narrow majority would not have kept them in office
a year in view of the death of Sir John A. Macdonald
in June, 1891, and the stunning blows given the government
by the “scandal session” of 1891, had it
not been for two disasters which overtook the Liberals:
The publication of Blake’s letter and the revelation
of the rascalities of the Mercier regime. Perhaps
of the two blows, that delivered by Blake was the
more disastrous. The letter was the message of
an oracle. It required an interpretation which
the oracle refused to supply; and in its absence the
people regarded it as implying a belief by Blake that
annexation was the logical sequel to the Liberal policy
of unrestricted reciprocity. The result was seen
in the by-election campaign of 1892 when the Liberals
lost seat after seat in Ontario, and the government
majority mounted to figures which suggested that the
party, despite the loss of Sir John, was as strong
as ever. The Tories were in the seventh heaven
of delight. With the Liberals broken, humiliated
and discouraged, and a young and vigorous pilot, in
the person of Sir John Thompson, at the helm, they
saw a long and happy voyage before them. Never
were appearances more illusory, for the cloud was
already in the sky from which were to come storm, tempest
and ruinous over-throw.
The story of the Manitoba school question and the
political struggle which centred around it, as told
by Prof. Skelton, is bald and colorless; it gives
little sense of the atmosphere of one of the most
electrical periods in our history. The sequelae
of the Riel agitation, with its stirring up of race
feeling, included the Jesuit Estates controversy in
parliament, the Equal Rights movement in Ontario,
the attack upon the use of the French language in the
legislature of the Northwest Territories and the establishment
of a system of National schools in Manitoba through
the repeal of the existing school law, which had been
modelled upon the Quebec law and was intended to perpetuate
the double-barrelled system in vogue in that province.
The issue created by the Manitoba legislation projected
itself at once into the federal field to the evident
consternation of the Dominion government. It parried
the demand for disallowance of the provincial statute
by an engagement to defray the cost of litigation
challenging the validity of the law. When the
Privy Council, reversing the judgment of the Supreme
Court, found that the law was valid because it did
not prejudicially affect rights held prior to or at
the time of union, the government was faced with a
demand that it intervene by virtue of the provisions
in the British North America act, which gave the Dominion
parliament the power to enact remedial educational
legislation overriding provincial enactments in certain
circumstances. Again it took refuge in the courts.
The Supreme Court of Canada held that under the circumstances
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