ommit the province to heavy
expenditures, his energy, enterprise and financial ability did good
service to the country at large. He was also attacked as having used
his public position to promote his own pecuniary interests, but he
courted and obtained inquiry into the most serious of such
accusations, and although there appears to have been some carelessness
in his connection with various speculations, and at times an absence
of an adequate sense of his responsibility as a public man, there is
no evidence that he was ever personally corrupt or dishonest. He
devoted the close of his life to the writing of his "Reminiscences,"
and of several essays on questions which were great public issues when
he was so prominent in Canadian politics, and although none of his
most ardent admirers can praise them as literary efforts of a high
order, yet they have an interest so far as they give us some insight
into disputed points of Canada's political history. He died in 1885 of
the dreadful disease small-pox in the city of Montreal, and the
veteran statesman was carried to the grave without those funeral
honours which were due to one who had filled with distinction so many
important positions in the service of Canada and the Crown. All his
contemporaries when he was prime minister also lie in the grave and
have found at last that rest which was not theirs in the busy,
passionate years of their public life. Sir Allan MacNab, who was a
spendthrift to the very last, lies in a quiet spot beneath the shades
of the oaks and elms which adorn the lovely park of Dundurn in
Hamilton, whose people have long since forgotten his weaknesses as a
man, and now only recall his love for the beautiful city with whose
interests he was so long identified, and his eminent services to Crown
and state. George Brown, Hincks's inveterate opponent, continued for
years after the formation of the first Liberal-Conservative
administration, to keep the old province of Canada in a state of
political ferment by his attacks on French Canada and her institutions
until at last he succeeded in making government practically
unworkable, and then suddenly he rose superior to the spirit of
passionate partisanship and racial bitterness which had so long
dominated him, and decided to aid his former opponents in consummating
that federal union which relieved old Canada of her political
embarrassment and sectional strife. His action at that time is his
chief claim to the monume