The President seemed much struck, and, after a pause, he said, "Sir, will you say that again?" I repeated the words, and he scribbled, as I spoke, some notes on the blotter of the portfolio before him. He then said, "A countryman of mine has been over to your side of the Atlantic to teach you to tame horses. This gentleman, Mr. Rarey, uses what he calls 'mild force.' Mild force will probably be useful with us." The Fenian demonstrations in the United States against England were named as a breach of comity. The President said, sharply, "Why don't your people remonstrate? We hear no complaint."
To return to my narrative, Mr. Cartier arranged an interview for me with the Governor-General, Sir Edmund Head, and I presented my letters from Mr. Baring, and was assured of all the help he could give me. "Your demands are very clear, and appear to me equally just. First you ask the Government of Canada to aid you in passing a Bill through Parliament, which clearly is for the benefit of Canada, because it proposes to increase the efficiency of the railway service by a further outlay of capital, and also to pay off debt, a considerable part of which is incurred in Canada; and secondly, you ask for an immediate and just settlement of the charge for the conveyance by you of the mails."
The Governor-General then sent for Mr. John A.
Macdonald, who came immediately, and the conversation which had taken place was repeated.
This was the first time I had seen either Cartier, Sir Edmund Head, or
Macdonald.
Sir Edmund Head was a tall stately man, with thoughtful brow, and complexion a little purpled by cardiac derangement. As the don of a college he would have been great, and in his sphere: as the Governor of a Province with a self-asserting people, I doubt if he had found the true groove.
His despatches were scholastic essays. His simplest replies were grave and learned, sometimes too complex for ordinary comprehension. When he, subsequently, became Governor of the Hudson's Bay Company, he tried to manage a profit-and-loss undertaking as if he were governing a province: just as when he governed a province he administered all things as if he were dealing with Russia in Europe. He was, however, a man of the kindest heart, and the strictest honor. But, after all, he was one of the round men put into the square holes of Provincial Government by the "authorities" at home. Still, on the whole, a noble character, and in very truth a gentleman. His chronic ailment led to some irritability of temper; and when, during the visit of the Prince of Wales, one of the Governor's aides-de-camp was pushed over from the steamer at Detroit by the press of the crowd, and fell into the water, Colonel Irving said:—"Ah! there was no danger whatever to ——'s life. The Governor-General has blown him up so much that he could never sink." I was present at a farewell dinner to Sir Edmund Head at Mr. Cartier's, at Quebec, in the winter of 1861-2. In response to the toast of his health, he alluded to his infirmity of temper, admitted his suffering—before concealed from outside people—and expressed his apologies in a manner so feeling and so gentle that the tears came into everybody's eyes. I heard more than one sob from men whose rough exterior disguised the real tenderness of their hearts.
Mr. John A. Macdonald entered the Governor-General's presence with a manly deference. I was at once struck by an odd resemblance in some of his features and expressions to Disraeli—dark curly hair, piercing eyes, aquiline nose, mouth sometimes firm, almost stern in expression, sometimes so mild that he seemed especially fitted to play with little children. I soon learned that, in tact, fixed purpose, and resources, he was ahead of them all. And, after watching his career for a quarter of a century, I have seen no reason to alter that opinion. He is the statesman of Canada—one of the ablest men on the Continent. I wish he administered the Colonial relations of the whole Empire. Had he done so for the last ten years we should have escaped our mistakes in South Africa, and the everlasting disgrace of Majuba Hill. Why is it that such men are excluded from office at home? Sir John A. Macdonald (then Mr. Macdonald) was once taken by me under the gallery, by special order of Mr. Speaker, to hear a "great" speech of Mr. Gladstone, whom he had not before heard. When we went away, I said: "Well, what do you think of him?" He replied: "He is a great rhetorician, but—he is not an orator." Would that men would not be carried away in a torrent of happy words. One hour of the late Patrick Smyth was, to my mind, worth a week of all the great rhetoricians.
A day or two after these interviews, the Hon. John Ross took me down to Portland, to have an interview with the Hon. A. T. Galt, the Finance Minister of Canada. I at once recognized in Mr. Galt a reduced likeness of his father. Mr. Galt was about five feet eleven: his father, who I had seen when a boy, about six feet four, and "buirdly" and stout in proportion. The father wore spectacles—the son did not. The father was the author of the "Annals of the Parish," "Laurie Todd," and many works greatly read when I was young. He was, also, the founder of the town of "Guelph," and of other towns in Upper Canada. If anyone wants to see an admirable likeness of him, he had better consult "Fraser's Magazine," of one of the issues of 1830 to 1833, and he will there find a rough engraving of the hoisting of the Union Jack at Guelph. Mr. Galt, pere, was so very large a man that Mr. Archibald Prentice, of the "Manchester Times," used to tell a story about his pointing Mr. Galt out to a little humpbacked Scotchman in the High Street of Edinburgh: "Eh! Jamie, mon, there's the great Galt, author of the 'Annals of the Parish.'" "'Annals o' the Payrish,' Archie, hech, sirs, he's big eneuch to be the Payrish itself—let alone the annals o' it."
Mr. Galt, the Finance Minister, has done great services to Canada, and is doing them still, in developing the mineral resources of the West, and in other ways. Our conversation on Grand Trunk affairs was long and anxious. I could see that Mr. Galt would do everything in his power; but the public prejudice was strongly against the Grand Trunk. The Grand Trunk Arrangements Bill was passed, as herein stated, in May, 1862; but, alas, the question of postal payments by Canada stood over till the end of 1864.