n
the Macdonald-Cartier Government underwent a similar experience.

The 'Double Shuffle' proved a source of acute dissatisfaction to Brown
and his friends. The ministers were accused by them of having
perverted an Act of Parliament to a sense it was never intended to
bear. Their action in swearing to discharge duties which they never
intended to perform was characterized as little short of perjury. They
were, however, {62} sustained both by parliament and in the courts.
Thirteen years later, no less a personage than Gladstone gave to the
proceeding the sanction of his great authority. In order to qualify
Sir Robert Collier, his attorney-general, for a seat on the Judicial
Committee of the Privy Council, appointments to which were restricted
to judges, he nominated him a justice of the Court of Common Pleas, in
which Sir Robert took his seat, sat for a few days, resigned, and went
on the Judicial Committee.[4]

The year 1858 saw the beginnings of a movement in the direction of
Confederation. At an early period in the session Galt raised the
question in an interesting speech. When he joined the Ministry, as
inspector-general (finance minister), he again brought it forward.
During recess a delegation consisting of Cartier, Galt, and John Ross
proceeded to England with the object of discussing the subject with Her
Majesty's government.

{63}

The ranks of the Reform Opposition at this time included D'Arcy M'Gee,
William M'Dougall, and many other strong debaters, among them John
Sandfield Macdonald, who had sat continuously in the Assembly since the
Union--for Glengarry until the general elections of 1857, and then for
Cornwall. At first he had been a Conservative, but he drifted into the
Liberal ranks and remained there until after Confederation, despite
periodic differences with George Brown. He opposed the Confederation
movement. But we must not anticipate his career further than to say
that his political attitude was at all times extremely difficult to
define. That he himself would not demur to this estimate may be
inferred from the fact that he was wont to describe himself, in his
younger days, as a 'political Ishmaelite.' Though born and bred a
Roman Catholic, he was not commonly regarded as an eminently devout
member of that Church, of which he used laughingly to call himself 'an
outside pillar.' The truth is that John Sandfield Macdonald was too
impatient of restraint and too tenacious of his own opi