'The sky of heaven is _bleu_, the fire of hell is _rouge_,' another more pointedly urged. 'I was afraid,' one witness testified, 'that if I voted for Tremblay I should be damned.' In defence it was urged that, in the first place, the civil courts had no authority over ecclesiastics, at least for acts done in their spiritual capacity, and, in the second place, that the Church had a right to defend its interests against attack, and that in using to this end all the powers at its disposal it was employing no undue influence. Judge Routhier, the author of the _Catholic Programme_, upheld these contentions in the first trial of the Charlevoix case, but the Supreme Court, in judgments delivered by Mr Justice Taschereau, brother of {48} the Archbishop, and by Mr Justice Ritchie, denied the existence of any clerical immunity from civil jurisdiction, and found that the threats which had been made from the pulpit constituted undue influence of the clearest kind. Accordingly they voided the election. Their action met with violent protests from some of the bishops, who, when Judge Casault in the Bonaventure case followed this precedent, sought, but in vain, to have him removed by the Sacred Congregation from his chair in the law faculty of Laval. But in spite of protests the lesson had been learned, and the sturdy fight of the Liberals of Quebec for the most elementary rights of a free people had its effect. ====================================================================== [Illustration: GOVERNORS-GENERAL OF THE DOMINION 1. VISCOUNT MONCK, 1867-68 2. LORD LISGAR, 1868-72 3. EARL OF DUFFERIN, 1872-78 4. MARQUIS OF LORNE, 1878-83 5. MARQUIS OF LANSDOWN, 1882-88 6. LORD STANLEY, 1888-93 7. EARL OF ABERDEEN, 1893-98 8. EARL OF MINTO, 1898-1904 9. EARL GREY, 1904-11 10. DUKE OF CONNAUGHT, 1911-] ====================================================================== It was when matters were at this acute stage that Wilfrid Laurier came forward to do for his province and his country a service which could be accomplished only by a man of rarely balanced judgment, of firm grasp of essential principles, of wide reading and familiarity with the political ideals of other lands, and, above all, of matchless courage. Rarely, if ever, has there been delivered in Canada a speech of such momentous importance, or one so firmly based on the first principles with which Canadian statesmen too rarely concern {49} themselves, as that which he addressed to _Le Club Canadien_, a group of young Liberals, in Quebec City in June 1877.