His action at that time is his chief claim to the monument which has been raised in his honour in the great western city where he was for so many years a political force, and where the newspaper he established still remains at the head of Canadian journalism. The greatest and ablest man among all who were notable in Lord Elgin's days in Canada, Sir John Alexander Macdonald--the greatest not simply as a Canadian politician but as one of the builders of the British empire--lived to become one of Her Majesty's Privy Councillors of Great Britain, a Grand Cross of the Bath, and prime minister for twenty-one years of a Canadian confederation which stretches for 3,500 miles from the Atlantic to the Pacific ocean. When death at last forced him from the great position he had so long occupied with distinction to himself and advantage to Canada, the esteem and affection in which he was held by the people, whom he had so long served during a continuous public career of half a century, were shown by the erection of stately monuments in five of the principal cities of the Dominion--an honour never before paid to a colonial statesman. The statues of Sir John Macdonald and Sir Georges Cartier--statues conceived and executed by the genius of a French Canadian artist--stand on either side of the noble parliament building where these statesmen were for years the most conspicuous figures; and as Canadians of the present generation survey their bronze effigies, let them not fail to recall those admirable qualities of statesmanship which distinguished them both--above all their assertion of those principles of compromise, conciliation and equal rights which have served to unite the two races in critical times when the tide of racial and sectional passion and political demagogism has rushed in a mad torrent against the walls of the national structure which Canadians have been so steadily and successfully building for so many years on the continent of North America. CHAPTER XI POLITICAL PROGRESS