Mr. George Brown died from the wound he received at the hands of a reckless printer, who had been in his employ, and Canadians have erected to his memory a noble monument in the beautiful Queen's Park of the city where he laboured so long and earnestly as a statesman and a journalist. Sir George Cartier died in 1873, but Sir John Macdonald survived his firm friend for eighteen years, and both received State funerals. Statues of Sir John Macdonald have been erected in the cities of Montreal, Toronto, Hamilton, and Kingston. In Ottawa on one side of the Parliament building we see also a statue of the same distinguished statesman, and on the other that of his great colleague, Sir George Cartier. It was but fitting that the statues of these most famous representatives of the two distinct elements of the Canadian people should have been placed alongside of the national legislature. They are national sentinels to warn Canadian people of the dangers of racial or religious conflict, and to illustrate the advantages of those principles of compromise and justice on which both Cartier and Macdonald, as far as they could, raised the edifice of confederation.
CANADA AS A NATION: MATERIAL AND INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT--POLITICAL RIGHTS.
Up to the dissolution of the 1904 Parliament in October, 1908, the Dominion had had ten Parliaments. During the first thirty years the Conservatives were almost continuously in office. They were defeated in the general election of 1874, owing to some grave scandals in connection with the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway; but were again returned to office in 1878. In the election of 1878 they were returned on a platform of protection for Canadian industry, and in 1879 Parliament enacted a National Policy Tariff, which was at once vehemently attacked by the Liberal Opposition. Seventeen years, however, elapsed before the Liberals had the opportunity of revising the tariff, and it was not until 1897 that there was any modification in the protective duties. In 1896, however, after several years of profound depression in trade in the Dominion, the Liberals succeeded in obtaining a large majority, and Sir Wilfrid Laurier succeeded to { 414} the premiership, which after the death of Sir John Macdonald had been held successively by Sir J. J. C. Abbott, Sir John Thompson, who died at Windsor, where he had gone to take the oath of office of privy councillor, Sir Mackenzie Bowell, and Sir Charles Tupper.