issioners were struck out, and the case left to rest
on the testimony of the warden's own witnesses and the official
records of the prison, there would be sufficient to establish the
blackest record of wickedness that ever disgraced a civilized
country." Amid applause, expressions of amazement and cries of
"Shame!" from the galleries, Brown told of the abuses laid bare by the
prison commission. He told of prisoners fed with rotten meal and bread
infested with maggots; of children beaten with cat and rawhide for
childish faults; of a coffin-shaped box in which men and even women
were made to stand or rather crouch, their limbs cramped, and their
lungs scantily supplied with air from a few holes. Brown's speech
virtually closed the case, although Macdonald strove to prove that
the accounts of outrages were exaggerated, that the warden, Smith, was
himself a kind-hearted man, and that he had been harshly treated by
the commissioners.

In a letter written about this time, Macdonald said that he was
carrying on a war against Brown, that he would prove him a most
dishonest, dishonourable fellow, "and in doing so I will only pay him
a debt that I owe him for abusing me for months together in his
newspaper."[10] Whatever the provocation may have been, the personal
relations of the two men were further embittered by this incident.

Eight years afterwards they were members of the coalition ministry by
which confederation was brought about, and Brown's intimate friend,
Alexander Mackenzie, says that the association was most distasteful to
Brown, on account of the charges made in connection with the prison
commission. That the leaders of the two parties were not merely
political opponents but personal enemies must have embittered the
party struggle; and it was certainly waged on both sides with fury,
and with little regard either for the amenities of life or for fair
play.

His work on the commission gave Brown a strong interest in prison
reform. While the work of the commission was fresh in his mind he
delivered an address in the Toronto Mechanics' Institute, in which he
sketched the history of prison reform in England and the United
States, and pointed out how backward Canada was in this phase of
civilization. He pleaded for a more charitable treatment of those on
whom the prison doors had closed. There were inmates of prisons who
would stand guiltless in the presence of Him who searches the heart.
There were guilty ones outsi