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Updated: May 1, 2025
The man who so haughtily wrote back to Molesworth his opinion of the appointment of Hincks was not the man to commend himself to an official superior. His very merits closed the door against him. Government departments usually prefer to let sleeping dogs lie, to be content with honest administration along existing lines, and to distrust innovation.
Brown, who had never forgotten the failure of the Conservative leaders to open negotiations with him on the defeat of the Hincks Government, vented his wrath alternately on the new Ministry and on the Roman Catholic Church, assailing both with amazing violence.
Hincks had offered him the commissionership of crown lands in the ministry, but he refused to accept any office except the one on which his ambition was fixed. Subsequently, however, he was induced by his friends to take the speakership of the legislative assembly, but he had never forgiven what he considered a slight at the hands of the prime minister in 1851.
The leading figure of this movement is that of Robert Baldwin, and he was well supported by Hincks, by Sullivan, by William Hume Blake and others. The forces were wisely led, and it is not pretended that this direction was due to Brown. He was in 1844 only twenty-six years of age, and his position at first was that of a recruit.
For several years Hincks had been doing his best to induce the American government to consider the question of reciprocity in natural products with Canada, but without avail. Bills to this effect had even been introduced into Congress; but they never got beyond the preliminary stages.
He was an entirely honest politician, deservedly remembered for the integrity of his life and his share in upbuilding Canada. So the Great Administration reached its period. It was succeeded by a ministry in which Hincks and Morin were the leaders. The new parliament included a new force in politics, George Brown, creator of the Globe newspaper.
A company of voyageurs, largely French-Canadian, however, was recruited in Canada, at Britain's expense, and did good service in the rapids of the Nile. Sir John Macdonald did not, of course, proclaim Canada's neutrality in this war, any more than Hincks and MacNab had done in the Crimean War, when hired German troops garrisoned Dover and Shorncliffe. Canada simply took no part in either war.
While the Hincks government was in office, the Canadian legislature received power from the imperial authorities as I shall show later to settle the question of the clergy reserves on condition that protection should be given to those members of the clergy who had been beneficiaries under the Constitutional Act of 1791.
From 1848 until the year of his recall, he remained in complete accord with his liberal administration, and never was constitutional monarch more intimately and usefully connected with his ministers than was Elgin, first with Baldwin and La Fontaine, and then with Hincks and Morin. Elgin gave a rarer example of what fidelity to colonial constitutionalism meant.
This act alone would have entitled Robert Baldwin to the lasting gratitude of his countrymen. Continuing, Brown said that the Hincks bill was reactionary that the original draft even contained a reference to the godless character of the institution that the plan would fritter away the endowment by dividing it among sects and among localities.
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