at blunder has
been committed in a matter involving the most important interests of
the country, and that the order-in-council you have passed endorses
that blunder and authorizes persistence in it.... I confess I was much
annoyed at the personal affront offered me, but that feeling has
passed away in view of the serious character of the matter at issue,
which casts all personal feeling aside."

If it were necessary to seek for justification of Mr. Brown's action
in leaving the ministry at this time, it might be found either in his
disagreement with the government on the question of policy, or in the
treatment accorded to him by his colleagues. Sandfield Macdonald and
his colleagues had on a former occasion recognized Mr. Brown's eminent
fitness to represent Canada in the negotiations at Washington, not
only because of his thorough acquaintance with the subject, but
because of his steadily maintained attitude of friendship for the
North. He was a member of the confederate council on reciprocity. His
position in the ministry was not that of a subordinate, but of the
representative of a powerful party. In resenting the manner in which
his position was ignored, he does not seem to have exceeded the bounds
of proper self-assertion. However, this controversy assumes less
importance if it is recognized that the rupture was inevitable. The
precise time or occasion is of less importance than the force which
was always and under all circumstances operating to draw Mr. Brown
away from an association injurious to himself and to Liberalism, in
its broad sense as well as in its party sense, and to his influence as
a public man. This had better be considered in another place.

CHAPTER XX

CONFEDERATION AND THE PARTIES

We are to consider now the long-vexed question of the connection of
Mr. Brown with the coalition of 1864. Ought he to have entered the
coalition government? Having entered it, was he justified in leaving
it in 1865? Holton and Dorion told him that by his action in 1864, he
had sacrificed his own party interests to those of John A. Macdonald;
that Macdonald was in serious political difficulty, and had been
defeated in the legislature; that he seized upon Brown's suggestion
merely as a means of keeping himself in office; that for the sake of
office he accepted the idea of confederation, after having voted
against it in Brown's committee. A most wise and faithful friend,
Alexander Mackenzie, thought that Refo