Tories in Brantford, Canada West (later Ontario) held an impressive political banquet on this date in 1860. Four-hundred gathered that evening and the highlight was the address delivered by John A. Macdonald of Kingston. He was then serving as Attorney General of Canada West.
As you will see from the excerpts from the future Father of Confederation’s found below, John A. definitely knew how to work a crowd.
"If there is one thing more than another to make me rejoice in my longevity, it is that it has given me this opportunity of returning my thanks to the many gentlemen I see around me for the magnificent reception given me. This is a reward for many of my trials. For a great deal of the obloquy I have suffered this is the compensation I feel and shall continue to feel for the remainder of my days. [Cheers.]
The Chairman has truly said that the life of a politician is not a bed of roses; but there are compensations for that life, thorny as it is. My reward is in my meeting face to face a number of my fellow subjects in Canada, who although personally unacquainted to me, have extended to me a cordial invitation to this banquet; who although they have read the repeated and constant attacks made upon me and those connected with me in the Government—in which my character has been aspersed, my honesty questioned, my motives impugned—have confidence in me and place reliance in my conduct.
My compensation is in meeting under such happy circumstances the three or four hundred gentlemen present, nearly all of whom are personal strangers to myself and I feel that, receiving such compensation, a politician is not so much to be pitied as otherwise one would think him to be. It shows this that when a man is conscious that his motives are good, his purpose honest, his meaning well, he will receive a generous consideration at the hands of his fellow countrymen. That is what I feel and know.
I know that in a long course of political life I have made many mistakes — that the Government of which I am a member has, of course, made errors and been guilty of omission as well as of commission; but feeling as I do, I can say honestly and in the face of you all, strangers though you be, that the desire of the Government is good, their motives good; that we have done what we could in an humble way for the purpose of promoting the social, educational and moral interests of this country; and if we have made mistakes in working out our out our designs, the people, knowing us not to be criminal, can endorse us, believing that if the Government has erred it was an error of the head and not of the heart or of the intention, [cheers.]”
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.