I had hitherto confined myself to the printing department, leaving the duties of editorship to others. On taking charge of the _Colonist_, I assumed the whole political responsibility, with Mr. John Sheridan Hogan as assistant editor and Quebec correspondent. My partners were the late Hugh C. Thomson, afterwards secretary to the Board of Agriculture, who acted as local editor; and James Bain, now of the firm of Jas. Bain & Son, to whom the book-selling and stationery departments were committed. We had a strong staff of reporters, and commenced the new enterprise under promising circumstances. Our office and store were in the old brick building extending from King to Colborne Street, long previously known as the grocery store of Jas. F. Smith. The ministry then in power was that known as the Hincks-Taché Government. Francis Hincks had parted with his old radical allies, and become more conservative than many of the Tories whom he used to denounce. People remembered Wm. Lyon Mackenzie's prophecy, who said he feared that Francis Hincks could not be trusted to resist temptation. When Lord Elgin went to England, it was whispered that his lordship had paid off £80,000 sterling of mortgages on his Scottish estates, out of the proceeds of speculations which he had shared with his clever minister. The St. Lawrence and Atlantic purchase, the £50,000 Grand Trunk stock placed to Mr. Hincks' credit--as he asserted without his consent--and the Bowes transaction, gave colour to the many stories circulated to his prejudice. And when he went to England, and received the governorship of Barbadoes, many people believed that it was the price of his private services to the Earl of Elgin. Whatever the exact truth in these cases may have been, I am convinced that from the seed then sown, sprang up a crop of corrupt influences that have since permeated all the avenues to power, and borne their natural fruit in the universal distrust of public men, and the wide-spread greed of public money, which now prevail. Neither political party escapes the imputation of bribing the constituencies, both personally at elections, and by parliamentary grants for local improvements. The wholesale expenditure at old country elections, which transferred so much money from the pockets of the rich to those of the poor, without any prospect of pecuniary return, has with us taken the form of a speculative investment to be "re-couped" by value in the shape of substantial government favours.