at some distance from the village, is a block of buildings belonging to the Hudson's Bay Company, whose posts are now found scattered at distant intervals all through the north and west as far as the Rocky Moun tains. Their next nearest station is at Lake Kakebonga, and the farthest north at James's Bay, many hundreds of miles distant from the Désert. The post at the latter point is now or will soon be deserted, as the traffic in furs is not sufficient to pay all its expenses. The country around the Désert is cultivated on a very limited scale, by some of the lumbermen and a few Indians. For the most part the land is poor, and the lumber becomes more inferior the further north you go. The Désert village is the last outpost of commerce and civilization in the country north of the Ottawa. A vast wilderness of picturesque lakes, hills, and barrens, with limited tracts of arable land, stretches to the waters of the distant Hudson's Bay. A country of silence, except when the Indian or voyageur dips his paddle to some monotonous chant. The Kakebonga Lake is the limit of the lumberman's operations in this region. If you follow the map, you will notice that the Désert River takes a sudden curve, a few miles from its junction with the Gatineau, runs parellel with it for a considerable distance, and then merges at last in the Lake of the Désert, into which flows a chain of streams and lakes, all connected with Lake Kakebonga, and finally with the river Ottawa itself. In fact all the rivers and lakes of the upper Ottawa country form a series of water-stretches, remarkable for their erratic courses, and it is quite possible to ascend the Ottawa to Lake Temiscamingue in a canoe, and, after passing over a few "carries" to avoid the rapids and falls, to descend at last into the Gatineau at the Désert. The village of Our Lady of the Désert in the Algonquin tongue, Maniwaki or Land of Mary-is the centre of the Indian missions for a large tract of wilderness. Here, some years ago, under the old Government of Canada, many thousands of acres of land were set apart for the Indians of the Désert. The situation is favourable for bringing to gether the Indians of Grand Lac, Temiscamingue, St. Maurice, and Abbitibbi. It is from this point that the Indian missionaries set out periodically in canoes for the distant missions of Wassinippi, the furthest post of the St. Maurice district; and of Makiskaw, on * the height of land whence the descent is to Hudson's Bay. The Roman Catholic missionary was, up to a year or two, the only professor of the Christian faith to be seen in this cheerless savage region. Even now, his church alone dominates the surrounding country and calls the people to worship. Neither the colds of winter nor the heats of summer retard his progress among the Indians, scattered over the face of this country. Differ from him we may, but we must always admire that fidelity to his purpose which, for ages, has taken him into the most remote corners of the earth. Here, on the verge of the wilderness, he has built a noble church, for the sole use of the Indian tribes; and one cannot but wonder at a zeal and devotion which Protestant sects might well imitate. The Indians of this region are somewhat numerous, and belong to the Algonquin family, who have always occupied the north. Some of the more remote tribes speak a dialect-for instance, the Indians of Wassinippi-which approaches nearer the Cree. Many of them are industrious and cultivate small farms, on which they have built snug log cabins or frame cottages; but the majority continue to subsist by hunting and fishing. In the Désert district, the Indians are civilized, and are outwardly very devout, if one may judge from their behaviour in church. They are very fond of processions, and the priests, who understand them well, do not fail to please them in this way on the feasts of the Epiphany, and on other occasions. The interior of the large chapel is very bare at present, as the priests have not yet succeeded in raising money sufficient to plaster and decorate it. The choir is composed of two violins and four Indian voices, generally led by one of the "Sisters" in charge of the educational establishment. The airs are generally low, monotonous chants, suited to the Indian voice. It was a very blustering day when the writer entered the chapel, during the afternoon service, and certainly no one could do otherwise than be impressed with the seeming harmony of the Indian voices with the wild north wind as it sighed around that lonely church on the bleak hills of the Désert. In the remote parts of the wilderness of this section, the missionaries have a difficult work to cure the Indians of the superstitions and juggleries which they have been wont to practice for centuries. Some of them are still said to practice what they call the Kasabandjakerin or La Cabane, in which the Indian conjuror proves himself the prototype of the Davenport Brothers. He builds a conical lodge of upright sticks and bark, under which he is carried when he has been firmly tied with cords. Once inside, the jugglery commences. The awestruck audience, who are awaiting revelations around the lodge, are soon rewarded by the most frightful groans and invocations to the Evil Spirit, who at last makes his appearance in the shape of a little ugly black man, who liberates the conjuror from his bonds and gives him all the information he requires. A similar trick was practised in Champlain's time, and shows that the so-called Spiritualistic magicians of modern times are only mere imitators of the aborigines. What is to be the future of the vast wilderness which stretches from the headwaters of the Gatineau and St. Maurice to the lonely shores of Hudson's Bay? What I have seen of the country, and what I have learned of its topographical features from surveyors who have, at one time or other, travelled over its rocky surface, cannot lead one to form a very hopeful opinion. The lumber is poor and scraggy, and the land is unfit for settlement, according as you go further north. Even game is scarce, and the valuable fur-bearing animals will soon be hunted off the face of the region. Wolves prowl among the hills, and ever and anon pounce down on the settlements within twenty miles of the capital. No farming population is likely to be attracted to a region which only offers a great variety of rocks, and water-stretches of rare beauty. The Désert village is likely to remain the last settlement of importance to the north of Ottawa, and it, we know, owes its existence to the enterprise of the missionary and lumberman. Silence and shadow will always rest upon this wilderness, unless, indeed, valuable economic minerals can be found amid the rocky hills which rise in all directions. Perhaps it may become vast grazing grounds for flocks of sheep, though the long, expensive winters must always stand in the way even of that enterprise. The fact that mineral deposits are being constantly unearthed in the country towards Ottawa, leads one to hope that the rocks which stretch from the Désert for many days' journey, may eventually be found to have some value. But until such discoveries are made, the region beyond this little village of the North must always remain a Désert in fact as well as in name. J. G. BOURINOT. I' LORD MACAULAY AND THE LIBERAL PARTY. T is the misfortune of great writers and great artists that they must be responsible, in some measure at least, to Fame and Posterity for the development of their doctrines, and the offshoots of their style. Long after they have ceased to live, their followers and disciples continue to appeal to their authority for logical results they would never have admitted, and for meretricious imitations and adaptations which they would never have approved. It would be interesting to know what St. Paul, for instance, would have to say to Mr. Matthew Arnold concerning the meanings which that learned and too ingenious gentleman has found in his words. Plato is made the foster-father of such nonsense as his great soul would have revolted from in deepest indignation. Montaigne has been made, even within a year or so, responsible for religious views which he would never have admitted to be his own, or to be logically deducible from his writings. Savonarola has been made to figure as a heretic to the Roman Catholic faith, to which no man was more enthusiastically devoted. Rubens has to bear the blame of much of the excesses of the fleshly style or school of painting, in an age when art has ceased almost to have any of its old divine instincts, and when artists have forsaken the contemplation of the angels and their Heaven, God and his saints, for the contemplation of barn-yard "interiors" and the beasts of the .field. Dr. Johnson's well-known foibles with regard to the Cock Lane Ghost and the superstitions of the Hebrides and kindred subjects, have been made to cover a host of puerilities in these more "enlightened" days. In fact, it may be said of the acknowledged founder of any sort of school, that if he could return to earth for a season, he would be shocked beyond measure at the developments of his teaching, and would, institute such a sweeping reformation as would leave seven-eighths of his followers screaming in chorus against the destruction of their rock and the condemnation of their theories. In the higher Politics, this would be particularly true. Even Voltaire would refuse to be responsible for the excesses of the revolutionary period. Charles Fox would repudiate the Dilkes, Chamberlains, and Jenkinses with fiery scorn. I doubt extremely if even Mr. Cobden would permit his Free Trade theories to cover a changed condition | of commerce under which British goods are met everywhere by hostile tariffs, while foreign goods of the same kind are admitted free to English markets, destroying the industry of the British workman, whose tea, tobacco, liquors, and medicines are taxed almost beyond endurance. It appears to the present writer that no man has suffered more from the unwarranted assumptions of his followers than Lord Macaulay. And the references made to him by Mr. Laurier, in his famous lecture of some months ago, and by Sir Francis Hincks at a very recent period, induce me to pen a few observations which occurred to me on a second perusal of Mr. Trevelyan's noble "Life." Stated broadly, the conclusion I have come to is this, that from the date of Macaulay's re-entry into public life, after his return from India, there was a continued and ever-increasing divergence of opinion between him and the bulk of the Liberal Party. And from this point of view it seems not only impossible, but a little ridiculous to try to make the Whig historian the fosterfather of a Colonial Liberalism which contains few, if any, of the prime postulates of Lord Macaulay's political beliefs. If any curious reader of his "Life" will take it up and peruse the second volume carefully, I think evidences of the divergence I have referred to can be found, if not as thick as blackberries, at least in numbers sufficient to support the theory I have advanced. It should never be forgotten of Lord Macaulay that his Liberalism was largely of a purely literary character. It seems as if his mental attitude towards Liberalism was like what many people imagine Dr. Newman's mental attitude to be towards Roman Catholicism. His Liberalism was in truth Whiggism of the Queen Anne period. Montague and Somers, not Lord Russell and Earl Grey, were the gods of his idolatry; and his admiration for the revolution was a warmer feeling than his regard for the Reform Bill. Nor should it be forgotten that he started as a Tory. And to the last and from the first his personal attitude towards the people as a people was one more characteristic of an Edinburgh Tory than of a Clapham or London Liberal. He had not one of the "points" of a Liberal leader. He was not fond of appealing to the masses; he was not fond of public speaking, he was not genial, he was not popular; he neglected his correspondents; he snubbed delegations. He thought he was doing the people of Edinburgh an honour in representing them, and that in re-electing him they did but make an act of "reparation" which was due from them to him. This was not the conventional Liberal note of personal conduct. But it is of his party relations that I wish more particularly to speak. Almost at the outset of his career he learned to have a hearty hatred for Lord Brougham, the great Liberal Champion, and this hatred never ceased. It was probably mutual, as a reference to Brougham's autobiography might reveal, but for that there is no occasion. Just here it may be interesting to notice Lord Brougham's views on Lord Durham's report, about which Sir Francis Hincks has had so much to say. "It was," Brougham said, “a second-rate article for the Edinburgh Review. The matter came from a swindler, the style from a coxcomb, and the Dictator furnished only six letters-D-U-R-H-A-M." (See Macaulay's Life, vol. II. p. 49.) Macaulay's peculiar views concerning parties began, as has been said, almost immediately after his return from India. The Whigs were not in good odour, and indeed were on the down grade to the break-up of 1841. Macaulay saw at once their unwisdom and their weakness. In 1838 he wrote: "My own suspicion is that the Tories in the House of Lords will lose reputation, though I do not imagine that the Government will gain any. As to Brougham, he has reached that happy point at which it is equally impossible for him to gain character or lose it." Indeed it was not very possible for Macaulay, with his high sense of the nature of Whig principles, to view with pleasure the Whig policy and practices of the period, when, as Praed wrote, a Whig minister "Has seen distrust in every look ; His very first effort in Parliament was an effort to justify the privilege claimed by the Government, of permitting some of the ministers to vote against ministerial measures; and it is curious to notice that the defence was made altogether from the literary point of view, and without ever once discussing the principle of the thing. His next was to defend Lord Cardigan for practices for which in these days his lordship would not be permitted to remain in the British service, at least in high command, for twenty-four hours; and Mr. Trevelyan admits that this heavy duty was "quite sufficient occupation for one minister." In 1843, Macaulay's distaste for Whig policy was so marked, that a letter of that period will be quite justifiable even in a short article::- In 1845, after having poured on Peel all the vials of his indignant rhetoric, we find Macaulay writing thus to his sister Hannah : "If, which is not absolutely impossible, though improbable, Peel should still try to patch up a Conservative administration, and should, as the head of that administration, propose the repeal of the Corn Laws, my course is clear. I must support him with all the energy I have till the question is carried. Then I am free to oppose him." And in the same letter he writes, "If Lord John should undertake to form a Whig ministry, and should ask my assistance, I cannot in honour refuse it. But I shall distinctly tell him, and tell my colleagues and constituents, that I will not again go through what I went through in Lord Melbourne's administration." In 1845 again, December 20th, we find Macaulay indicting his party leaders to his sister Hannah. He writes as follows :-“I have no disposition to complain of the loss of office. On the contrary, my escape from the slavery of a placeman is my only consolation. But I feel that we are in an ignominious position as a party.' It was after Lord Grey's disagreement had prevented Lord John from forming a cabinet, and the public interests were temporarily sacrificed DEAR ELLIS :-I never thought that I should to personal considerations. I pass over the live to sympathise with Brougham's abuse of quarrel with his constituency and his defeat the Whigs; but I must own that we deserve it at Edinburgh in 1847. In that case his lanall. I suppose that you have heard of the stupid guage and conduct were such as to mark and disgraceful course which our leaders have with the greatest emphasis his departure resolved to take. I really cannot speak or write of it with patience. They are going to vote from Whig principles and his own eloquent thanks to Ellenborough in direct opposition to professions, even in his history, of the revertheir opinion, and with an unanswerable case ence which popular judgment should always against him on their hands, only that they may receive at the hands of the people's represave Auckland from recrimination. They will sentatives. At page 178 of the "Life," after not save him, however. Cowardice is a mighty his enforced retirement from political life, we poor defence against malice, and to sacrifice read :-"Sometimes he would recast his the whole weight and respectability of our party to the feelings of one man is-but the thing is thoughts and give them over again in the too bad to talk about. I cannot avert the dis- shape of an epigram. You call me a grace of our party; but I do not choose to share Liberal,' he said, but I don't know that in it. I shall therefore go to Clapham quietly, these days I deserve the name. I am opand leave those who have cooked this dirt-pie posed to the abolition of standing armies. I for us, to eat it. I did not think that any poli-am opposed to the abrogation of capital ALBANY, Feb'y, 1843. tical matter would have excited me so much as this has done. I fought a very hard battle, but punishment. I am opposed to the destruchad nobody except Lord Minto and Lord Clan- tion of the National Church. In short, I ricarde to stand by me. I could easily get up am in favour of war, hanging, and church a mutiny among our rank and file if I chose, establishments.'" During the period that elapsed between his defeat at Edinburgh and his re-election in 1852, his mind had been losing its purely partisan bent, and on the occasion of his first speech to the electors of his constituency we read that he reviewed the events of the past five years "in a strain of lofty impartiality' although he did, in the course of it, "change his tone," but only for a little while, to give them a taste of his old "rattling party quality." There was an absence of asperity in the speech, which, considering the relations of parties was rather striking in a man who was looked upon, and with justice, as a great party champion. In the same year we read in his diary a tribute to the "practical ability" of Mr. Disraeli. And again we read, during the progress of the formation of Lord John's Government in 1852, of "the sympathy, not unmingled with amusement, with which he listened to the confidences of his old Whig colleagues;" sympathy and amusement being queer feelings for an old political colleague to entertain for the men at whose side he had fought his way to fame, and from whose admiring support he had received his first advances and his greatest fortune. In November, 1852, he writes: "Joe Hume talked to me earnestly about the necessity for a union with the Liberals. He said much "Macaulay's indifference to the vicissitudes of party politics had by this time grown into a confirmed habit of mind. His correspondence during the Spring of 1857, contains but few and brief ministerial defeat upon the China war, and the allusions to even catastrophes as striking as the overwhelming reverse of fortune which ensued when the question was referred to the polling booths. 'Was there ever anything,' he writes, since the fall of the rebel angels like the smash of the Anti-corn-law league? How art thou fallen from Heaven, O Lucifer!' Macaulay's opinion, was in favour of the Government, and opinion on the matter, so far as he had any against the Coalition. I am glad,' he wrote, on the eve of the debate, 'that I have done with politics. I should not have been able to avoid a pretty sharp encounter with Lord John."" that during the most eminent portion of his Hear we may finish. It seems pretty clear career, even while the Whigs and Liberals were looking to him with pride and confidence, he was looking away from them, and gradually growing in beliefs on public questions that in their due logical consequences would in time have compelled him towards, if not into, the Conservative camp. In our day, short as is the time that has elapsed since his death, is it not more likely that he would be found supporting the Government and party that have reformed the representabout the ballot and the franchise. I told ation, improved the sanitary condition of the him that I could easily come to some com- people, protected the national honour, expromise with some of his friends on these tended the territory of the empire by bloodmatters, but that there were other ques-under a British form of government, and less conquests, consolidated the colonies tions about which I feared there was an irreconcilable difference, particularly the preserved the peace of Europe in the face of insane Liberal agitations, rather than following in the train of those who carry their "burning" questions and "blazing" principles-the entire secularization of schools in a country with a national Church, and the destruction of that Church in a country in which, as Newman said, "it is the great bulwark against infidelity ,, -at the head of an army of agitators and radicals, with whom the great Whig historian would have nothing in common? And by parity of reasoning, what hope is there to find in Lord Macaulay a sponsor for a misty programme of Liberalism, in which he could not find one principle, not to all parties, of He vital question of national defence. attacks on Prince Albert; and a little later common which he could approve? MARTIN. J. GRIFFIN. |