On wider grounds the Government should have stood for clemency. Who was right in the United States after the Civil War--President Johnson, who wished to try Lee for treason, or General Grant, who insisted that he be not touched? Twenty years after, the unity of North and South proves unmistakably Grant's far-seeing wisdom. 'We cannot make a nation of this new country by shedding blood,' Mr Laurier concluded. 'Our prisons are full of men, who, despairing of getting justice by peace, sought it by war, who, despairing of ever being treated like freemen, {89} took their lives in their hands rather than be treated as slaves. They have suffered greatly, they are suffering still, yet their sacrifice will not be without reward.... They are in durance to-day, but the rights for which they were fighting have been acknowledged. We have not the report of the commission yet, but we know that more than two thousand claims so long denied have at last been granted. And more--still more: we have it in the Speech from the Throne that at last representation is to be granted to those Territories. This side of the House long sought, but sought in vain, to obtain that measure of justice. It could not come then, but it came after the war; it came as the last conquest of that insurrection. And again I say that "their country has conquered with their martyrdom," and if we look at that one fact alone there was cause sufficient, independent of all other, to extend mercy to the one who is dead and to those who live.' In parliament, for all the eloquence of Laurier and Blake, the Government had its way. In the country the controversy raged in more serious fashion. In Quebec Honore Mercier, the brilliant, tempestuous leader of the Liberals, carried on a violent agitation, {90} and in January 1887 rode the whirlwind into power. Wild and bitter words were many in the contest, and they found more than an answer in Ontario, where the leading ministerial organ, the _Mail_, declared it better to 'smash Confederation into its original fragments' rather than yield to French dictation. [Illustration: HONORE MERCIER From a photograph]