s
all federations--the limits between federal and provincial power.
Ontario was the chief champion of provincial rights. The struggle was
intensified by the fact that a Liberal Government reigned at Toronto
and a Conservative Government at Ottawa, as well as by the keen personal
rivalry between Mowat and Macdonald. In nearly every constitutional
duel Mowat triumphed. The accepted range of the legislative power of the
provinces was widened by the decisions of the courts, particularly of
the highest court of appeal, the Judicial Committee of the Privy
Council in England. The successful resistance of Ontario and Manitoba
to Macdonald's attempt to disallow provincial laws proved this power,
though conferred by the Constitution, to be an unwieldy weapon. By the
middle nineties the veto had been virtually abandoned.

More serious than these political differences was the racial feud that
followed the second Riel Rebellion. For a second time the Canadian
Government failed to show the foresight and the sympathy required
in dealing with an isolated and backward people. The valley of the
Saskatchewan, far northwest of the Red River, was the scene of the new
difficulty. Here thousands of metis, or French half-breeds, had settled.
The passing of the buffalo, which had been their chief subsistence, and
the arrival of settlers from the East caused them intense alarm. They
pressed the Government for certain grants of land and for the retention
of the old French custom of surveying the land along the river front
in deep narrow strips, rather than according to the chessboard pattern
taken over by Canada from the United States. Red tape, indifference,
procrastination, rather than any illwill, delayed the redress of the
grievances of the half-breeds. In despair they called Louis Riel back
from his exile in Montana. With his arrival the agitation acquired a new
and dangerous force. Claiming to be the prophet of a new religion, he
put himself at the head of his people and, in the spring of 1885, raised
the flag of revolt. His military adviser, Gabriel Dumont, an old buffalo
hunter, was a natural-born general, and the half-breeds were good shots
and brave fighters. An expedition of Canadian volunteers was rushed
west, and the rebellion was put down quickly, but not without some hard
fighting and gallant strokes and counterstrokes.

The racial passions roused by this conflict, however, did not pass so
quickly. The fate to be meted out to Riel