HIS FOREIGN POLICY

his way to Peshawur and he thought "that the interests of both prudence and humanity would be best consulted by levelling a speedy and decisive blow at the embryo conspiracy." To Sir Hugh Rose, who advised delay to the spring and war on a larger scale with the commander-in-chief in charge, he was opposed. "I wish," he told Wood, "by a sudden and vigorous blow to check this trouble on our frontier while it is in a nascent condition." It lies outside this history to follow the troubles to their conclusion after Elgin's death, but his attitude discloses a man who could act or advise action at the right moment, and who advised it not merely as at times a necessary part of administration but as at times the prudent guardian of humanity. In foreign policy he was opposed to war for war's sake, and he saw the frontier as the last place on earth to encourage ceaseless and flamboyant displays by military men who knew nothing of civil problems. He believed strongly in frontier defence, and in this he shewed himself a member of the great traditional school of Indian strategists, but it was to be such a defence as would fit in with Indian administration, not merely as a domestic whole but as part and parcel of that of a world-wide empire. Time, however, allowed Elgin's ideals no test. The curtain now falls on an unfinished play-the manuscript is buried in the inscrutable archives of death.

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CHAPTER VIII

A MAKER OF CANADA

S Elgin's diplomatic career is viewed in the perspective of well nigh a century, it is possible, without any fear of contradiction, to say that his hold on historical fame lies in the fact that he was in a very true sense a maker of Canada. In China and Japan he carried out a work which might have been done by many of his contemporaries, and even had he been essential, the missions on which he was sent did not issue in far-reaching policies nor did they contain the rich promise which Elgin foretold in the successful working out of his Canadian administration. In India, his régime was too short to take a permanent and creative place in Indian history. In Canada, on the other hand, he passed from strength to strength. From countless points to-day in the political and imperial scheme of the Dominion of Canada we can go back across the years to that crowded middle period of the nineteenth century and find Elgin's principles. We can hew down to the foundations of the national structure of modern Canada and discover huge granite rocks, cornerstones, laid true and permanent by the governorgeneral. His monument is indeed not amid the

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far-off Indian hills, but in the living body of a great nation within the empire to which his faith and conviction were inseparably attached. In concluding then this sketch of his career, we can without disparagement afford to neglect his other claims to distinction and to sum up in broad generalizations his position as a maker of Canada, and in that making his position as a permanent maker of the modern British Commonwealth.

For well over half a century before Elgin arrived in the Canadas there had endured a somewhat remarkable colonial experiment, based on what we may call Pitt's conception of empire after the loss of the Thirteen Colonies. As Englishmen looked round for explanations of the American Revolution they professed to find them in the prevalence of too much democracy, too much freedom, too much deviation from centralized sovereignty. They therefore determined to give to the Canadas, created by proclamation under the Constitutional Act of 1791, not merely a constitution "the image and transcript" of the British but one in which the comprehensive imperial theory of sovereignty should be unmistakable. Whatever the position of the governor in the Thirteen Colonies, now he was to be a real governor, a vital, necessary and fundamental official entirely responsible to the imperial sovereignty, which in its plenary powers granted a new constitution, as the Act said, "to provinces

HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF

dependent on and belonging to Great Britain." Whatever the law of the disallowance and reservation of colonial bills in the lost empire, here it reappeared in the hands of a reliable officer. Then, too, the old mercantile theory found its due place in sections of the Act. In the sections dealing with the Clergy Reserves and in earlier sections, fortunately less pregnant with mischief, by which it was sought to attach to seats in the Legislative Council "hereditary titles of honour, the attempt was made to endow Canada with those two bridles of a too lawless democracy, an established Church and a House of Lords. In other words, in every field in which the lost colonies made challenges and found through the sword an answer to every non possumus, that non possumus was written into the constitution of the new American Empire which rose out of the old.

The history repeated itself. At first all went fairly well. In Canada East-in Quebec-for a long time French-Canadian civilization kept the even tenour of its traditional ways. In Canada West-in Ontario-the creation of a new province and the early struggle for homesteads in a virgin forest absorbed much of the attention of sturdy English-speaking settlers. When, however, the older civilization at length realized that in a modern world it could not survive merely by living in the racial and cultural past of paternalism, and when in the newer settlements pioneer life