646 THE FEDERATIONS AND THE UNION [parr IV 
day should always rule with a majority in both provinces 
of the Union, and Mr. Baldwin actually resigned in 1851! 
because the members of the upper province rejected a 
measure for a Court of Chancery. But the system was 
utterly rotten ; the demand for an increase of the members 
for Upper Canada became more and more urgent, and a 
legislative impasse was on hand, for from May 1862 to 
June 1864 there were no less than five administrations, each 
of them quite without any real strength. Thereupon the 
leaders of the two parties decided to aim at a federation 
of the two Canadas if that alone could be managed, but 
preferably of all the Colonies then existing except British 
Columbia, which was in an altogether peculiar position from 
the other Colonies. The idea of federation had long been 
in the air; Lord Durham had glanced at it and suggested 
that a facultative power should be inserted in the Union 
Act; Nova Scotia had passed a resolve in favour of it 
in 1854, the Cartier-Macdonald Government of 1854 had 
mooted it; in 1858 Galt, in 1859 Brown pressed for it; but 
it was not until the whole machinery of the Government 
was in ruins in 1864 that the movement became at all real 
or actual, aided no doubt by the growing dread of the 
military preponderance of the United States and the need 
for union in defence. Fortunately the maritime provinces 
had just decided to confer for a maritime union, and delegates 
from Canada, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward 
Island, and Newfoundland met at Quebec in October 1864. 
Then in a long session there were drawn up seventy-two 
articles, the Quebec Resolutions, which were to serve as the 
basis of the constitution of the new federation, and in 1865 
the measure was submitted to the Canadian Parliament 
and approved by large majorities ; and next year, after the 
necessary preliminary preparations for the constitutions of 
the two provinces to be carved out of Canada, a deputation 
was sent to England to confer with the Imperial authorities. 
Turcotte, Canada sous I Union, ii, 171-8 ; Macdonald, in Confederation 
Debates (1865), p. 30; Bourinot, Constitution of Canada, p. 39; Pope, 
Sir John Macdonald, 1. 151, 182, 222, 245, 251, 335, 336 ; Dent, The last 
Forty Years: Canada since the Union of 1841, passim.