hom they
knew little or nothing. Most of these former governors had been military
men, more accustomed to habits of command than to deal with perplexing
questions of state. They looked with a very natural degree of impatience
on the attempts which the people of the province were making to get the
full control of their own affairs. Under the old regime the governor was
surrounded with military guards, and sentries paced the walks and
guarded the entrances to the Government House. The withdrawal of the
British troops from Canada before the lieutenant-governorship of Mr.
Tilley commenced relieved him of any embarrassment in regard to
dispensing with military guards and sentries; but all pretentious
accompaniments of authority were foreign to his nature, and he always
showed, by the severe simplicity of his life, that he felt he was one
of the people, and that it was his duty as well as his pleasure to
permit all who had any occasion to see him to have free access to him,
without the necessity of going through any formal process.

{THE PROTECTIONIST TARIFF}

When Mr. Tilley became lieutenant-governor of the province, he was
fifty-five years of age, and he seems to have thought that his political
career was ended, because, by the time his term of office expired in its
natural course, he would have reached the age of sixty, a period when a
man is not likely to make a new entrance into public life. But
circumstances, quite apart from any desire on his part, made it almost
necessary for him to change his determination, and during the summer of
1878, when the general election was imminent, he found himself pressed
by his old political friends to become once more the candidate of his
party for his old constituency, the city of St. John. There was great
enthusiasm amongst them when it was announced that he would comply with
their wishes, and that he had resigned the lieutenant-governorship. The
result of that general election is well known. The Liberal party, which
had succeeded to the government less than five years before with a large
majority in the House of Commons, experienced a severe defeat, and the
Hon. Alexander Mackenzie, seeing this, very properly did not await the
assembling of parliament, but sent in the resignation of the ministry,
and Sir John A. Macdonald was called upon to form a new government. In
the cabinet thus constructed Mr. Tilley resumed his old office of
minister of finance, and one of his first duties w