developing there; the professional politician, who is too often the creation of factions and cliques, and the lower influences of political intrigue and party management, will be found, as time passes, more common in our legislative halls, to the detriment of those higher ideals that should be the animating principles of public life in this young country, whose future happiness and greatness depend so much on the present methods of party government. Be all this as it may be, one may still fairly claim for our legislative bodies that their intellectual standard can compare favourably with that of the Congress at Washington or the state legislatures of Massachusetts and New England generally. After all, it is not for brilliant intellectual pyrotechnics we should now so much look to the legislative bodies of Canada, but rather for honesty of purpose, keen comprehension of the public interests, and a business capacity which can grasp the actual material wants and necessities of a country which has to face the competition, and even opposition, of a great people full of industrial as well as intellectual energy. Nowhere in this review have I claimed for this country any very striking results in the course of the half century since which we have shown so much political and material activity. I cannot boast that we have produced a great poem or a great history which has attracted the attention of the world beyond us, and assuredly we find no noteworthy attempt in the direction of a novel of our modern life; but what I do claim is, looking at the results generally, the work we have done has been sometimes above the average in those fields of literature--and here I include, necessarily, science--in which Canadians have worked. They have shown in many productions a conscientious spirit of research, patient industry, and not a little literary skill in the management of their material. I think, on the whole, there have been enough good poems, histories and essays written and published in Canada for the last four or five decades to prove that there has been a steady intellectual growth on the part of our people, and that it has kept pace at all events with the mental growth in the pulpit, or in the legislative halls, where, of late years, a keen practical debating style has taken the place of the more rhetorical and studied oratory of old times. I believe the intellectual faculties of Canadians only require larger opportunities for their exercise to bring forth a rich fruition. I believe the progress in the years to come will be far greater than that we have yet shown, and that necessarily so, with the wider distribution of wealth, the dissemination of a higher culture, and a greater confidence in our own mental strength, and in the resources that this country offers to pen and pencil. The time will come when that great river, associated with memories of Cartier, Champlain, La Salle, Frontenac, Wolfe and Montcalm,--that river already