was the burning question.
Ontario saw in him the murderer of Scott and an ambitious plotter who
had twice stirred up armed rebellion. Quebec saw in him a man of French
blood, persecuted because he had stood up manfully for the undoubted
rights of his kinsmen. Today experts agree that Riel was insane and
should have been spared the gallows on this if on no other account. But
at the moment the plea of insanity was rejected. The Government made
up for its laxity before the rebellion by severity after it; and in
November, 1885, Riel was sent to the scaffold. Bitterness rankled in
many a French-Canadian heart for long years after; and in Ontario, where
the Orange order was strongly entrenched, a faction threatened "to smash
Confederation into its original fragments" rather than submit to "French
domination."

Racial and religious passions, once aroused, soon found new fuel to feed
upon. Honore Mercier, a brilliant but unscrupulous leader who had ridden
to power in the province of Quebec on the Riel issue, roused Protestant
ire by restoring estates which had been confiscated at the conquest in
1763 to the Jesuits and other Roman Catholic authorities, in proportions
which the act provided were to be determined by "Our Holy Father the
Pope." In Ontario restrictions began to be imposed on the freedom of
French-Canadian communities on the border to make French the sole or
dominant tongue in the schoolroom. A little later the controversy was
echoed in Manitoba in the repeal by a determined Protestant majority
of the denominational school privileges hitherto enjoyed by the Roman
Catholic minority.

Economic discontent was widespread. It was a time of low and falling
prices. Farmers found the American market barred, the British market
flooded, the home market stagnant. The factories stimulated by the "N.
P." lacked the growing market they had hoped for. In the West climatic
conditions not yet understood, the monopoly of the Canadian Pacific, and
the competition of the States to the south, which still had millions of
acres of free land, brought settlement to a standstill. From all parts
of Canada the "exodus" to the United States continued until by 1890
there were in that country more than one-third as many people of
Canadian birth or descent as in Canada itself.

It was not surprising that in these extremities men were prepared to
make trial of drastic remedies. Nor was it surprising that it was
beyond the borders of Canada it