Public men and public life in Canada Author:James Young Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: enterprises; and all classes seemed to feel that the "good times " had at last come and were going to stay. Property in town and country in some cases doubled, a... more »nd in others quadrupled, in value. Sales of building lots were of daily occurrence, and thousands of them were sold on back streets of country villages at fabulous prices! New business enterprises, both public and private, cropped up almost every morning, and fortunes were supposed, in some cases, to have been made and lost in a day. In short, an unmistakable and dangerous " boom " had overspread the entire Province, and the people generally had been seized with a spirit of wild speculation and extravagance which subsequent experience could not possibly justify. When this memorable " boom " collapsed, which it did rather suddenly, whilst fortunes had been made by many, most Canadians found they were not so rich as they had supposed, whilst many were left much poorer than when it began. Nevertheless, the change throughout the country from a state of tardy progress to one of business activity, enterprise and even wild speculation, was on the whole beneficial to Canada, and very much needed by all classes of the people at that time. CHAPTER III EARLY STRUGGLES FOR RESPONSIBLE GOVERNMENT The state of political affairs in Canada at this time was somewhat anomalous, but deeply interesting. The excitement and bitter'animosities of the Mackenzie-Papineau Rebellion had largely disappeared. The old Tory Family Compact, whose oligarchical rule, coupled with the bumptiousness and blundering of Sir Francis Bond' Head, then Governor-General, had been the main cause of all the strife and bloodshed, had been dethroned and discarded. Lord Durham's famous Report, as already mentioned, resulted in the union of Upper and Lower Can...« less