These serious words did not appear to produce any immediate effect, and the debates dragged on through the hot summer months. In the end, however, patience and firmness prevailed, and the Franchise Act reached the statute-book, where it remained until it was repealed twelve years later by the Government of Sir Wilfrid Laurier. The apprehensions of the Opposition with regard to the revising officers were not realized. In Ontario these positions were offered to the county court judges, or to the junior judges, and were accepted by nearly all of them. In the province of Quebec, where there are no county court judges, such appointments were not possible; but the law provided that where the returning officer was not a judge, he must be a barrister or notary of not less than five years' standing, and an appeal in all cases lay from {138} him to a judge. Sir John Macdonald carefully supervised these appointments, which in the great majority of cases were quite unexceptionable. The administration of the Act was no doubt expensive. This was the strongest criticism heard against it; but in the opinion of the Government of that day it was essential to the idea of a united Dominion that the parliament of Canada should determine and control the conditions of acquiring the right to vote for members of its own House of Commons. [Illustration: Sir John A. Macdonald in 1883] I should not omit to state that Sir John professed himself a believer in the extension of the franchise to single women. Apparently he considered that his advocacy of a property qualification required this. I have heard him say, too, that women, as a whole, were conservative, and he considered that their admission to the vote would tend to strengthen the defences against the irruption of an unbridled democracy. Whether these views would have stood the test afforded by the present-day militant suffragettes, I am unable to say; for from Sir John Macdonald the knowledge that there might be something even more disastrous than an unrestrained male democracy was mercifully withheld. [1] See Pope's _Memoirs of Sir John Macdonald_, vol. i, p. 103. [2] Dorion voted for the third reading of the Seigneurial Tenure Bill and against that relating to the Clergy Reserves. Brown voted against the third reading of both measures, and the Clear Grits and Rouges as a body did all in their power to impede the passage of both bills. [3] 'The great reason why I have always been able to beat Brown is that I have been able to look a little ahead, while he could on no occasion forgo the temptation of a temporary triumph' (Sir John A. Macdonald to M. C. Cameron, dated Ottawa, January 3, 1872).