pport of
common schools. The mail carriage to all parts of the province secures
us the travelling public conveyance which would not otherwise exist, and
the very large amount of newspapers, etc., which pass through the Post
Office affords strong evidence that the Department may be considered a
branch of our educational system."--Postmaster-General of New Brunswick,
1857.

[314] "Already they found a tax proposed on every poor man who took a
newspaper for the information of his family; a stamp tax, an impost
unknown in the Maritime Provinces, and one which had cost England half
this continent."--Mr. Macdonald in Canadian House of Commons, 12th
December 1867 (_Ottawa Times_).

[315] Sir John A. MacDonald in Canadian House of Commons, 20th December
1867, ibid.

[316] "If ever there was a time when it was necessary for the interests
of the whole Dominion that just the sort of information which newspapers
conveyed should be disseminated through all the Provinces, it was
now."--Hon. Dr. Tupper in Canadian House of Commons, 20th December 1867
(_Ottawa Times_).

[317] Mr. Savary in Canadian House of Commons, 20th December 1867
(ibid.).

[318] Hon. Mr. Mackenzie in Canadian House of Commons, _Parl. Debates,
Canada_ (_Commons_), 22nd February 1875.

[319] "There was good reason for the enactment of the old law that made
the rate for the carriage of newspapers a cent a pound, and there never
was even a semblance of sense or reason or any request for the repeal of
that law. The truth is that its repeal was a mere whim of a gentleman of
the Senate, who, anxious to pose in the niche of personal popularity,
jollied through Parliament a measure that has cost this country in
postal rates millions of dollars, creating a big deficit in the spending
department, which has stood in the way of reform every time a reform was
proposed."--Mr. Ross Robertson, _Parl. Debates, Canada_ (_Commons_),
13th May 1898.

[320] See _Parl. Debates, Canada_ (_Commons_), 11th July 1900.

[321] The following remarks by Sir Charles Tupper in the Dominion House
of Commons, though made at a somewhat later date, will illustrate this.
He said: "There is abundant evidence that manhood suffrage in the
Dominion is a far higher franchise than manhood suffrage in Great
Britain, for the reason that there are tens of thousands of electors in
the United Kingdom who go to the polls without having the remotest idea
not only of public questions before the country, b