es to secularize the Clergy Reserves they were
guilty of an abandonment of principle. But in 1854 this had ceased to
be a party question. The progress of events had rendered it inevitable
that these lands should be made available for settlement; and since
this had to come, it was better that the change should be brought about
by men who had already striven to preserve the rights of property
acquired under the Clergy Reserve grants, rather than by those whose
policy was little {39} short of spoliation. The propriety and
reasonableness of all this was very generally recognized at the time,
not merely by the supporters of MacNab and Macdonald, but also by their
political opponents. A. A. Dorion, the Rouge leader, considered the
alliance quite natural. Robert Baldwin and Francis Hincks both
publicly defended it, and their course did much to cement the union
between the Conservatives and those who, forty years after the events
here set down, were known to the older members of the community as
'Baldwin Reformers.'

[1] The question of the authorship of Lord Durham's Report is one which
all Canadians have heard debated from their youth up. No matter who
may have composed the document, it was Lord Durham's opinions and
principles that it expressed. Lord Durham signed it and took
responsibility for it, and it very naturally and properly goes under
his name. But in a review of my _Memoirs of Sir John Macdonald_ the
_Athenaeum_ (January 12, 1895) said: 'He,' the author, 'repeats at
second hand, and with the incorrectness of those who do not take the
trouble to verify their references, that Lord Durham's report on
Canada' was written by the nobleman whose name it bears. 'He could
easily have ascertained that the author of the report which he commends
was Charles Buller, two paragraphs excepted which were contributed by
Gibbon Wakefield and R. D. Hanson.' Some years later, however, in a
review of Mr Stuart Reid's book on Lord Durham, the same _Athenaeum_
(November 3, 1906) observed: 'Mr Reid conclusively disposes of
Brougham's malignant slander that the matter of Lord Durham's report on
Canada came from a felon (Wakefield) and the style from a coxcomb
(Buller). The latter, in his account of the mission, frequently
alludes to the report, but not a single phrase hints that he was the
author.'

[2] 'It is well known, sir, that while I have always been a member of
what is called the Conservative party, I could never have