98 HISTORY OF PRINCE EDWARD ISLAND. fatal to his excellency's popularity and usefulness. The committee, with a negative sarcasm which the governor must have felt keenly, simply passed a resolution expressing regret that any public measures—in reference to government house—over which the society had no control, should have been deemed by his excellency a sufficient reason for the withdrawal of his name as patron of the society ; and a resolution was passed, at the annual meeting, soliciting the honor of His Royal Highness Prince Albert 's patronage, which, it is unnecessary to add, was readily- granted. In 1846 a dispute arose between the governor and Mr. Joseph Pope , which excited considerable interest at the time, and which resulted in a correspondence between the colonial office and the governor. It seems that Mr. Pope had op¬ posed strenuously, as an influential member of the house of assembly,—he was then speaker,—a proposal to add five hundred pounds to the governor's annual salary, and this generated in the mind of his excellency a very undignified feeling of hostility to Mr. Pope , who bad only exercised a right which could not bo legitimately called in question. Writing to Mr. Gladstone , then colonial secretary, the gov¬ ernor said of Mr. Pope : "As for any support from Mr. Pope , I am quite satisfied that in all his private actions, since the time of my persisting in reading the speech, at the ■opening of the session of 1845, respecting the debt he had accumulated, he has been my concealed enemy." The gov¬ ernor resolved to get quit of Mi-. Pope, as an executive councillor, and proceeded, in utter disregard of his instruc¬ tions, to effect that object by suspending that gentleman -iroin his seat at the board, without any consultation with <other members of the council, assigning to Mr. Gladstone , as his reason for dispensing with the usual forms, that he had learnt from good private sources that the council, if