The plan of the Government with respect to the Yukon Railway was made public only a few days before the assembling of Parliament on the 3d of February. It was given out by the Government through its principal newspaper organ in Toronto, and was put forward, not in a sober and matter of fact way, but rather as an enterprise might be advertised by a group of company promoters. The scheme was to establish a railway, river and lake communication between the coast of British Columbia and Dawson City. The railway was to begin at Glenora or Telegraph Creek, on the Stickine River, and was to run a distance of about 150 miles to the head of Teslin Lake, from which point Dawson City was to be reached by means of the Hootalinqua, the Lewes, and the Yukon rivers. The line was to be of narrow gauge. The concessions for its construction were to be in favour of Messrs. Mackenzie and Mann, contractors well known in connection with street-car and railway undertakings in Canada.

From the first the Laurier Government has adopted the policy that the gold mining country of the Yukon must pay for its own government and its own development; that it must throw no charges on the rest of the Dominion of Canada. This policy is at the bottom of the system under which Yukon mining licenses are sold, and under which miners are compelled to pay royalties of ten per cent. into the Dominion Treasury. It was also to be embodied in the Yukon railway legislation.

Instead of the Government, as heretofore, granting a cash bonus of so much a mile for the construction of the railway, it was to pay the contractors exclusively in land grants. They were to receive 25,000 acres of land in the Yukon mining country for every mile of railway built; and it was estimated that for the length between the Stickine River and Teslin Lake they would receive 3,750,000 acres, or an area of 5,850 square miles. On these lands no taxation was to be paid, except such as might be levied by municipalities, and the mining royalties were to be at the rate of one per cent., as compared with ten per cent., the royalty on gold taken out of Government lands.

For ten years, the owners of the Stickine and Teslin Rail

way were to be empowered to charge special rates for passengers and freight. Moreover, they were to have for five years from September, 1898, a monopoly of railway communication with Dawson City from the Pacific coast, and in the event of a railway being constructed from a port in British Columbia to the Stickine River, Messrs. Mann and Mackenzie were to be entitled to receive, in preference to any other person or company, during ten years from September, 1898, such aid or assistance in land or money as the Government might be authorized and might see fit to grant in aid of the line. These were the terms the Government made with the contractors, who in turn undertook to have the Stickine and Teslin Line ready and equipped for operation in September, 1898.

Within two or three days after the meeting of Parliament, the Government submitted their scheme in detail to the House of Commons. They urged in its behalf that the proposed line afforded a practically all-Canadian route to the Yukon, and that the railway was necessary on commercial, humane, and political grounds. It was necessary on commerical grounds in order to secure the outfitting trade to the Canadian cities of Victoria and Vancouver; it was necessary on humane grounds, because of the tens of thousands of people who had gone or were going into the Yukon country, thousands of whom might be destitute at the end of the mining season of 1898; and it was also necessary for political purposes, to ensure the preservation of order in the mining country, and to prevent any attempts at setting aside the authority of the Canadian Government. From what quarters these attempts were to come was not specified, but much emphasis was laid by speakers in behalf of the Government on the likelihood that they might occur.

Even before the opposition began its Parliamentary criticisms, Mr. Blair, the Minister of Railways, who laid the scheme before the House of Commons, sought to explain away the large land grant. "I presume we may be asked," he said, "why did we give so many acres as 25,000? Why did you not give the contractors less? Well, I may frankly acknowledge that the reason was because they would not take less. We could not force them to take less. We bartered and negotiated it with

them. Members of the Government, sub-committees of the Government-sub-committees constituting pretty nearly the whole numerical strength of the Government-urged on Messrs. Mackenzie and Mann every conceivable argument in order to get them to reduce their terms, and we did get them down very much below, I can assure you, the demands they made, but we could not get them below 25,000 acres per mile; therefor did not."

Later on in the long-drawn-out discussion, after the Opposition had shown the weakness of the plea put forward by the Minister of Railways in view of the fact that Messrs. Mackenzie and Mann were the only persons asked to undertake the construction of the railway, the land grant was defended by Sir Richard Cartwright, the Minister of Trade and Commerce, on the ground that it was a gamble both for the Government and the contractors, but especially for the contractors. Other objections were taken to the scheme; but in both the House and the Senate, criticism was directed chiefly against the land grant, which, it was insisted, was extravagant in view of the known mineral wealth of the Yukon territory.

In both Houses, the Government met the criticism of the Opposition in much the same way, by enlarging on the cost of constructing the railway, and by belittling the value of Yukon mining lands. At second reading stage in the House of Commons, the Opposition proposed an amendment characterising the conditions of the contract as indefensible, and setting forth that the House would cordially support "the grant of substantial assistance in aid of the immediate construction of a railway on the best available route, under such conditions and safeguards as would prevent the creation of any railway or mining monopoly." The division in the House was on party lines, and the amendment was rejected by 119 votes to 65.

After the defeat on second reading stage, the Conservatives in the House of Commons practically let the bill go without further opposition, and it was read a third time without a division, and sent to the Senate. In the Senate the grounds of opposition were the same as in the House of Commons. The defence of the scheme on the part of the Government was also

the same; but as the Conservatives are in an overwhelming majority in the Upper House, the bill was thrown out, and another was added to the growing list of measures which have come to grief in the Senate since the Laurier Government came into power in 1896.

II. THE REFORM OF THE FRANCHISE LAWS.

The Constitution of the United States expressly sets out what shall be the franchise on which members of the House of Representatives shall be elected. The British North America Act of 1867, the Constitution of the Dominion of Canada, contains no similar provision. It leaves with the Dominion Parliament the settlement of the franchise on which members of the House of Commons shall be chosen. The clause dealing with the franchise, number 41 in the Act of Confederation, reads as follows:

"Until the Parliament of Canada otherwise provides, all laws in force in the several provinces at the union relative to the following matters, or any of them, namely, the qualifications and disqualifications of persons to be elected to or to sit or vote as members of the House of Assembly or Legislative Assembly in the several provinces, the voters at elections of such members, the oaths to be taken by voters, the returning officers, their powers and duties, the proceedings at elections, the periods during which elections may be continued, the trial of controverted elections and proceedings incident thereto, the vacating of seats of members and the execution of new writs, in case of seats vacated otherwise than by dissolution, shall respectively apply to elections of members to serve in the House of Commons for the same several provinces."

From 1867 to 1885 the Dominion Parliament passed no law dealing with the suffrage, and members of the House of Commons were consequently chosen on the franchises of the provinces from which they were elected. These provincial franchises held good at five Dominion general elections-1867, 1872, 1874, 1878 and 1882. The system, however, was never satisfactory to the Conservatives, who for years prior to the change of 1885 urged the adoption of a franchise for Dominion

elections which should be uniform in all the provinces. They made six or seven attempts to get rid of the Provincial franchises, and at last in 1885 they carried a bill to that end. It was strenuously opposed by the Liberals, who spent six weeks in resisting the change, and upholding the franchise which had served during the first nineteen years of Confederation.

The Act of 1885 established a franchise uniform in all the seven provinces, and with it went a measure providing for the preparation, revision, and printing of the electoral lists each year at the expense of the Dominion Government. The Act conferred the right to vote in respect of eight qualifications. They were (1) owners and occupiers; (2) persons in receipt of incomes or yearly earnings of at least $300 from some profession, office, trade, or investment in Canada; (3) life annuitants of $100 a year; (4) farmers' sons living at home; (5) sons of owners of real property; (6) tenants of real property paying more than two dollars a month rental; (7) fishermen owning real property and boats, nets, fishing gear and tackle, or shares in a registered ship, to the actual value of at least $150; and (8) Indians in possession and occupation of distinct tracts of land in an Indian reserve the improvements on which were valued at $150.

When the Act of 1885 was passed, it was intended that the electoral lists should be revised every year. The lists were to be prepared by clerks to the revising barristers, assisted by constables appointed for the work, and then gone over in open court by the revising barrister, as is the practice in England since 1832. The first revision under the Act of 1885 took place in 1886, when entirely new lists had to be prepared all over the Dominion. The revision cost the Government $416,000, and was so costly that there was not another revision until 1889. This time it cost $238,400, and it had to serve until 1891, when at an expense of $226,700 the third revision was made. From 1891 until 1895 there was no revision. Early in 1895 the lists were again revised; this time at a cost of $243,500. When the general election of 1896 took place the lists were eighteen months old, and since then there has been no other revision. The by-elections between 1896 and 1898 all took place on lists which, as the months went by, were increasingly out of date.