To whom is due the confederation of the British North American provinces is a long vexed question. The Hon. D'Arcy McGee, in his speech on confederation, gave credit to Mr. Uniacke, a leading politician of Nova Scotia, who in 1800 submitted a scheme of colonial union to the imperial authorities; to Chief-Justice Sewell, to Sir John Beverley Robinson, to Lord Durham, to Mr. P. S. Hamilton, a Nova Scotia writer, and to Mr. Alexander Morris, then member for South Lanark, who had advocated the project in a pamphlet entitled _Nova Britannia_. "But," he added, "whatever the private writer in his closet may have conceived, whatever even the individual statesman may have designed, so long as the public mind was uninterested in the adoption, even in the discussion of a change in our position so momentous as this, the union of these separate provinces, the individual laboured in vain--perhaps, not wholly in vain, for although his work may not have borne fruit then, it was kindling a fire that would ultimately light up the whole political horizon and herald the dawn of a better day for our country and our people. Events stronger than advocacy, events stronger than men, have come in at last like the fire behind the invisible writing, to bring out the truth of these writings and to impress them upon the mind of every thoughtful man who has considered the position and probable future of these scattered provinces." Following Mr. McGee's suggestion, let us try to deal with the question from the time that it ceased to be speculative and became practical, and especially to trace its development in the mind of one man. In the later fifties Mr. Brown was pursuing a course which led almost with certainty to the goal of confederation. The people of Upper Canada were steadily coming over to his belief that they were suffering injustice under the union; that they paid more than their share of the taxes, and yet that Lower Canadian influence was dominant in legislation and in the formation of ministries. Brown's tremendous agitation convinced them that the situation was intolerable. But it was long before the true remedy was perceived. The French-Canadians would not agree to Brown's remedy of representation by population. Brown opposed as reactionary the proposal that the union should be dissolved. He desired not to go back to the day of small things--on the contrary, even at this early day, he was advocating the union of the western territories with Canada. Nor was he at first in favour of the federal principle. In 1853, in a formal statement of its programme, the _Globe_ advocated uniform legislation for the two provinces, and a Reform convention held at Toronto in 1857 recommended the same measure, together with representation by population and the addition of the North-West Territories to Canada.