deration the real remedy, he was satisfied, and he did not
keep up an agitation merely for agitation's sake. It is not necessary
to attempt to justify every word that may have been struck off in the
heat of a great conflict. There was a battle to be fought; he fought
with all the energy of his nature, and with the weapons that lay at
hand. He would have shared Hotspur's contempt for the fop who vowed
that "but for these vile guns he would himself have been a soldier."

CHAPTER XIII

MOVING TOWARDS CONFEDERATION

To whom is due the confederation of the British North American
provinces is a long vexed question. The Hon. D'Arcy McGee, in his
speech on confederation, gave credit to Mr. Uniacke, a leading
politician of Nova Scotia, who in 1800 submitted a scheme of colonial
union to the imperial authorities; to Chief-Justice Sewell, to Sir
John Beverley Robinson, to Lord Durham, to Mr. P. S. Hamilton, a Nova
Scotia writer, and to Mr. Alexander Morris, then member for South
Lanark, who had advocated the project in a pamphlet entitled _Nova
Britannia_. "But," he added, "whatever the private writer in his
closet may have conceived, whatever even the individual statesman may
have designed, so long as the public mind was uninterested in the
adoption, even in the discussion of a change in our position so
momentous as this, the union of these separate provinces, the
individual laboured in vain--perhaps, not wholly in vain, for although
his work may not have borne fruit then, it was kindling a fire that
would ultimately light up the whole political horizon and herald the
dawn of a better day for our country and our people. Events stronger
than advocacy, events stronger than men, have come in at last like
the fire behind the invisible writing, to bring out the truth of these
writings and to impress them upon the mind of every thoughtful man who
has considered the position and probable future of these scattered
provinces." Following Mr. McGee's suggestion, let us try to deal with
the question from the time that it ceased to be speculative and became
practical, and especially to trace its development in the mind of one
man.

In the later fifties Mr. Brown was pursuing a course which led almost
with certainty to the goal of confederation. The people of Upper
Canada were steadily coming over to his belief that they were
suffering injustice under the union; that they paid more than their
share of the taxes, and yet that Lower