It has been seen that during Dorchester’s first government, he had experienced no little difficulty in dealing with Livius, the contumacious Chief Justice of Quebec. In the earlier period of his second government, he had, on the contrary, a wise and loyal fellow worker in Chief Justice Smith. Soon after the governor returned to Canada for the last time, towards the end of 1793, Smith died and his place was taken by Osgoode, the Chief Justice of Upper Canada, who did not enjoy Dorchester’s confidence to the same extent as his predecessor. But Osgoode’s appointment was made the occasion for putting into practice a reform which Dorchester, to his lasting honour, had urgently pressed upon the notice of the Imperial Government, the abolition of fees and perquisites, and the payment of judges and other public officers by adequate salaries alone. Dorchester himself, when he first took up the government of Canada in 1766, had refused to take the fees to which he was legally entitled; and in the last years of his Canadian service he wrote on this subject in no measured terms. In a dispatch dated the last day of December, 1793, and written in connexion with the vacant chief justiceship, he referred to the system of fees and perquisites as one which ‘alienates every servant of the Crown from whoever administers the King’s Government. This policy I consider as coeval with His Majesty’s Governments in North America, and the cause of their destruction. As its object was not public but private advantage, so this principle has been pursued with diligence, extending itself unnoticed, till all authority and influence of government on this continent was overcome, and the governors reduced almost to mere corresponding agents, unable to resist the pecuniary speculations of gentlemen in office, their connexions and associates’. He added that whatever tended to enfeeble the Executive power in British North America tended to sever it for ever from the Crown of Great Britain. Subsequent dispatches were to the same effect. In June, 1795, he reported having disallowed certain small claims by subordinate officers, expressed regret that gentlemen in Britain should look to America for a reward for their services, and laid down that officers should be paid sufficient salaries to place them above pecuniary speculations in the colonies. The next month he wrote in the same strain with reference to the Customs officials and the collection of revenue: and a year later he again insisted that such officers should not receive indirect emoluments, that the local administration should not be warped and made subservient to fees, profits, perquisites ‘and all their dirty train’, and that the national interests should not be sacrificed to gentlemen who possessed or were looking out for good places for themselves and their connexions. Running through the dispatches is insistence on the principle that the Executive must be strong, that it can be strong only if the officers are