Still, in spite of the acquittal of Hincks, there were cases of complicated corruption, and a multitude of little squalid sins. Men like Sir Allan MacNab, who had been bred in a system of preferments and petty political gains, found it difficult to avoid small jobbery. "He has such an infernal lot of hangers on to provide for," wrote one minister to another, concerning the gallant knight, "that he finds it difficult to do the {317} needful for them all."[19] It is clear, too, that when John A. Macdonald succeeded MacNab as Tory leader, purity did not increase. It was no doubt easy for George Brown to criticize Macdonald's methods from a position of untempted rectitude, and no doubt also Brown had personal reasons for criticism; but he was speaking well within the truth, when he attacked the Tory government of 1858, not only for grave corruption in the late general election, but for other weightier offences. It was elicited, he said, by the Public Accounts Committee that L500,000 of provincial debentures had been sold in England by government at 99-1/4, when the quotation of the Stock Exchange was 105 @ 107, by which the province was wronged to the extent of L50,000. It was elicited that a member of Parliament, supporting the government, sold to the government L20,000 of Hamilton debentures at 97-1/4 which were worth only 80 in the market.... It was elicited that large sums were habitually drawn from the public chest, and lent to railway companies, or spent on services for which no previous sanction of Parliament had been obtained.[20] It is, perhaps, the gravest charge {318} against Macdonald that, at the entrance of Canada into the region of modern finance and speculation, he never understood that incorrupt administration was the greatest gift a man could give to the future of his country. In a young and not yet civilized community it was natural that the early days of self-government should witness some corruption among the voters, the more so because, at election times "there were no less than four days, the nomination, two days' polling, and declaration day, on all of which, by a sort of unwritten law, the candidates in many constituencies were compelled to keep open house for their supporters," while direct money bribes were often resorted to, especially on the second day's polling in a close contest.[21]