaining their national inheritance intact, fell back upon themselves, and kept up no relations with the outside world. The immediate result of this policy was to keep them strangers to the reforms which were constantly taking place beyond their boundaries, and fatally to shut them up within the narrow circle of their own old views. On the other hand, the new blood which was poured into the colony came from the most advanced country under the sun in point of trade and industry. They brought with them the civilization of their native land, and their strength was ceaselessly renewed by a steady current of immigration, which added not only to their numbers, but to their stock of information and their ideas."

Mr. Laurier's maiden speech doubtless had its share of party rhetoric and of an opposition member's licensed criticism; yet it was in matter a distinct achievement for a man of thirty, broad in its sweep and remarkably free from partizan recriminations, while the

grace and persuasiveness of his manner held high promise.

It was, however, in the debate, in 1871, on the abolition of dual representation that Mr. Laurier most clearly showed his strength. The constitutional issues involved were then as ever more congenial to him than economic questions. His training as a lawyer, his reading in the classics of French radicalism and English liberalism, and his position as a member of a minority relying on constitutional guaranties for the preservation of its rights, gave a leading place in his thinking to considerations of justice and of the legality in which justice was assumed to be enshrined.

The system of dual representation, by which the same men could hold seats both in the Federal Parliament and in the legislature of their province, had not been made a positive feature of the confederation scheme. It had developed because no law forbade it and because of the dearth of men of first-rate caliber. Each party was keen to be represented by its strongest men both at the federal and at the provincial capital. Sir John Macdonald, with his theoretical preference for a legislative rather than a federal union of the dominion, and his practical desire to have his hand on the provincial machine, was particularly strong in support of the dual system. It had its strong features, raising the level of capacity in the local legislatures, and in some cases conducing to harmony between federal and provincial policy. Yet there were still stronger grounds of objection on principle, and despite the short sessions which were then the rule, the practical inconvenience of adjusting the meetings of Parliament and of legislature was increasingly felt.

In discussing the general question of constitutional limitations, Mr. Laurier gave interesting evidence of the influence on his thought of the social-contract doctrines of the older radical individualist tradition:

When a people accept a constitution, they make the sacrifice of a portion of their liberty, a generous sacrifice by which each gives up something belonging to himself

individually for the benefit and security of the whole. When a people accept a constitution, they trace out themselves the circle which they assign to their liberties; they say to themselves, in a sense: this space belongs to me; here I can speak, think, act; I owe no account of my words, my thoughts, my acts to any one except to my own conscience and to God; but as regards society, here begins its domain and ends mine, and I shall not go further. Still, like all human works, constitutions are not perfect. New horizons, which were not before perceived, are constantly opening up, and unsuspected abuses are discovered. It is then the duty of the legislature to step in and enlarge or contract, according to needs and circumstances, the circle within which the institutions of the country move.

Passing to the specific issue, he showed convincingly that dual representation led to practical inconvenience and inconsistency of policy, and particularly that it tended to confuse federal and provincinal issues and subordinate provincial to federal policy. For Quebec the system was particularly dangerous. "With the single mandate, Quebec is Quebec; with the double mandate, it becomes merely an appendix to Ottawa."

The motion to abolish dual representation was defeated by a small margin on this occasion, but was carried the next session, only to be rejected in the Legislative Council. In the meantime the province of Ontario had abolished the system in 1872. In 1873 the Dominion Parliment made the prohibition general by providing that members of any provincial legislature should be ineligible for the Federal House.

Mr. Laurier's success in the provincial legislature led to demands that he should go to the Federal House, where the Liberal contingent from Quebec sadly needed strengthening. Ottawa was farther from Arthabaska than Quebec, and the federal sessions were slightly longer, covering two or even three months, blessed contrast with the six- and eight-month sessions of later days, but these considerations did not weigh heavily against the wider opportunities of the dominion field. He became the Liberal candidate for the fed

eral constituency of Drummond-Arthabaska in the general election of 1874, and was returned by a majority of 238.

The political situation at Ottawa had suddenly been transformed. At confederation Sir John Macdonald seemed assured of an indefinite lease of power. Though a late convert to the federation project, he had rendered invaluable service in carrying it through, and had reaped from its success more popular prestige and political strength than any of his rivals. The entrance of new provinces into the circle gave opportunities for new party combinations and new personal alliances in which the master strategist of Canadian politics was in his native element. The general feeling that the administration in power should be given a fair opportunity to launch the new ship of state and guide it on its trial voyage counted strongly in his favor. His chief antagonist, George Brown, led a divided party, and had lost much of his force and fire as the result of a serious illness in 1862. The leading New Brunswick Liberal, Leonard Tilley, and two of Brown's Ontario lieutenants, William Macdougall and William Howland, had remained with Macdonald on the ground that the coalition formed to effect confederation should persist to carry it on. Charles Tupper, the strongest personal force in Maritime politics, now that Joseph Howe was failing, had formed a close political and personal alliance with Sir John.

For five years this grouping of forces proved invincible. Then shortly after the general election of 1872 had returned the Conservatives again to power, though with lessened strength, a storm arose from an unexpected quarter and swept the Government from office. One of the Liberal leaders, Lucius Huntington, brought before Parliament charges of gross corruption in connection with the granting to Hugh Allan of Montreal and his associates the charter for the construction of the railway which was to be built to the Pacific coast in fulfilment of the terms under which the far-Western province of British Columbia entered confederation in 1871. The charges were flatly denied, but after a stormy controversy they were proved to the hilt. Allan had ex

His colleague, Letellier de Saint-Just, was a man of average ability, and of much more than average determination and sense of dignity; he had won a place by his persistent fighting of the Rouge battles in eastern Quebec since 1851, and was destined, after he, too, resigned in 1876 to take the LieutenantGovenorship of Quebec, to become the occasion of a famous constitutional crisis. Télesphore Fournier, who held in turn the portfolio of internal revenue, justice, and the post-office, was a man of greater capacity, who for years had carried on a vigorous, but hopeless, fight in the Quebec district against Conservative and clerical, only winning his way to the Commons when too firmly set in his ways to be able to repeat in the House the success he had won at the bar. Fournier resigned in 1875 to become a member of the Canadian Supreme Court, which he had taken the leading part in establishing. Dorion's place was taken by Félix Geoffrion, who proved a very good administrator, and when a serious illness forced him to resign in 1876, Rodolphe Laflamme, Mr. Laurier's onetime preceptor in the law and another uncompromising Rouge champion, succeeded, only to meet Fournier's difficulty of adjusting himself to the ways of Parliament. Letellier's place as Minister of Agriculture was taken by C. A. P. Pelletier, an urbane gentleman who found his place at the same time in the Senate. When Fournier retired, Mackenzie, hard put for a successor, made a choice difficult to reconcile with his own character and his party's traditions. For thirty years Joseph Cauchon had been active in public life, vigorous in parliamentary debate, and in his newspaper, "Le Journal de Quebec," as slashing, aggressive, and powerful as George Brown himself. He had been an uncompromising Conservative and a thoroughgoing unholder of clerical claims until shortly after confederation, when disappointed ambition and quarrels over railway projects set him adrift from his old friends. He was a man of unquestioned force, and still a power with the clergy, and Mackenzie's action in offering him a cabinet seat might have been defended had it not been for his reputation for corruption.

A parliamentary inquiry in 1872 had branded him as secretly interested in government contracts with the Beauport Asylum while himself a member of the provincial legislature. Sir John Macdonald might have appointed him, and the opposition could not have shouted"Robbery and corruption!" louder than they were already and always doing; but for God-fearing, broad-phylacteried Liberals, and particularly a man so personally upright and so impatient of dishonor as Mackenzie, the appointment was a fatal blunder. It was with relief that many Liberals saw Cauchon accept the Lieutenant-Governorship of Manitoba in 1877, and make way for Wilfrid Laurier.

Aside from difficulties as to leadership, the Liberal party in the seventies faced four serious issues: the hostile attitude of an aggressive section of the Quebec clergy, which will be reviewed later; the Riel agitation; the demand of the West for the speedy construction of the Pacific Railway; and the worldwide trade depression, which brought a revival of protectionism in its wake.

The Riel agitation was an unfortunate aftermath of Canada's bungling in handling its first difficult task of national expansion. The development of the American West had long directed attention to the possibilities of the vast British territory to the northward under the control of the Hudson's Bay Company. For years before the confederation Brown and Macdougall had urgently demanded that Canada should acquire this heritage, to which the enterprise of French-Canadian explorers under the old régime gave the province some legal claim. With the enlarged resources and the new national aspirations the confederation brought, the dream of westward expansion became real. Within four years after 1867 the bounds of the dominion had been extended to the Pacific and its territory multiplied eight-fold.

When in 1870-71 the Dominion Government provided for the entry of British Columbia into the federation, the negotiations were conducted with the representatives of the Pacific colony's ten thousand white settlers on a footing of equality, and generous, even extrava

gant, terms, including the promise to build a railway through trackless wastes to the Pacific within ten years, were offered. When two years earlier the same Government sought to bring the vast territory between the Great Lakes and the Rockies under its sway, it paid no heed to the wishes of the twelve thousand whites and half-breeds gathered in the valley of the Red River. Negotiations were carried on with the British Government and the governors of the Hudson's Bay Company; money was paid to extinguish the company's rights, but no step was taken to discuss with the people of the country the terms under which they and their lands were to be transferred to a new allegiance.

The situation was one that needed care. With the authority of the Hudson's Bay Company steadily slipping from its grasp and with therepresentatives of the famous

tlers poured in; with priests like Father Richot in full and active sympathy with the fears and hopes of their parishioners; with Minnesota traders and professional Fenian raiders across the border anxious to swing the settlement into the American orbit, it was imperative to take steps to insure the Red River settlement a voice in its own fu

old company who still remained on the spot, convinced that the financial magnates in London had sacrificed the interests of the working partners, unwilling to exert themselves to aid the establishment of the new régime; with half the community made up of French half-breeds, used to the free life of voyageur, buffalo-hunter, or transportdriver, and apprehension of a flood of alien and disdainful immigrants unsettling their old ways of life; with thousands of Scottish half-breeds, less unruly, but dubious also of new-comers; with the Canadian colony already in the settlement urging for years annexation to Canada and some of its members foolishly boasting how the backward elements would have to make way when the tide of progressive Canadian set

ture governing. No such steps were taken, and the action of the Canadian Government in starting surveys in half-breed settlements before the transfer, and the greedy staking out of lands by members of official missions, gave positive ground for alarm.

Out of this friction and muddle conflict rapidly developed. Many men played a part in the succession of blunders and misunderstandings which marked the interregnum between the rule of the company and the rule of Canada. First, Joseph Howe, who for years had been the leader of Nova Scotia's fight against being coerced into confederation, now won over to acquiescence and a seat in the cabinet, with special charge of the Western territories, paid a flying visit to Red River in the autumn of 1869, and whether merely through declining to take sides with the Canadian faction or because, in Macdougall's words, of "seditious talk and bibulous fraternization with rebels," undoubtedly encouraged resistance.

Meanwhile William Macdougall, appointed lieutenant-governor of the territory he had done more than any other man to keep before the mind of Canada, reached Pembina before the formal transfer of the territory to the dominion, only to be blocked at the border by