Acland found the governor general reading the Quarterly Review, the influential British periodical founded in 1809 that was known for its insightful discussions of ideas in science, politics, philosophy, and literature. The most recent issue, published early in July 1860, featured an article written anonymously by Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, before his legendary debate on June 30 with T.H. Huxley on Darwin’s Origin of Species during a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science held at the Oxford University Museum. Wilberforce, who was a member of the Royal Society and supporter of the sciences at Oxford, critiqued the Origin for its lapses in inductive baconian logic and rigorous empirical evidence, noting where Darwin’s theory had depended on analogical reasoning. He pointed out, for example, that from his premiss that all organic beings, including man, have much in common, such as their cellular structure, Darwin reasoned that all have therefore descended from some one primordial form. Although Wilberforce was caricatured in the following decade as a representative of religion resisting the incontrovertible evidence of empirical science, conscious of the great gaps in empirical evidence in the Origin, Darwin himself agreed in correspondence with T.H. Huxley that the bishop’s article pointed out all the most conjectural parts of his theory.

The Ottawa River had long been an important trade route. For 1,271 kilometers (700 miles) from its source in central Quebec, it wound its way, tumbled over waterfalls, and coursed over turbulent rapids towards its confluence with the St Lawrence at Montreal. The Ottawa (Algonquin: Odawa – to trade) had for hundreds of years been part of a wide indigenous trading network both northwards towards James Bay and westward through a series of interconnected rivers and lakes to Georgian Bay on Lake Huron. After the French explorer, Samuel de Champlain, travelled the westward route to Georgian Bay in 1615, for two hundred years French-Canadian fur traders paddled their canoes along the waterway with its gruelling portages towards depots in Montreal. Even before the fur trading route largely disappeared in 1821 with the merger of the Montreal-based North West Company and the northern-based Hudson’s Bay Company, the Ottawa River had already become a timber river.

Built between 1826-32, the Rideau Canal linked 207 kilometers (128 miles) of lakes and rivers through largely unsettled country between Kingston and Ottawa. On the Ottawa River, other canals bypassed the extensive rapids between Montreal and Ottawa. As a linked system they provided an alternate troop and supply route between Montreal and Kingston, avoiding the St Lawrence River which could be blockaded from its American side by the United States. The Rideau Canal was built by thousands of Irish labourers, part of the period’s mass migration, and by French Canadians freed from labour in winter lumber camps. This combined labour force wielded axes, picks, and shovels to clear dense forests and cut through rocks in the Canadian Shield, contending along the way with malarial swamps. The still fully-operational canal, now used by pleasure craft, was declared a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2007 as the best preserved example in North America of European slack water technology connecting lakes and rivers on a large scale. On the Ottawa River, locks and canals along rapids were completed between 1818-43. In the end, neither of the canal systems was needed for military purposes. Instead, they provided immediate commercial transport evident in the barges of lumber towed from Ottawa in 1860 towards Montreal and Kingston, often with destinations in the United States.

Typically, in late September foremen arrived at logging sites to plan roads for bringing in winter supplies and tracks for hauling timber. The work in the logging camps was both strenuous and dangerous. The head of a gang of five men selected trees and determined the best direction for their fall. Using axes, two choppers worked in tandem to fell the trees; two more removed branches and cut them into 16 foot lengths, chopping about sixty logs per day. Finally, a highly skilled axe-man used the wide blade of a broad ax to hew squared logs with flat surfaces for ease of transport in rafts along wide rivers like the Ottawa and St Lawrence and to facilitate piling them aboard ships bound for Europe. The logs and squared sticks were either skidded by oxen on tracks or pulled on sleighs over snow-covered roads to be piled by a river’s edge. In spring run-off in mid-April, they were released into the turbulent rivers. River drivers in pointer-boats used pike poles to keep logs from jamming on banks, camping in tents to follow them downstream. On rivers like the Ottawa, about twenty squared sticks were bound together into cribs which could then be bound into much larger rafts or disassembled at river rapids. As on the St Lawrence, expert Iroquois pilots steered the rafts through the centre of strong currents on white-water rapids. As lumbering moved westward, by 1845 three quarters of the timber shipped from Quebec City was from the Ottawa River watershed.

At various places during the tour, mock processions made fun of the formal processions. At Ottawa, a group that dubbed itself the Physiocarnivalogicalists processed by torchlight past the Victoria Hotel during a formal dinner for the prince.

The governor general recommended that Acland read the work of John Austin, the first professor of jurisprudence at the University of London, who published some of his lectures in 1832 as The Province of Jurisprudence Determined. According to Austin’s legal positivism, law is not rooted in an objective moral sense of right and wrong with an ultimate source in God (natural law) or on the axis of maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain for the greatest number (the utilitarian law of Austin’s friend, Jeremy Bentham). Instead, law is defined simply as the command of a sovereign or of a sovereign institution backed by sanctions for non-compliance. Acland noted that this theory of law, similar to the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, premissed a view of human nature as selfish and requiring sanctions. Austin’s theory of law was consistent with Head’s recommendations as Assistant Commissioner of the Poor Law in England in 1839. He wrote of the need of law to punish able-bodied labourers who sent their families to the Poor House, putting selfish enjoyments above ties of natural affection and obligations to their families. In fact, Poor Houses were the object of mass protest after the Poor Law Amendment in 1834 deprived the poor of outdoor relief, or social assistance outside an institution, to make them less reliant on hand-outs and drove them into Work Houses where families were separated.

Among the several patients Acland treated in Ottawa was Lady Chandos who was travelling in North America with her husband. In 1861, her husband inherited the title of the Duke of Buckingham and served as Secretary of State for the Colonies from March 1867 to December 1868, the period in which the British North America Act was passed to create the Dominion of Canada.

Acland noted that Blackwell, managing director of the Grand Trunk, was related to Rev. William Buckland, a pioneering professor of geology at Oxford (1813-45) and later dean of Westminster (1845-56). As a student, Acland had attended his dramatic lectures featuring displays of the fossilized bones of elephant, tiger, hippopotamus, and bear found in a cave in Yorkshire.

Prior to Blackwell’s appointment in 1857 as general manager of the Grand Trunk in Canada, he had been employed as a civil engineer for docks, canals, and railways, and for drainage and waterworks in English towns. With the construction of the Grand Trunk line, the merits of capitalism, a word coined in the nineteenth century, were put to the test. Since the Canadian Government lacked sufficient resources, the construction had been contracted to the Grand Trunk, headquartered in Britain. Capital was raised for the venture through two prominent investment banks, including Baring Bros which had facilitated the Louisiana Purchase in 1802, the largest land purchase in history kept at arm’s length distance because proceeds were used to finance Napoleon’s war effort against Britain. The Canadian government’s loan guarantees for the railway project reassured British investors who anticipated high returns on shares and bonds. Some may also have believed a government bailout might follow any serious financial difficulty. However, even before Blackwell’s arrival in Montreal, the Grand Trunk was able to meet the interest on its bonds in London, Boston, and New York only through Canadian government advances. When construction of the bridge was nearly complete in 1859, intense pressure was put on the government by the Grand Trunk to provide financial relief. For Thomas Blackwell, intelligent, tactful, and cultured, the strain was severe. He suffered a first acute attack of illness just months before the Prince of Wales’ tour. When he died three years later at the age of forty-four, an obituary suggested that professional wear and tear during his connection to the Grand Trunk had contributed to his early death.

In the united Canadas, political parties remained fluid and even their presence was contested by some people. Prior to the coming of Responsible Government, imperial instructions to governors encouraged them to form a government of individuals from various parties as well as independents. With the introduction of Responsible Government, Members of the Provincial Parliament from the dominant party or coalitions formed the government.

As political parties evolved, during the mid 1850s in Canada East the conservative Parti Bleu (Blue Party), comprised of former reformers, was headed by Cartier with a platform supporting confederation, the role of the Roman Catholic Church in society, and the dismantling of the seigneurial system. Its opposition, the Parti Rouge (Red Party), was anti-clerical and republican rather than monarchical. In 1858, the coalition of Cartier’s party with Macdonald’s weaker conservative party in Canada West both gave strength in the assembly to Macdonald and bridged differences between French and English. However, although a change of party through elections provided a peaceful way to resolve political tensions, as Acland observed a little later during the tour, the party system also led politicians to curry favour constantly with constituents to obtain their votes.