French Canadians in particular. This
fatuous course could not fail to prove embarrassing to a Ministry which
drew its main support from Lower Canada. {30} It was the time of the
'Papal Aggression' in England. Anti-Catholicism was in the air, and
found a congenial exponent in George Brown, whose vehement and
intolerant nature espoused the new crusade with enthusiasm. It is
difficult for any one living in our day to conceive of the leading
organ of a great political party writing thus of a people who at that
time numbered very nearly one-half the population of Canada, and from
whose ranks the parliamentary supporters of its own political party
were largely drawn:

It would give us great pleasure to think that the French Canadians were
really hearty coadjutors of the Upper-Canadian Reformers, but all the
indications point the other way, and it appears hoping against hope to
anticipate still; their race, their religion, their habits, their
ignorance, are all against it, and their recent conduct is in harmony
with these.[6]

The Ministry could not be expected to stand this sort of thing
indefinitely. They were {31} compelled to disavow the _Globe_, and so
to widen the breach between them and Brown.

In 1851 Baldwin and LaFontaine retired from public life. A new
Administration was formed from the same party under the leadership of
Hincks and Morin, and in the general elections that followed George
Brown was returned to parliament for Kent. The new Ministry, however,
found no more favour at the hands of Brown than did its predecessor.
Nor was Brown content to confine his attacks to the floor of the House.
He wrote and published in the _Globe_ a series of open letters
addressed to Hincks, charging him with having paltered away his Liberal
principles for the sake of French-Canadian support. To such lengths
did Brown carry his opposition, that in the general elections of 1854
we find him, together with the extreme Liberals, known as Rouges, in
Lower Canada, openly supporting the Conservative leaders against the
Government.

While Brown was thus helping on the disruption of his party, his future
great rival, by a very different line of conduct, was laying broad and
deep the foundations of a policy tending to ameliorate the racial and
religious differences unfortunately existing between {32} Upper and
Lower Canada.[7] To a man of Macdonald's large and generous mind the
fierce intolerance of Brown must have been in