in its various phases
bedevilled Canadian politics and set race against race and province
against province. Had it been only the resistance offered by the Red
River settlers to Canadian authority which was in question in the
seventies, time would soon have brought understanding and
forgetfulness. That the half-breed settlers had just grievances, that
the Canadian authorities bungled badly their first experiment in
national expansion, all {39} would have admitted. But the shooting in
cold blood of Thomas Scott, an Orangeman of Ontario, by the order of
Louis Riel, lit fires of passion that would not easily die. And
politicians fanned the flames for party ends. Neither party was
guiltless. At the outset in Ontario the Liberals played to the Orange
gallery, while in Quebec they appealed to French prejudices. Sir John
Macdonald could attack Blake for frightening Riel out of the country
and beyond the reach of justice, by offers of reward for his arrest, at
the very time that Macdonald himself was paying Riel out of the secret
service funds to keep away from Canada.

During the Mackenzie administration the question twice gave rise to
full-dress debates. Early in 1874 Mackenzie Bowell moved that Riel,
who had been elected a member for Provencher, should be expelled from
the House; Holton moved an amendment that action be deferred until the
committee, then inquiring into the whole matter, reported; while
Mousseau demanded immediate and unconditional amnesty. In the debate
that followed Mr Laurier made his first parliamentary speech in
English. He supported Holton's amendment, while making it clear {40}
that in his view of the evidence the country had been pledged to
amnesty by the action of the former Government. It was a forceful and
well-reasoned argument, in both its felicitous phrasing and its
moderate tone an appropriate introduction to the parliamentary career
which was just beginning. Again in 1875, when Mr Mackenzie moved that
full amnesty be given to all concerned in the rebellion save Riel,
Lepine, and O'Donoghue, and that the former two be pardoned, subject to
five years' banishment, Mr Laurier defended this reasonable compromise
against both the Quebec extremists who demanded immediate pardon and
the Ontario opponents of any clemency whatever.

Protection was an even more fertile topic of debate in these and
following years. It was only recently that it had become a party
issue. Both parties had hit