CHAPTER XXIIL

HON. GEORGE BROWN.

BY WILLIAM BUCKINGHAM.

A Busy Lite Shortened by a Tragic Death-The Uncrowned King of Upper Canada-Supreme in the Command of His Own Party-Forces upon Mr. John A. Macdonald the Temporary Peace which was the Prelude to Confederation-An Untiring Worker-Peter and George Brown Establish "The Banner" in Toronto-George Brown Becomes the Ally of the Liberal Ministers-Founds The Globe"-Makes an Enemy of Rev. Dr. Egerton Ryerson -The Character of his Editorial Work-An Intensely Earnest Writer-A Man of Great Truth and Honesty-Makes Enemies of the Roman Catholics by His Attacks on the Pope, and His Institutions-Elected to the Legislative Assembly in 1851-Gains Tory Hostility by His Defence of the Rebellion Losses Bill-A Staunch Advocate of Free TradeAdvocates the Secularization of the Clergy Reserves-The "Double Shuffle "-George Brown One of the Great Fathers of Confederation-Defeated in South Ox ord in 1867Accepts Nomination to the Upper Chamber-Declines Kuighthood-His Assassination— His Untimely Death,

N the person of George Brown, a busy and agitated life was shortened by a tragic death. But though it was a death that came from violence, he had not the satisfaction, poor though that might be, of feeling in his long resulting illness that it was occasioned by his services to the country. The assassins of McGee, Lincoln, and Garfield, made pretence of public motives for their action, but the misguided man who shot George Brown did it merely to avenge an imaginary and petty personal wrong. Mr. Brown had passed the meridian span of life with the turmoil and strife of his earlier years, and there are good grounds for believing that he had gladly sought to obtain a measure of retirement and repose amidst scenes and influences more congenial to his chastened and subdued spirit, perhaps also to his better nature, when in this wretched manner his death came. Those of his own generation, then still largely to the fore, but since that time mostly passed away, who attended his funeral to pay the last tribute of respect to his memory, and who had been stirred by him in their younger days as few men

could stir a people, while thinking again of his exploits, heard once more the trumpet notes of his calls to battle high sounding above the solemn dirges that followed him to the grave. There had been in Canada before his time, there has been in the broader Canada he helped to make, no political warrior with equal power to sound those notes so loud and clear.

In 1857, when the writer of this sketch first came to know him, and an acquaintance was formed in his service which continued to the close, Mr. Brown was in the heyday of his prodigious strength and influence. He had reached the zenith of his physical and mental power, and was being borne on by the elasticity of his mind and character, and the buoyant spirit of the young, and fast developing, and resourceful western counties of the Province at his back, towards political heights he clearly saw, though he was enabled to scale them but once, and then for a mere moment to retain his foothold.

At that period he was the uncrowned king-the self-constituted champion of the rights of Upper Canada--a championship which very few in his own party ever dreamt of questioning. One there was who in an unguarded moment at the Toronto Convention of 1867 hinted at the fear of a dictatorship. The mere suggestion was enough. The mutinous member went no further. Mr. Brown was down upon him with his disciplinary lash at once. He said: "I scorn the imputation. I stand here at the end of twenty-five years' service to the Reform party, and I defy any man to show the first act of selfishness of which I have ever been guilty with reference to that party. I defy any man to point to one word that has ever crossed my lips, as the representative of the people-one motion I ever made-one speech I ever delivered-one vote I ever gave-which is not in harmony with the principles of the Reform party of Upper Canada." The emeute, if any were intended, stopped right there. It had previously been manifested in the disobedience to orders of Mr. Brown's colleagues in the coalition Government, Mr. McDougall and Mr. Howland, who refused to retire with their leader when he gave the signal, and who faced him on the platform on the occasion of that great gathering. But their incitement to rebellion was brought at the outset to an inglorious end. Mr. Brown was supreme in command of his own forces, and it is probably because he was so well able at that time to keep

hem in hand that after a long struggle, he forced upon Mr. John A. Macdonald-a greater leader than himself, success in leadership being the criterion-the temporary peace which was the prelude to Confederation.

But to return to the earlier period. Towards the close of the fifties Mr. Brown was in the full vigor of his manhood, verging upon forty years of age, with no marriage ties to bind him to the family circle; in stature, inches above the average of his fellow-men, broad in proportion, tall and straight, and strong, as in the Miltonic metaphor, "the mast of some great ammiral," a notable figure on King street, where he was so often seen swinging and striding along that well-known Toronto thoroughfare:

"The front of Jove himself;

An eye like Mars, to threaten and command.”

Those words "to threaten and command" are very exact in their description of George Brown. From the great frame came forth a voice mighty and unfailing, like the never-ending and over-bearing roar and rush of Niagara. He had, too, the strength of a Hercules, enabling the powerful machinery to be kept incessantly at work, so that it never needed to succumb to that weakness of feeling tired, which he so heartily despised in others. He was, in very truth, the incarnation of energy. "Put plenty of work on me," he wrote during an

election campaign in 1851. "I can speak six or eight hours a day easily." Yes, all of that, and a great deal more, not only then, but onwards for twenty-five years, as his weary reporters, whose duty it was to follow him up and down the country, so well knew.

Some of his best work he had already done. Coming to Canada, in 1843, to extend in these provinces the circulation of the British Chronicle, a paper his father and himself had established in New York, in advocacy of the principles of the Free Church of Scotland, he saw here opened to them a promising political as well as religious field, and of this he was not slow to induce his father to join him in taking possession. The Chronicle in New York ceased to be published, and Peter and George Brown, in place of it,