On March 27, 1845, Parliament was prorogued and on July 1st the new governor, Lord Cathcart, arrived. This year various educational movements were furthered. Bishop’s College, Lennoxville, was opened and the Mechanics’ Institute, so long in existence as an educational force, was incorporated. In December, John Dougall issued his specimen Witness and the first weekly Witness was published on January 5, 1846. Meanwhile the commission appointed in 1845 to investigate the rebellion losses indemnities was sitting and on April 18, 1846, it presented its report that the sum of £100,000 would be sufficient to pay all real losses. Already bitter feeling was being aroused among the English on this point. But the railway era, then commencing, diverted some attention from their grievances. In June, James Ferrier and others sought a charter for a railway from Kingston to Prescott and John A. Macdonald, then beginning his parliamentary career, and others, sought one from Montreal to Kingston, John Molson and others demanding one from St. Johns to the international boundary. On August 10th, on the Champ de Mars, a gathering of 2,000 Montrealers resolved to have a railway to the sea. Men were seeing visions and the Hon. John Young wrote this year to the Economist, advocating a bridge across the St. Lawrence. His dream was to come true. The year 1847 saw the line from Montreal to Lachine opened. Otherwise the year was one of disaster--that of the ship fever. In this year 100,000 emigrants, mostly from Ireland, escaping the scourge of typhus fever and famine, came to Canada, but being exposed to ship fever nearly 10,000 became its victims; hundreds and hundreds died. The quarantine station of Grosse Isle was the most pestilential spot in the country. Every ship that could be chartered, good, bad and indifferent, was engaged in transporting emigrants. They were all slow-going vessels. Through want of sufficient room, neglect of ventilation, need of eatable food and cleanliness, the worst form of typhus soon appeared. “On the 8th day of May,” says Maguire’s “Irish in America,” “on the arrival of the ‘Urania’ from Cork, with several hundred immigrants on board, a large proportion of them sick and dying of the ship fever, it was put into quarantine at Grosse Isle, thirty miles below Quebec. This was the first of the plague-smitten ships from Ireland which that year sailed up the St. Lawrence. But before the first week of June as many as eighty-four ships of various tonnage were driven in by easterly gales. Of all the vessels there was not one free from the taint of malignant typhus, the offspring of famine and of the foul ship-hold.”