I Was At Once Struck By An Odd Resemblance In Some Of
His Features And Expressions To Disraeli - Dark Curly Hair, Piercing
Eyes, Aquiline Nose, Mouth Sometimes Firm, Almost Stern In Expression,
Sometimes So Mild That He Seemed Especially Fitted To Play With Little
Children.
I soon learned that, in tact, fixed purpose, and resources,
he was ahead of them all.
And, after watching his career for a quarter
of a century, I have seen no reason to alter that opinion. He is the
statesman of Canada - one of the ablest men on the Continent. I wish he
administered the Colonial relations of the whole Empire. Had he done so
for the last ten years we should have escaped our mistakes in South
Africa, and the everlasting disgrace of Majuba Hill. Why is it that
such men are excluded from office at home? Sir John A. Macdonald (then
Mr. Macdonald) was once taken by me under the gallery, by special order
of Mr. Speaker, to hear a "great" speech of Mr. Gladstone, whom he had
not before heard. When we went away, I said: "Well, what do you think
of him?" He replied: "He is a great rhetorician, but - he is not an
orator." Would that men would not be carried away in a torrent of happy
words. One hour of the late Patrick Smyth was, to my mind, worth a week
of all the great rhetoricians.
A day or two after these interviews, the Hon. John Ross took me down to
Portland, to have an interview with the Hon. A. T. Galt, the Finance
Minister of Canada. I at once recognized in Mr. Galt a reduced likeness
of his father. Mr. Galt was about five feet eleven: his father, who I
had seen when a boy, about six feet four, and "buirdly" and stout in
proportion. The father wore spectacles - the son did not. The father was
the author of the "Annals of the Parish," "Laurie Todd," and many works
greatly read when I was young. He was, also, the founder of the town of
"Guelph," and of other towns in Upper Canada. If anyone wants to see an
admirable likeness of him, he had better consult "Fraser's Magazine,"
of one of the issues of 1830 to 1833, and he will there find a rough
engraving of the hoisting of the Union Jack at Guelph. Mr. Galt,
pere, was so very large a man that Mr. Archibald Prentice, of
the "Manchester Times," used to tell a story about his pointing Mr.
Galt out to a little humpbacked Scotchman in the High Street of
Edinburgh: "Eh! Jamie, mon, there's the great Galt, author of the
'Annals of the Parish.'" "'Annals o' the Payrish,' Archie, hech, sirs,
he's big eneuch to be the Payrish itself - let alone the annals o' it."
Mr. Galt, the Finance Minister, has done great services to Canada, and
is doing them still, in developing the mineral resources of the West,
and in other ways.
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