ear had its little compact or junta of friends and relatives in power indefinitely.  There were elections, but the legislature had no control over the purse strings of the government.  Such a close corporation of special interests did the governing clique become that the administration was known in both provinces as a “Family Compact.”  Administrative abuses flourished in a rank growth.  Judges owing their appointment to the Crown exercised the most arbitrary tyranny against patriots raising their voices against government by special interests.  Vast land grants were voted away to favorites of the Compact.  Public moneys were misused and neither account given nor restitution demanded from the culprit.  Ultra-loyalty became a fashionable pose.  When strolling actors played American airs in a Toronto theater they were hissed; and when a Canadian stood up to those airs, he was hissed.  Special interests became intrenched behind a triple rampart of fashion and administration and loyalty.  Details of the revolt need not be given here.  A great love is always the best cure for a puny affection—­a Juliet for a Rosalind; and when a pure patriotism arose to oust this spurious lip-loyalty, there resulted the Rebellion of 1837.

The point is—­when the rebellion had passed, Canada had overthrown a system of government by oligarchy.  She had ousted special interests forever from her legislative halls.  In a blood and sweat of agony, on the scaffold, in the chain gang, penniless, naked, hungry and in exile, her patriots had fought the dragon of privilege, cast out the accursed thing and founded national life on the eternal rocks of justice to all, special privileges to none.  Her patriots had themselves learned on the scaffold that law must be as sacredly observed by the good as by the evil, by the great as by the small.  From the death scaffolds of these patriots sprang that part of Canada’s national consciousness that reveres law next to God.  Canada passed through the throes of purging her national consciousness from 1815 to 1840, as the United States passed through the same throes in the sixties, but the process cost her half a century of delay in growth and development.

While the union of Upper and Lower Canada put an end to the evils of special privileges in government, events had been moving apace in the far West, where roving traders and settlers were a law unto themselves.  Red River settlers of the region now known as Manitoba were clamoring for an end to the monopoly of the Hudson’s Bay Fur Company over all that region inland from the Great Northern Sea.  The discovery of gold had brought hordes of adventurers pouring into Cariboo, or what is now known as British Columbia.  Both Red River and British Columbia demanded self-government.  Partly because England had delayed granting Oregon self-government, the settlers of the Columbia had set up their own provisional government and turned that region over to the United States.  We are surely