George Brown Defends the Middle-Class

But brokerage politics that gave Lower Canada the whip hand seemed, to George Brown, to undermine middle-class hegemony. The middle classes, fresh from their fight for responsible government, must reassert their right to rule against corruption and violence emanating from both ends of the spectrum, the patrician and the plebeian.

--E.A. Heaman, Tax, Order, and Good Government: A New Political History of Canada, 1867-1917 (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2017), 38.