If George Brown of Upper Canada was the hero of the hour, George Cartier of Lower Canada played a rôle equally courageous and honourable. The hostile forces to be encountered by the French-Canadian leader were {42} formidable. Able men of his own race, like Dorion, Letellier, and Fournier, prepared to fight tooth and nail. The Rouges, as the Liberals there were termed, opposed him to a man. The idea of British American union had in the past been almost invariably put forward as a means of destroying the influence of the French. Influential representatives, too, of the English minority in Lower Canada, like Dunkin, Holton, and Huntington, opposed it. Joly de Lotbinière, the French Protestant, warned the Catholics and the French that federation would endanger their rights. The Rouge resistance was not a passive parliamentary resistance only, because, later on, the earnest protests of the dissentients were carried to the foot of the throne. But all these influences the intrepid Cartier faced undismayed; and Brown, in announcing his intention to enter the coalition, paid a warm tribute to Cartier for his frank and manly attitude. This was the burial of another hatchet, and the amusing incident related by Cartwright illustrates how it was received. [Illustration: Sir George Cartier. From a painting in the Château de Ramezay.] In that memorable afternoon when Mr Brown, not without emotion, made his {43} statement to a hushed and expectant House, and declared that he was about to ally himself with Sir George Cartier and his friends, for the purpose of carrying out Confederation, I saw an excitable, elderly little French member rush across the floor, climb up on Mr Brown, who, as you remember, was of a stature approaching the gigantic, fling his arms about his neck, and hang several seconds there suspended, to the visible consternation of Mr Brown and to the infinite joy of all beholders, pit, box, and gallery included. At last statesmanship had taken the place of party bickering, and, as James Ferrier of Montreal, a member of the Legislative Council, remarked in the debates of 1865, the legislators 'all thought, in fact, that a political millennium had arrived.' [1] _Memoirs of Sir John Macdonald_, by Sir Joseph Pope, vol. i, p. 265. [2] This portion of the lengthy survey of the new Dominion in the _Globe_ of July 1, 1867, is said to have been written by George Brown himself. [3] Sir Joseph Pope states that in the printed copy of this memorandum which Sir John Macdonald preserved there appears, immediately following the word 'Legislature' at the end of this paragraph, in the handwriting of Mr Brown, these words: 'Constituted on the well-understood principles of federal gov.' {44} CHAPTER V THE CHARLOTTETOWN CONFERENCE Not an instant too soon had unity come in Canada. The coalition ministry, having adjourned parliament, found itself faced with a situation in the Maritime Provinces which called for speedy action.