while Sandfield Macdonald had been markedly absent. Surprisingly enough, Foley and Connor had swallowed their anger and pride, and their speeches, to vote in favour of the measures, and so for Brown’s policies at the end.80
Nevertheless, it was equally plain that the programme of constitutional change had attracted few votes beyond Brown’s own following, and precious few indeed from Lower Canada. Only nine from the eastern section had supported federation.81 The proposal had made no headway there – no doubt because the time that might have been spent by Upper Canada Liberals in spreading better understanding eastward had been taken up in their own internal squabbles. Yet western Reformers, in reaction, would fall back still more upon themselves.82 Why, they might argue, follow a policy that presumed on eastern support, as federation did? The West must return to its own wrongs, to its own demands, and make its own reforming forces so strong that none would dare deny them.
Obviously the federation principle had failed, even while the Globe tried to put the best face on it and announced that “the great question of constitutional change has passed its first parliamentary ordeal”.83 How far was it Brown’s fault? He had hoped too much; he had acted too precipitately at the outset, in gambling on a quick introduction of the Convention’s resolutions while the enthusiasm roused by that meeting still seemed strong. It was an ineptly calculated risk and it displayed his leadership at its faultiest. Here his chief failings as a politician were all revealed: over-confidence, impatience, and imperiousness, and then sheer inability to woo and win – to persuade and conciliate instead of ordering and insisting. Brown, the strong, far-sighted director of the Convention of 1859, and Brown, the hasty, uncompromising dictator of the caucus of 1860, were two aspects of the same man.
Yet not everything was lost. The party still held together; even the malcontents were still in association. Nor could Brown be fairly blamed for their own sizeable contribution of distrust and envy, backsliding and postponement, their placing of obstacles without offering any really positive alternatives. Furthermore, the idea of federation in Reform circles was far from dead. It had been filed away, like British North American union among Conservatives, for future reference if it ever should seem feasible. And George Brown’s main share in stamping that idea on his party at the Convention, in the Address, and during the session of 1860, would be remembered long after his failure with the resolutions in that year had been forgotten. The Globe, summing up, wrote undismayed: “The joint authority will be established, and Upper Canada will become the centre, at no distant day, of a British Confederation extending from the Rocky Mountains to the Banks of Newfoundland.”84
6
However important, the constitutional problem was not Brown’s only preoccupation in parliament that hectic spring. An old concern of his, the university question, had appeared once more. The provincial university, the secular and state-endowed University of Toronto, was under new attacks from religious denominations with colleges of their own to maintain, on the grounds that the university had lowered standards and wasted funds, and, worst of all, had not left a surplus from the public endowment that could be divided among the denominational colleges. A select committee of nine had been named by parliament to investigate.85 George Brown was one of a varied membership that included Foley, Malcolm Cameron, and John A. Macdonald. Party lines did not necessarily hold on the question, however; for the committee hearings that began in March and ran through April often found Cameron and Macdonald ranged on one side, Brown and the Conservative William Cayley on the other. Certainly there was no doubt where Brown’s own sympathies would lie, as the champion of non-sectarian public education at all levels, and a firm believer in one strong central university. He was in close accord with the two chief witnesses for the University of Toronto at the hearings: John Langton, its Vice-Chancellor, and Daniel Wilson, Professor of History and English Literature in University College, the University’s actual teaching institution.
Brown, in fact, was particularly in accord with Wilson, an Edinburgh Scot like himself, who had once been his schoolmate at the Edinburgh High School.86 Early in the year, when complaints against the university were being prepared for presentation to parliament, he and Wilson had conferred on the troubles ahead. The crux of the problem was that the existing University Act, that of 1853, had made a vague provision for the distribution of surplus income from the university endowment among “affiliated” colleges. There had been no surplus yet – and there was no clear indication that any funds at all had to go to the colleges by right. But when denominational interests, pinched by the depression, eyed Toronto’s fine new stone buildings in Queen’s Park, their sense of deprivation grew righteously acute. The powerful Wesleyan Methodist Conference that maintained Victoria College had been particularly aroused. It took the lead in memorializing against the unjust Toronto monopoly.
Recognizing the extent of the danger to the provincial institution, Brown himself, in discussion with Wilson, was even willing to consider providing new professorial chairs in the denominational colleges at public expense, in order to ease their need for funds and take the pressure off the central university. But Daniel Wilson argued that admitting the principle of public grants to sectarian institutions could only imperil the whole endowment: “Why not divide it among the claimants? – and so away goes the noblest provision ever made for an unsectarian provincial system of collegiate education.”87
When, therefore, the university committee met, Brown, urged on by Wilson, stood four-square for the integrity of Toronto university, academic as well as financial.88 But the attacking denominational forces had the province’s most potent educational personage on their side: the weighty Dr. Egerton Ryerson, a Methodist minister and one-time principal of Victoria, Chief Superintendent of Education for Upper Canada, and an old foe of George Brown’s. Having submitted a written statement to the committee, Ryerson gave his evidence with all the emotional oratory and polemical zeal that had made him so powerful a controversialist. He attacked Toronto’s disgraceful lowering of standards, which allowed an “unprecedented system of options” through the introduction of modern languages and natural science, and permitted half the time of its professors to be spent in tutoring honours students, instead of properly allotting their full attention to all the undergraduates for “critical exposition and drilling”.89 He attacked the university’s lavish expenditures, particularly on buildings comparable in Toronto, he said, to St. Peter’s in Rome. And he freely painted the staff of University College as “a family compact” engaged in the Senate in voting salary increases for one another.90 Altogether, his was a strong performance.
Thus, when George Brown cross-examined Superintendent Ryerson in mid-April, it was like a bout between well-matched heavy-weights. Details of the record, questions of motive, personalities, flew fast. By an intensive use of university records Brown pressed Ryerson well back on a number of his sweeping charges, though the latter repeatedly evaded telling blows by failing to remember the episode in question.91 Thereafter, too, the doctor submitted fresh statements with new interpretations to meet Brown’s countercharges. At the end both sides claimed victory. The Globe deemed Ryerson “thoroughly roasted”, while Ryerson attributed his triumph to divine aid.92 The truth was that neither hardened battler had really been hurt.
In fact, after all the sound and fury, the whole investigation ended without a decision. There were two draft reports for and against the university given to the press, but neither of them was adopted by the committee or presented to parliament – which rose in any case on May 19.93 The committee was too divided to decide, and so was the ministry itself. If John A. Macdonald favoured Ryerson and the denominational colleges, there were those in his own party, like Cayley, who did not. Undoubtedly the ministerialists did not feel so secure in office that they could afford to press so controversial an issue. Indeed, the fizzling-out of the university question was one more consequence of the weakness and division in government under the existing Canadian union.
Both the university interests and those of the colleges were, of course, left unsatisfied. In early May, Wilson entreated Brown without success to push the committee to
