GALT, Sir ALEXANDER Trimocit (1817-93). A Canadian financier and statesman. He was born in Chelsea, London, was educated privately, and in 1835 removed to Sherbrooke, Lower Canada, where he had been appointed to a clerkship in a colonization society. He remained in the service of this company until 1856, and during the latter half of the period was its manager. He began his public career as a Liberal member of the Provincial Parliament in 1849, but opposed the Liberal Government. He resigned in the same year, and did not enter Parliament again until 1853, after which he served continuously until 1872. Such was the reputation he established that on the fall of the Brown-Dorion Cabinet in 1858 he was called upon to form an administra tion, but declined. Subsequently he joined the Cartier-Macdonald Cabinet as Inspector-General of the Finances, demanding as a condition of his taking office that the administration should pledge itself to further a federation of the British colonies in North America. He went out of office with the fall of the Ministry in 1862, but held the Finance portfolio in the Tache-Macdonald Ad ministration from 1864 to 1866. He was active in
the promotion of the plan for federation, was a delegate at the Charlottetown and Quebec con ference in 1864, and in 1865 was one of the delegates to England to urge Imperial support of the plan for union. After the inauguration of the Federal Government he became first Finance Minister of the Dominion of Canada, and secured the issue of legal-tender notes which form the basis of the present currency of the Dominion. He resigned in 1868, and after 1872 his public services were for the most part of a diplomatic nature. He served twice as Commissioner to negotiate with the United States, and from 1880 to 1883 was High Commissioner of the Dominion in England. He was the author of a number of important pamphlets of a political nature, in cluding Church and State in Canada (1876) ; Civil Liberty in Lower Canada (1876); Future of the Dominion of Canada (1881) ; and Rela tions of the Colonies to the Empire: Present and Future (1883).