Canada was fortunate at this critical time in having a Premier of remarkable qualities, who was the man for the hour. John Alexander Macdonald (afterwards knighted and invested with the honour of a Grand Cross of the Bath) was a Scotsman by birth whose family removed to Canada in his early childhood. With the sturdy qualities of his race he { 26} thus united the influences of Canadian environment and training, the family arriving in Canada in 1820, when the future Prime Minister was but five years of age. In his earliest youth, as a lad of fifteen, circumstances forced him into the world to earn his living. Life itself became his university. He developed in his first contact with the world that initiative, that instant perception of the situation and the facility to meet it, which so signally distinguished his statesmanship in after years. The family had landed at Quebec and journeyed to Kingston where they settled and lived until the death of the elder Macdonald in 1841, leaving the household in straitened circumstances. The Ontario of those days was very different from the smiling and prosperous Province of the present time. All Upper Canada (as it was then known) was covered with dense forests, and all means of transportation were primitive and slow. "Railways, of course, were unknown," writes Sir Joseph Pope, the authorised biographer of Sir John Alexander Macdonald, "and macadamised roads, then looked upon as great luxuries, were few and far between. The climate, too, was more severe than, owing to the cultivation of the soil, it has since become." In 1842, at the age of twenty-seven, Macdonald made his first visit to England, largely for the purpose of purchasing his law library. Quoting a letter written by him at this time to his mother, his biographer (Sir Joseph Pope) adds:
"Forty-two years passed away and again John Alexander Macdonald stood within the portals of Windsor Castle; but under what different circumstances! No longer an unknown visitor, peeping with youthful curiosity through half-open doors; but as the First Minister of a mighty Dominion, he comes by the Queen's command to dine at her table, and, in the presence of the Prime Minister and of one of the great nobles of England, who alone have been summoned as witnesses of the ceremony, to receive from the hand of his Sovereign that token and pledge of her regard which, as such, he greatly prized--the broad, red riband of the Bath."