tion. It was a time of wild
speculation, in which emerged for the first time the new type of
company promoter. From England the rage for railways spread to the
Continent and to America. While Hincks was working at the problem in
Canada, Howe was working at it in Nova Scotia. To link the East with
the West, Montreal with Toronto, Montreal with the Atlantic seaboard,
Montreal with the Lake Champlain waterways to the southward, was the
general design of the first Canadian railways. It was in this period
that the first {112} sections were built of those Canadian lines which,
in half a century, have grown into immense systems radiating across the
continent. Hincks's idea was to aid private enterprise by government
guarantees of the interest on half the cost of construction. Canada is
now laced with iron roads from ocean to ocean. The man who laid the
foundation of these immense systems in the day of small beginnings
should never be forgotten.

So the busy session went on, until a measure was introduced which
aroused a storm of opposition, threatened a renewal of civil war, and
tested the principle of responsible government almost to the breaking
strain. This was the Act of Indemnification, a part of the bitter
aftermath of the rebellion twelve years before.

War, even on the smallest scale, means the destruction of property. In
the troubles of '37 buildings were burned down in the course of
military operations. For example, good Father Paquin of St Eustache
had long to mourn the loss of his church and the adjoining school. As
it stood on a point of land at the junction of two streams and was
strongly built of stone, it was an excellent {113} place of defence
against the attack of Colborne's troops. On the fatal fourteenth of
December 1837 it was stoutly held by Chenier and his men, until two
British officers broke into the sacristy and overset the stove. Soon
the fire drove the garrison out of the building, which was destroyed
along with the new school-house near by. His parishioners were loyal,
Father Paquin contended in a well-reasoned petition; it was not they
but the discontented people of Grand Brule who had seized the town; yet
the result was ruin. In the affair of Odelltown in 1838 a citizen's
barn was burnt down by orders of the British officer commanding because
it gave shelter to the rebels. Near St Eustache the Swiss adventurer
and leader of the rebels, Amury Girod, took possession of a farm
bel