In 1870 Sir Francis Hincks returned to Canadian public life as finance minister in Sir John Macdonald’s government, and held the office until 1873, when he retired altogether from politics.  Until the last hours of his life he continued to show that acuteness of intellect, that aptitude for public business, that knowledge of finance and commerce, which made him so influential in public affairs.  During his public career in Canada previous to 1855, he was the subject of bitter attacks for his political acts, but nowadays impartial history can admit that, despite his tendency to commit 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 monument 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.