Commentary
“Like a king.” That’s how Sir John A. Macdonald was greeted in public in the 1880s. “Everybody loved him” and his presence could be “like an electric shock.” Yet the great man did not let the adulation go to his head. “No man was more deeply conscious of his own shortcomings,” said his personal secretary Sir Joseph Pope in his 1894 book “Memoirs of the Right Honourable Sir John A. Macdonald.”
Macdonald referred in speeches to his “manifold sins of omission and commission,” echoing the Anglican Book of Common Prayer (“We acknowledge and bewail Our manifold Sins and Wickedness”). He also believed that “To him much should be forgiven by the people of Canada,” Pope wrote, because he “loved much” and had a great capacity for “entering into the minds and hearts of others.”…