officers. At the last meeting there were three members present. It was a long chase, but the Church was in at the death.1 1 The material in this and the preceding chapter has been gathered mainly from the newspapers and periodicals of the time, and from a pamphlet issued from the office of the Montreal Witness in 1875, entitled "History of the Guibord Case; Ultramontanism versus Law and Human Rights." The writer of the pamphlet is, no doubt, unfriendly to the Ultramontanes. The Witness, like Le Pays, was condemned by Bishop Bourget. WHEN CHAPTER IV QUEBEC AT THE UNION HEN Mr. Laurier began the practice of law at Montreal, political conditions in Canada were thoroughly unsettled. George E. Cartier had joined hands with John A. Macdonald and George Brown to promote Confederation, while the leaders of the Liberal party in Quebec had broken with their old allies of Upper Canada, and assumed the leadership of the forces opposed to the coalition and to Confederation. There was something pathetic in the separation of Brown and Dorion. With a fine and beautiful chivalry Dorion had borne with Brown's harsh and inconsiderate attacks upon his church, his race, and his province, and had set the great public objects which they had in common far above private resentments and momentary irritations. The policy of Brown doomed Dorion to a hopeless struggle in his own province, and shut him out even from the sympathetic regard of the mass of his compatriots. His authority declined. He suffered personal defeat. He was superseded in the leadership of his own party in Lower Canada. But despite defeat and contumely, loss of influence, and exclusion from office, his allegiance to Brown remained unshaken, and no word of reproach or of protest passed his lips. United by a positive personal affection, and bound to a common programme, the two men held together with simple good faith and unflinching tenacity; and the chivalry of Dorion was the seal of the compact. Canada has had few nobler public servants than Antoine Dorion. A man of magnanimous spirit, of beautiful character, and of rare sagacity, he fought through a long public career, in a bitter and factious time, without a stain upon his shield, unsoured by reverses, and untouched by sordid bargainings for the spoils or the dignities of office. Though small in stature, his was still a commanding presence, and though his manner was grave and restrained, his gracious bearing invited approach and confidence, while the music of his voice, the nobility of his face, and his clear and reasoned utterance, gave grace and authority to all that he said in the private circle, in the court-room, and from the platform. A statesman hardly less great than any that Canada has produced, he was also a great advocate, and he furnishes an unusual instance of authority at the bar unimpaired by continuous absorption in politics. Formidable as he was in Parliament and on the political platform, his heart was probably always in his profession rather than in the business of the State, and it was fitting that he should close his career as Chief-Justice of his native province. His separation from Brown and the Liberals of Upper Canada was of short duration. He opposed the terms rather than the idea of Confederation, and when the union was accomplished, and Mr. Brown had withdrawn from the Coalition Government, all sections of the Liberal party reunited under the leadership of Brown and Mackenzie in Ontario, and of Dorion and Holton in Quebec. It may be that the heartiness of the old understanding between Brown and Dorion was never quite restored, but to the last they entertained for each other a sincere friendship and a great respect, and no sincerer or more impressive mourner stood before the open grave of George Brown than Sir Antoine Dorion,1 1 It was not by the French Liberals alone that the terms of the union were condemned in Quebec. Dorion, the French Catholic, was joined by Joly, the French Protestant, while Holton and Dunkin and Huntington, who ranked with Galt as leaders 1 The famous "Joe" Rymal, of Wentworth, who, by the way, opposed Confederation, in a speech at the Reform Convention of 1867, said: "The Reformers of Upper Canada were called upon to express all the gratitude possible for the manner in which the Lower Canadian leaders had stood by them. Of Mr. Dorion no one had cause to complain. If there had been a statesman in the Canadian Legislature for the past ten years-if there had been an honest politician in the whole box and dice of them-Mr. Dorion was the man. When he was enticed to sin he would not consent-he would not follow the multitude to do evil. If there was one thing which, more than anything else, made coalition distasteful, it was the fact that these men whom we were forced to respect had been excluded. None of them went in, and, thank God, none of them had to go out." of the English minority in the Lower Province, alike opposed Confederation on the basis of the resolutions of the Quebec Conference. Cartier, with excellent temper and just enough of extravagance to season the observation, declared during the Confederation debates that the Quebec resolutions were accepted by all men of moderate opinions, and opposed by socialists, democrats, and annexationists. He said the Institut Canadien had constituted itself a champion of religion, and professed to fear that the religious rights of French Canadians would suffer under the new arrangement. The Montreal Witness, a mouthpiece of English Protestantism, contended that under Confederation the British Protestant minority would lie at the mercy of the French Canadians; while the True Witness, founded to defend the Roman Catholic Church against the attacks of John Dougall's paper, held that if Confederation were established, the French Canadians would be doomed and their nationality and religion destroyed.1 This is perhaps an exaggerated and partisan account of the situation, but it is nevertheless true that all these extreme elements were united against the project of union accepted by the Coalition Government. Holton and Huntington were greatly concerned to provide adequate protection for the educational and religious rights of the Protestant minority in Quebec; Cartier was equally deter "Confederation Debates," page 61. |