Loyalty so strong as this seems natural in a Whig like Baldwin, but one associates agitation and radicalism with other views. The progressive, when he is not engaged in decrying his own state, often exhibits a philosophic indifference to all national prejudice--he is a cosmopolitan whose charity begins away from home. There were those among the Canadian Radicals who were as bad friends to Britain as they were good friends to the United States, but the Clear-Grit party up to confederation was true to Britain, largely because their leader, after 1850, was George Brown, and because Brown was the loyalest Scot in Canada. Brown was in a sense the most remarkable figure of the time in {341} his province. Fierce in his opinions, a vehement speaker, an agitator whose best qualities unfitted him for the steadier work of government, he committed just those mistakes which make the true agitator's public life something of a tragedy, or at least a disappointment. But Brown's work was done out of office. His passionate advocacy of the policy of Abraham Lincoln and the abolition of slavery kept relations with the United States calm through a diplomatic crisis. He it was who made confederation not possible, but necessary, by his agitation for a sounder representation. His work as opposition leader, and as the greatest editor known to Canadian journalism, saved Canadian politics from becoming the nest of jobs and corruption which--with all allowance for his good qualities--John A. Macdonald would have made them. Never before, and certainly never since his day, has any Canadian influenced the community as Brown did through _The Globe_. "There were probably many thousand voters in Ontario," says Cartwright,[48] "especially among the Scotch settlers, who hardly read anything except their _Globe_ and their Bible, and whose whole political creed was practically dictated to them {342} by the former." Now that influence was exerted, from first to last, in favour of Britain. In his maiden speech in parliament Brown protested against a reduction of the governor's salary, and on the highest ground: "The appointment of that high authority is the only power which Great Britain still retains. Frankly and generously she has one by one surrendered all the rights which were once held necessary to the condition of a colony--the patronage of the Crown, the right over the public domain, the civil list, the customs, the post office have all been relinquished ... she guards our coasts, she maintains our troops, she builds our forts, she spends hundreds of thousands among us yearly; and yet the paltry payment to her representative is made a topic of grumbling and popular agitation."[49] In the same spirit he fought annexation, and killed it, among his followers; and, when confederation came, he helped to make the new dominion not only Canadian, but British. In that age when British faith in the Empire was on the wane,