or wirepullers, they will allow their allegiance to a faction to carry them the length of voting for national ruin. Once more the Republic has been saved from a great peril, by the sure, though slow, awakening of the good sense of its people. The victory itself was not more valuable than the way in which it was won. A question so intricate, so dry, and so unavailable for clap-trap rhetoric as the currency, puts the popular intelligence and the principle of self-government to the severest possible test; and in this case the test was well borne. The people when fairly aroused to the necessity of attention, gave their minds to the subject, listened to the arguments, mastered the essential points and voted right. It was noticed that the vote on the right side was largest where the politicians, who generally give the people credit for less wisdom and morality than they possess, had the courage of their opinions, and put the issue boldly. There has seldom been a better national debate, or one which more clearly proved how great an advantage it is to political economists and teachers of political science generally, to be forced to put their theories in a practical form and bring them to a level with the intelligence of ordinary

men.

The smartest thing said in the discussion was, If the State can make money, why does it come to me for taxes?' We did not happen to see the Greenback answer.

It is only to be regretted that the same good sense which yesterday rejected Greenbackism did not fifteen years ago put its veto on inconvertible paper. By doing so, it would have averted fearful derangement of commerce and also the industrial disputes arising from fluctuations in the value of wages, as well as an enormous addition to the burden of national debt. In justice to the Greenbackers it must be remembered that many of them are being absolutely crushed, as mortgagors or debtors in other ways, by the pressure of liabilities contracted ori

ginally in depreciated paper which now, the paper having risen to par, are devouring the whole of their substance. This it is, not the mere spirit of fraudulent repudiation, that has been the mainspring of the greenback agitation. Despair is a violent counsellor. Distress far short of despair led the English landlords, when the price of their corn fell after the close of the French war to use their control over Parliament for the purpose of passing the Corn Law to keep up prices and rents while the people were deprived of bread.

One effect of the alarm caused by the Greenback agitation has been the reconsolidation of the Republican party which had split on the question of administrative reform. It is to be hoped that the question of administrative reform, which is as vital as that of the currency though less urgent, will not be allowed to suffer by the postponement. A permanent reconstruction of the "machine as it was in the time of Grant, with the men who then worked it, and all its jobbery and corruption, would be a miserable result of a great national effort. More than this it would be pregnant with the most serious danger, if anything like the domination of the carpetbaggers were to be revived at the South.

Southern troubles are not at an end. The evil memory of slavery was revived the other day by the burning of a negro alive, a hideous act of barbarism more than once committed, we believe, under the old regime. It is difficult to imagine any complete solution of this problem. When two races cannot intermarry, their social fusion is impossible; and without social fusion, political unity and equality are hopeless. It is evident that though the nation has conferred upon the negro an equality of civil rights, his exercise of the suffrage is forcibly prevented in South Carolina and some other Southern States. Not only the negro but the white who belongs to the national

party, seems to be virtually deprived of his franchise. Rebellion, worsted in the field, renews the struggle in a milder forin at the polls, and at the polls, as in the field, it will have to be put down. The issue of the Civil war decided that the American Republic was to be not a congress of sovereign States, but a nation. It will have to assert its nationality in the highest and most important of all questions by enforcing the electoral law. Self-government to any extent is compatible with national unity, and the more of it there is, the higher politically the community will be; but national unity ceases to exist if the decrees of the supreme legislature can be defied. It is probable that the Democrats, as the party of resistance to national sovereignty, first in the interest of revolutionary liberty, and afterwards of slavery, will league themselves with resistance to the electoral law of the nation at the South as they do with Greenbackism and social agitation at the North; and it is possible that these combined forces may prevail. But it is also possible that the national spirit being evoked, the Republic may be victorious once more.

From Europe and the United States we come back to Canada. Since the last article on current politics appeared in this magazine a great revolution has taken place in Canadian politics. Whoever may be prophetic after the event, the event itself took both parties by surprise, and in this consists the real significance of the revolution. The wirepullers, however busy, had little to do with the result, and their calculations, on both sides, were ludicrously falsified. The political principles, or what are styled the political principles, of the two parties went for nothing; their conventional professions of loyalty and their mutual charges of disloyalty fell dead upon the public ear. The country was swept by the National Policy. It was swept, that is, by the determination

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of the people to give a trial to a fiscal policy which they thought might possibly do something for their material interests, and afford them some relief from commercial depression. Under the influence of this motive, not from change of political opinion, they trampled down party barriers, broke party allegiance under the friendly cover of the ballot, and put the Government into the hands of those who had declared themselves willing to make the desired experiment. result indicates that the people, as they grow in intelligence, will prefer their substantial interests to the figments of party politics, and it is full both of instruction and of happy augury for the future.

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In assigning the desire to give the National Policy a trial as the main cause of the changes, we do not leave out of sight the great personal popularity of Sir John Macdonald, and the general conviction that he is the ablest of Canadian statesmen. The Pacific Scandal having been properly condemned, and visited with temporary exclusion from power, the people were willing that the king should have his own again. That the national verdict on the Pacific Railway transaction has been reversed, or that public feeling has undergone any alteration on that subject, there is not the slightest reason for believing The people have simply refused, in choosing their government, at a practical crisis of the most serious kind, to allow all other considerations, including the repeated violations of reform and purity pledges by those in power, to be swallowed up in the memory of a single offence. The writers of the Globe, indeed, preached in tones of passionate earnestness the duty of inflexible society towards so great a criminal; but these high teachings were deprived of some of their force by the notoriety of the fact that the teachers were in the pay of Sir John Macdonald's political rival. We are often called upon to remark how credulous are

gentlemen of this class in their estimate of the credulity of other men.

A third factor in the revolution was, no doubt, the determination of genuine Liberals to deliver themselves and their cause, if possible, from the strangling grasp of Gritism, which had been fatally tightened since the departure of Mr. Dorion from the Government and the resignation of Mr. Blake. It is certain that, in the cities especially, a large Liberal vote— a vote large enough, as has been computed, to turn several electionswas cast against the reactionary despotism of the Globe. It is equally certain that, from their own point of view, and with reference to the interest of their own cause, these seceders acted wisely. To all charges of apostasy they may conclusively reply that the domination of the Globe is not the ascendency of Liberal principles, but as much the reverse as possible, and that to secure the ascendency of Liberal principles was the sole object with which they entered the party. If they have deserted, it is from the camp of deserters. The Government of Sir John Macdonald cannot possibly be more reactionary than was that of Mr. Brown; it will probably, in some important respects be more progressive; it will certainly be far abler; and it will be a Parliamentary Government, not a Government of outside influence. Mr. Mackenzie's friends boast of his personal purity, and not without justice; but they forget that if he was innocent of the corruption with which they charge his rivals, his connection with the proprietors of the Globe was equivocal, humiliating to the national Government, and, at the same time, injurious to the character of the press. So people would say in England if a similar connection existed there between the Prime Minister and the Times.

On the success of the genuine Liberals in shaking off the yoke of Gritism depends the future of their party. If they fail, every Liberal tendency

will be discouraged, every Liberal movement vetoed, like the movement for the reform of the Senate, every man of truly Liberal tendencies treated with suspicion as before. Nothing will be left but the old profes sions of reform and purity which, unless there is some object to inspire disinterested efforts, are sure to be again belied. The circulation of the Globe since its defeat has been declining, and its desperate efforts to destroy the independent Liberal press in the West have failed. Even in Toronto it has been thrust out of a large part of its former domination. It is reduced to vending a weak and suspicious brand of the Conservatism which is found undoubtedly genuine in the Mail. To take care that it shall not recover its monopoly of opinion will be the obvious policy of those who have raised the standard of revolt against it. There appears also to be an inclination to transfer the leadership, if possible, from Mr. Mackenzie, as the special nominee of the Globe, to Mr. Blake. It cannot be said that Mr. Blake's former experiment in independent action was successful or of happy augury; but his courage may have been strengthened since the hollowness of the bug-bear has been revealed. The world does not go backward, nor does it very long stand still. If Liberals will have patience, and allow discussion to proceed and opinion to ripen, keeping up their general co-operation with each other, and at the same time resolutely refusing to help the mere office-seekers of the connection in setting up again the fallen. tyranny or in doing anything to prevent its complete and final demolition, their day will assuredly come. adverse influences which at present prevail are evidently limited in their range and in their probable duration. The new government cannot remain stationary, and it can hardly move in any direction without breaking ground to the ultimate advantage of the Liberal cause, supposing Liberal prin

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be marred only by hastily reconstructing the party upon a narrow and inadequate basis, or, as might truly be said in reference to its recent condition, without any basis of principle at all. Boasts of purity, intolerance and clannishness are not a sufficient platform. Gritism has been nothing but Scotch Calvinism, with the doctrines of election and predestination, applied to politics; it has had no affinity to Liberalism whatever.

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Sir John Macdonald's government passed safely through the ordeal of re-election, which in this country has double perils. Sectionalism unsubdued, we fear almost unabated, by Confederation, demands not only a representation of provinces in the ministry, but a representation of races and creeds. Of all the nationalities, the only one which may be safely neglected is the Canadian, ever meek and self-despising. Irish discontent, after the division of the spoils, is supposed to have had something to do with the election of the deposed Minister of Finance in Huron. But that event might be plausibly ascribed to the insidious policy of Sir John Macdonald. danger of the Conservatives is a split between the thoroughgoing Protestants and those who are less thoroughgoing, or who are really not Protestants at all, but simply in favour of a readjustment of the tariff'; and there can be no stronger safeguard against such a split, than the unloved presence of the late Finance Minister. Mr. Cartwright was conscientious, but he was needlessly Rhadamanthine. Supposing him to be inflexibly wedded, not only to the strict Free Trade formula, but to the belief that a system which excluded our manufacturers from the American markets while it admitted the Americans to ours, was a free trade system, it was not necessary to slam the door in the face of a suffering interest. He might have acknowledged the hardship of the situation, expressed his sympathy, avoided too trenchant

confutations and promised to do his best. By his austerity he flung into the ranks of his enemy a body of auxiliaries powerful, though not numerous and animated with the energy of despair.

Those who desire Sir John Macdonald's failure naturally demand that he shall call Parliament and bring out his new fiscal policy without reflection. Those who desire his success, in the interest of national commerce, will counsel him to take abundant time for the consideration of a very intricate question and for consultation with the new Minister of Finance. He is pledged by his campaign speeches to nothing but an attempt to afford to the Canadian manufacturer and producer, by a revision of the tariff, that relief from unjust disadvantages which his predecessors had avowed themselves wholly unable to afford. His utterances have been extremely guarded, yet we can hardly be mistaken as to the line on which he intends to move. Those who have looked into the tariff question know that without ostensibly discriminating against the Americans, it is possible practically to discriminate against them, to a great extent, by a selection of articles. A policy of incidental retaliation is in fact that which Sir John Macdonald seems disposed to adopt. Whether he will be doing anything more than running a pin into an elephant and getting a stroke of its trunk in return is a question which we will not attempt to answer till his plan is actually before us. That, setting aside political questions, Canada would economically be a gainer, to an immense extent, by the free admission of her lumber, coal, manufactures and farm produce to the markets of the Continent, as well as by full participation in Continental capital and by being relieved from the expense and trouble of maintaining a customs line, can be doubted by no reasonable being, least of all by the projectors of Reciprocity Treaties. Whether she can gain much, or obtain serious relief

from the disadvantages under which she now labours, by fiscal legislation of any other kind, is the problem which we are now going to see solved.

The debate which has been raging in the papers as to the propriety or impropriety of cutting of LieutenantGovernor Letellier's head must have been pleasant reading for LieutenantGovernor Letellier. Sir Francis Hincks has demonstrated with great erudition, as well as with great weight of authority, that the Lieutenant Governor had power to dismiss his Ministry. It is unquestionable that he had that power; and it is equally unquestionable that he had power to commission his footman to form a new Administration. The Sovereign whom he represents has unquestionable power of her own personal fancy to declare war against half the nations of Europe, to veto the Mutiny Bill, to confer a Dukedom on her scullion, or to make her First Lord in Waiting Admiral of the Channel Fleet. Under an unwritten constitution, if the Crown and every other functionary did what they have power to do, there would soon be an administrative chaos. But Sir Francis Hincks will admit that in the absence of written laws the exercise of power under the British constitution is regulated by unwritten usage equal in force to law. He will admit also that British Constitutional usage extends to Canada under the Instrument of Confederation, which provides that Executive authority or government shall be vested in the Sovereign of the United King

dom of Great Britain and Ireland, and be administered according to the well-understood principles of the British Constitution, by the Sovereign personally, or by the representative of the Sovereign duly authorized.' Among the principles thus embodied by reference, there is not one better settled than that which restrains a constitutional king from dismissing his Ministry, except upon an adverse vote of Parliament. All that

he can do is to require that the Ministers shall submit themselves to the judgment of Parliament without unnecessary delay. Of course, if they propose by any means to evade or stave off the judgment of Parliament, he is authorized and bound to withhold his assent. The dismissal of the Whig Ministers by William IV., in 1833, was the last departure from the principle, and it would now be universally condemned as an intrigue. For a personal breach of duty an individual Minister may be dismissed. Lord Palmerston was dismissed for a personal breach of duty in recognizing the usurping Government of France after the coup d'etat, in contravention of the instructions given him by the Crown on the advice of the Cabinet. Personal corruption or or treachery would be a still stronger case. But if the Lieutenant-Governor of Quebec meant to exercise this power, he should have dismissed his advisers, not collectively, but individually, stating the specific offence which was the ground of dismissal in each case. In Lord Palmerston's case, the Prime Minister and the rest of the Cabinet concurred in the removal of their offending colleague.

Every government, however sound may be its title to power has its moments of unpopularity, brought on possibly by the performance of some inevitable public duty. At such moments a constitutional sovereign owes his advisers his special support; if he were to be allowed to seize the opportunity of tripping them up, for the gratification of his political antipathy, it is evident what the consequences would be to the constitution. Lieut.-Governors unfortunately are partisans, and if they are not held to the strict observance of constitutional rules, these offices will become the instruments of conspiracy in the interest of party. In this case there was clearly a strong party inducement to get hold of the Quebec Government with its influence and patronage on the

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