quibble.
According to a recent act, if a member of Legislative Council or
Assembly "shall resign his office, and within one month after his
resignation, accept any other of the said offices (enumerated above),
he shall not vacate his seat in the said Assembly or Council."[22] It
was a simple, and a disgraceful thing, for the ministers, once more in
power, to accept offices other than those which they had held before
resignation, and then, at once, to pass on to the reacceptance of the
old appropriate positions. They saved their seats at the expense of
their honour. In spite of Macdonald's availability, there was too much
of the village Machiavelli about his political tactics to please the
educated and honest judgment.

It was very natural too that, in these early struggles towards
independence and national {320} self-consciousness, the crudities
inseparable from early colonial existence should be painfully apparent.
In Canada at least, vice could not boast that it had lost half its evil
by losing all its grossness. According to Sir Richard Cartwright, the
prolonged absence from domestic associations, led to a considerable
amount of dissipation among members of parliament. The minister who
dominated Canadian politics for so many years before and after
Confederation set an unfortunate example to his flock; and many of the
debates read as though they drew their heat, if not their light, from
material rather than intellectual sources. Apart from offences against
sobriety and the decalogue, there can be no doubt that something of the
early ferocity of politics still continued, and the disgrace of the
Montreal riots which followed Elgin's sanction of the Rebellion Losses
bill was rendered tenfold more disgraceful by the participation in them
of gentlemen and politicians of position. Half the success of
democratic institutions lies in the capacity of the legislators for
some public dignity, and a certain chivalrous good nature towards each
other. But that is perhaps too high a standard to set for the first
colonial Assembly which had exercised full {321} powers of
self-government since 1776. After all, there were great stretches of
honesty and high purpose to counterbalance the squalid jobs and tricks.
If Macdonald sinned in one direction, Alexander Mackenzie had already
begun his course of almost too austere rectitude in another.
Opposition kept a keen eye on governmental misdoings, and George Brown,
impulsive, imp