Liberal warhorse Sir Richard Cartwright was in Seaforth, Ontario on this date in 1886 where he addressed the area’s young Liberals at the group’s inaugural meeting. Known far and wide as one of the greatest orators his party had produced, the former minister in the Mackenzie government (1873-1878) didn’t disappoint, attacking his personal nemesis (and fellow Kingstonian), Sir John A. Macdonald at every turn.
“Sir, you have heard that Nero fiddled while Rome was burning,” he said. “I do not mean to say that Sir John Macdonald fiddled, but I do mean to say that to my own certain knowledge, when the Fenian raiders menaced our frontiers, he was very considerably fuddled. (Cheers.) And, indeed, a year ago, when his own culpable mismanagement and corruption had got the North-West in a blaze, Sir John could find no better amusement than the introduction of the famous — or, rather I should say, infamous — Franchise Bill by which he designed to make himself a Parliamentary dictator, to deal with our whole representative system as he saw fit, and to gerrymander the whole electorate of the Dominion just as in 1882, four years ago, he had gerrymandered Centre Huron out of existence, and 54 other constituencies out of all fair and reasonable proportion. (Loud applause.)”
You can read Cartwright’s address in full at this link: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=aeu.ark:/13960/t18k7hr7h&seq=2
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.