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.
