8 ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 
legislature of Upper Canada before 1840, and of the legislature of 
United Canada, prime minister of the first Liberal-Conservative ministry 
which came into existence on the fall of the Hincks-Morin Government 
in 1854, a knight bachelor, a baronet, an aide-de-camp of the Queen, 
and speaker of the legislative council. 
It is an interesting fact, on which I may for one instant dwell, that 
it was actually during his administration that the Toryism of old times— 
of the days of the rebellion, of the family compact, of the Metcalfe 
regime—entirely disappeared and gave place to that more progressive 
spirit which called itself Liberal-Conservative, and settled the vexatious 
questions of the Clergy Reserves, and the Seigniorial ‘Tenure, which had 
so long perplexed and even weakened the Reform Governments, which 
preceded the new political movement the necessity of which was at once 
recognized by the prescient mind of Sir John Macdonald. 
Memory must always cling to the mansion which is so interesting 
a feature of the beautiful park, which, from this day, becomes a pleasure 
ground of the city of Hamilton. Most of you know better than I that 
the name of Dundurn is a memorial of the old home of Sir Allan’s family 
at the head of Loch Earne in the picturesque Scotch province of Perth, 
so famous for its varied landscape of high hills, romantic passes, wildly 
leaping cataracts, and long stretches of luxuriant level meadows in the 
valleys. The scenery of old Gore is not so varied as that of Sir Allan’s 
ancestral county of Perth, and yet he may have found in the heights of 
Burlington, in the strath of Dundas, and in the smiling bay beyond, 
some features which recalled his father’s memories of the hills and waters 
of Loch Earne. 
I well remember the year 1856—one famous in Canadian political 
annals—when Sir Allan MacNab closed his political career as leader of 
the Liberal-Conservative party. Looking down from the reporters’ 
gallery of the old Parliament House in Front street, Toronto, I saw him, 
wracked by the disease to which he had long been subject and all 
swathed in flannel, carried into the chamber of the assembly where he 
was placed in a chair. He was permitted to speak from his seat when 
he practically made his farewell to the House where he had been for so 
many years a political force. The party with which he was allied had 
felt that the time had come for placing at its head a much stronger man, 
one more equal to the new conditions of political life, Mr. John A. Mac- 
donald, destined from that time to become the most conspicuous figure . 
in the public life of British North America. But Sir Allan was not pre- 
pared to retire from the leadership without a remonstrance on his deposi- 
tion ; and I can still recollect the sympathy with which his tremulous 
accents were received by the House, when he deprecated a condemnation 
