e contravened.

Mr. Brown had been absent in the sessions of 1861 and 1862, and he did
not enter the House in 1863 until the Separate School Bill had passed
its second reading. In the _Globe_, however, it was assailed
vigorously, one ground being that the bill was not a finality, but
that the Roman Catholic Church would continually make new demands and
encroachments, until the public school system was destroyed. On this
question of finality there was much controversy. Dr. Ryerson always
insisted that there was an express agreement that it was to be final;
on the Roman Catholic side this is denied. At confederation Brown
accepted the Act of 1863 as a final settlement. He said that if he had
been present in 1863, he would have voted against the bill, because
it extended the facility for establishing separate schools. "It had,
however, this good feature, that it was accepted by the Roman Catholic
authorities, and carried through parliament as a final compromise of
the question in Upper Canada." He added: "I have not the slightest
hesitation in accepting it as a necessary condition of the union."
With confederation, therefore, we may regard Brown's opposition to
separate schools in Upper Canada as ended. In accepting the terms of
confederation, he accepted the Separate School Act of 1863, though
with the condition that it should be final, a condition repudiated on
the Roman Catholic side.

The Sandfield Macdonald government was weakened by this incident, and
it soon afterwards fell upon a general vote of want of confidence
moved by Mr. John A. Macdonald. Parliament was dissolved and an
election was held in the summer of 1863. The Macdonald-Dorion
government obtained a majority in Upper but not in Lower Canada, and
on the whole, its tenure of power was precarious in the extreme.
Finally, in March, 1864, it resigned without waiting for a vote of
want of confidence. Its successor, the Tache-Macdonald government, had
a life of only three months, and its death marks the birth of a new
era.

CHAPTER XV

CONFEDERATION

"Events stronger than advocacy, events stronger than men," to repeat
D'Arcy McGee's phrase, combined in 1864 to remove confederation from
the field of speculation to the field of action. For several years the
British government had been urging upon Canada the necessity for
undertaking a greater share of her own defence. This view was
expressed with disagreeable candour in the London _Times_ and
elsew