On his sixty-fifth birthday, 8 March 1868, Egerton Ryerson, the founder of Ontario's education system and a man of deep Christian faith, contemplated his mortality. He decided that before his inevitable end he should settle his relationships with all the people he had been in dispute with. At the top of that list was editor and politician George Brown, who, he reflected, was the only person with whom he had had really personal disagreements.
So he wrote to Brown that day and said, "I wish to assure you of my hearty forgiveness of the personal wrongs I think you have done me in the past…."
Brown replied the same day. "I am entirely unconscious of any ‘personal wrong’ ever done you by me, and have no thought of receiving forgiveness at your hands."
Brown lived another twelve years, Ryerson fourteen. There was no further correspondence.
