Lower Canada, being now numerically the weaker, naturally clung to the system which gave it equality of representation. In all these matters the breach between George Brown and the Lower Canadian representatives was widening, while he was becoming more and more the voice of Upper Canadian opinion. When, in the intervals between parliamentary sessions, he visited various places in Upper Canada, he found himself the most popular man in the community. He addressed great public meetings. Banquets were given in his honour. The prominent part taken by ministers of the Gospel at these gatherings illustrates at once the weakness and the strength of his position. He satisfied the "Nonconformist conscience" of Upper Canada by his advocacy not only of religious equality but of the prohibition of the liquor traffic and of the cessation of Sunday labour by public servants. But this very attitude made it difficult for him to work with any political party in Lower Canada. In 1853 there was a remarkable article in the Cobourg _Star_, a Conservative journal, illustrating the hold which Brown had obtained upon Upper Canadian sentiment. This attitude was called forth by a banquet given to Brown by the Reformers of the neighbourhood. It expressed regret that the honour was given on party grounds. "Had it been given on the ground of his services to Protestantism, it would have brought out every Orangeman in the country. Conservatives disagreed with Brown about the clergy reserves, but if the reserves must be secularized, every Conservative in Canada would join Brown in his crusade against Roman Catholic endowments." Then follows this estimate of Brown's character: "In George Brown we see no agitator or demagogue, but the strivings of common sense, a sober will to attain the useful, the practical and the needful. He has patient courage, stubborn endurance, and obstinate resistance, and desperate daring in attacking what he believes to be wrong and in defending what he believes to be right. There is no cant or parade or tinsel or clap-trap about him. He takes his stand against open, palpable, tangible wrongs, against the tyranny which violates men's roofs, and the intolerance which vexes their consciences. True, he is wrong on the reserves question, but then he is honest, we know where to find him. He does not, like some of our Reformers, give us to understand that he will support us and then turn his back. He does not slip the word of promise to the ear and then break it to the lips. Leaving the reserves out of the question, George Brown is eminently conservative in his spirit. His leading principle, as all his writings will show, is to reconcile progress with preservation, change with stability, the alteration of incidents with the maintenance of essentials. Change, for the sake of change, agitation for vanity, for applause or mischief, he has contemptuously repudiated. He is not like the Clear Grit, a republican of the first water, but on the contrary looks to