nt which has been raised in his honour in the
great western city where he was for so many years a political force,
and where the newspaper he established still remains at the head of
Canadian journalism.

The greatest and ablest man among all who were notable in Lord Elgin's
days in Canada, Sir John Alexander Macdonald--the greatest not simply
as a Canadian politician but as one of the builders of the British
empire--lived to become one of Her Majesty's Privy Councillors of
Great Britain, a Grand Cross of the Bath, and prime minister for
twenty-one years of a Canadian confederation which stretches for 3,500
miles from the Atlantic to the Pacific ocean. When death at last
forced him from the great position he had so long occupied with
distinction to himself and advantage to Canada, the esteem and
affection in which he was held by the people, whom he had so long
served during a continuous public career of half a century, were shown
by the erection of stately monuments in five of the principal cities
of the Dominion--an honour never before paid to a colonial statesman.
The statues of Sir John Macdonald and Sir Georges Cartier--statues
conceived and executed by the genius of a French Canadian
artist--stand on either side of the noble parliament building where
these statesmen were for years the most conspicuous figures; and as
Canadians of the present generation survey their bronze effigies, let
them not fail to recall those admirable qualities of statesmanship
which distinguished them both--above all their assertion of those
principles of compromise, conciliation and equal rights which have
served to unite the two races in critical times when the tide of
racial and sectional passion and political demagogism has rushed in a
mad torrent against the walls of the national structure which
Canadians have been so steadily and successfully building for so many
years on the continent of North America.

CHAPTER XI

POLITICAL PROGRESS

In the foregoing pages I have endeavoured to review--very imperfectly,
I am afraid--all those important events in the political history of
Canada from 1847 to 1854, which have had the most potent influence on
its material, social, and political development. Any one who carefully
studies the conditions of the country during that critical period of
Canadian affairs cannot fail to come to the conclusion that the
gradual elevation of Canada from the depression which was so prevalent
for year