It was on this date in 1886 that the voice of future Prime Minister John Thompson was heard in Canada’s House of Commons.  A brilliant and distinguished jurist and legal scholar, voters in Antigonish, Nova Scotia had sent Thompson to Ottawa shortly before to represent them in parliament. Thompson is not as well-known today as he deserves to be.  He was a lawyer who became Nova Scotia's Attorney General just one year after being elected to the provincial legislature.  Four years later he became leader of the provincial Conservatives, and thus premier, but lost the subsequent election just two months after taking the post.  The Liberal government, victors in that 1882 election, appointed Thompson to the Nova Scotia Supreme Court. In 1885, however, he accepted Sir John A's invitation to enter federal politics and became Minister of Justice.  (He was elected one month after being sworn into Cabinet.). He was responsible, during that tenure, for Canada's first criminal code.  Seven years later, in 1892, he succeeded Sir John Abbott as prime minister.  But, as was noted in an earlier Art's History entry, he died of a heart attack two years later (December 12, 1894) while at Windsor Castle.  Due to his untimely death -- he was just 49 -- and his widely acknowledged intellect and political skill, historians have described Thomson as the "great might-have-been" of Canada's Prime Ministers. To read Sir John Thompson’s maiden address in the House of Commons click here.   caption id="attachment_544888" align="aligncenter" width="299" Portrait of Sir John Thompson, 4th Prime Minister of Canada/caption Arthur Milnes is an accomplished public historian and award-winning journalist.  He was research assistant on The Rt. Hon. Brian Mulroney’s best-selling Memoirs and also served as a speechwriter to then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper and as a Fellow of the Queen’s Centre for the Study of Democracy under the leadership of Tom Axworthy.  A resident of Kingston, Ontario, Milnes serves as the in-house historian at the 175 year-old Frontenac Club Hotel.