Brown, in fact, was particularly in accord with Wilson, an Edinburgh Scot like himself, who had once been his schoolmate at the Edinburgh High School.86 Early in the year, when complaints against the university were being prepared for presentation to parliament, he and Wilson had conferred on the troubles ahead. The crux of the problem was that the existing University Act, that of 1853, had made a vague provision for the distribution of surplus income from the university endowment among “affiliated” colleges. There had been no surplus yet – and there was no clear indication that any funds at all had to go to the colleges by right. But when denominational interests, pinched by the depression, eyed Toronto’s fine new stone buildings in Queen’s Park, their sense of deprivation grew righteously acute. The powerful Wesleyan Methodist Conference that maintained Victoria College had been particularly aroused. It took the lead in memorializing against the unjust Toronto monopoly.
Recognizing the extent of the danger to the provincial institution, Brown himself, in discussion with Wilson, was even willing to consider providing new professorial chairs in the denominational colleges at public expense, in order to ease their need for funds and take the pressure off the central university. But Daniel Wilson argued that admitting the principle of public grants to sectarian institutions could only imperil the whole endowment: “Why not divide it among the claimants? – and so away goes the noblest provision ever made for an unsectarian provincial system of collegiate education.”87
When, therefore, the university committee met, Brown, urged on by Wilson, stood four-square for the integrity of Toronto university, academic as well as financial.88 But the attacking denominational forces had the province’s most potent educational personage on their side: the weighty Dr. Egerton Ryerson, a Methodist minister and one-time principal of Victoria, Chief Superintendent of Education for Upper Canada, and an old foe of George Brown’s. Having submitted a written statement to the committee, Ryerson gave his evidence with all the emotional oratory and polemical zeal that had made him so powerful a controversialist. He attacked Toronto’s disgraceful lowering of standards, which allowed an “unprecedented system of options” through the introduction of modern languages and natural science, and permitted half the time of its professors to be spent in tutoring honours students, instead of properly allotting their full attention to all the undergraduates for “critical exposition and drilling”.89 He attacked the university’s lavish expenditures, particularly on buildings comparable in Toronto, he said, to St. Peter’s in Rome. And he freely painted the staff of University College as “a family compact” engaged in the Senate in voting salary increases for one another.90 Altogether, his was a strong performance.
Thus, when George Brown cross-examined Superintendent Ryerson in mid-April, it was like a bout between well-matched heavy-weights. Details of the record, questions of motive, personalities, flew fast. By an intensive use of university records Brown pressed Ryerson well back on a number of his sweeping charges, though the latter repeatedly evaded telling blows by failing to remember the episode in question.91 Thereafter, too, the doctor submitted fresh statements with new interpretations to meet Brown’s countercharges. At the end both sides claimed victory. The Globe deemed Ryerson “thoroughly roasted”, while Ryerson attributed his triumph to divine aid.92 The truth was that neither hardened battler had really been hurt.
In fact, after all the sound and fury, the whole investigation ended without a decision. There were two draft reports for and against the university given to the press, but neither of them was adopted by the committee or presented to parliament – which rose in any case on May 19.93 The committee was too divided to decide, and so was the ministry itself. If John A. Macdonald favoured Ryerson and the denominational colleges, there were those in his own party, like Cayley, who did not. Undoubtedly the ministerialists did not feel so secure in office that they could afford to press so controversial an issue. Indeed, the fizzling-out of the university question was one more consequence of the weakness and division in government under the existing Canadian union.
Both the university interests and those of the colleges were, of course, left unsatisfied. In early May, Wilson entreated Brown without success to push the committee to a decision, in order to erase Ryerson’s “most unscrupulous misrepresentations and falsehoods” and remove the stain that he had placed on the character of the whole Toronto staff – “arraigned before a Committee of your House as so many knaves”.94 On the other hand, the colleges were left with no answers to their complaints and still without funds forthcoming. Yet for Brown, at least, the contest was not without significance. He had helped keep the central University of Toronto intact; he had fought one more round with Egerton Ryerson; and he had left a powerful Methodist element with rankling memories of his opposition to the interests of Victoria College.
The pace seemed quieter once Brown was back in Toronto with the Globe. Soon, however, the summer calm was broken by a stiff exchange of letters between John Sandfield Macdonald and himself, letters fully published in the Globe in June and July.95 The argument was an old one, concerning what the former Brown-Dorion government had meant to do to provide compensation for the abolition of seigneurial rights in Lower Canada. As an ex-member of that short-lived cabinet, Sandfield had recently made known that it would have paid compensation from the general provincial funds – as the Liberal-Conservative ministry had done – whereas Brown, with Dorion’s concurrence, had always held that only Lower Canadian resources had been earmarked for that purpose. Sandfield’s assertion could not be treated as a chance remark. It was too well calculated both to win him “moderate” friends in Lower Canada and to embarrass George Brown among the western Grits. The party leader naturally pressed for a retraction. He was refused. A dispute developed in a series of bristling open letters arguing over what had been intended by the Brown-Dorion ministers, and who had said what. In effect, the bare façade of common party allegiance was only maintained by the two writers’ avoiding words quite so explicit as “liar” and “cheat”.
It would seem, however, that the leader had the better of it. While Sandfield cited memories of what had been agreed on at private party conclaves, Brown rested his case on verifiable facts as to what the people concerned had stated in parliament, and how they had cast votes there. Here, indeed, he neatly caught Sandfield out. When the pride of Cornwall categorically denied that he had ever voted with Brown for the principle that compensation should come from Lower Canadian funds alone, the latter supplied the relevant and incriminating page reference from the Journals of the House. The vote in question had been inadvertently omitted from the Journals’ index for 1859 – and Brown’s effective deduction was that Sandfield, doing his research too hastily, had concluded from not finding an entry in the index that it was safe to deny the vote!96
In any case, if this was a victory, and a necessary victory for Brown, it was a small unedifying one that only revealed how wide the breaches in Liberalism were. Nor had he enjoyed the contest. During the course of the exchange with Sandfield, he wrote gloomily to his confidant, Luther Holton, “I have hesitated about answering, simply because if I do I must show him up as the most unprincipled scoundrel that ever got into the position he occupies – and I have had so much disagreeable personal work to do that I shrank from assailing so old an acquaintance in such a fashion.”97
Only a few weeks later the troubled