system, and to call for a peaceful junction with the United States.

Elgin had not been long in Canada before he saw one important fact that the real annexationist feeling had commercial, not political roots. Without diminishing the seriousness of the situation, the discovery made it more susceptible of rational treatment. A colony suffering a severe set-back in trade found the precise remedy it looked for in transference of its allegiance. The remedy offered them,' wrote Elgin, is perfectly definite and intelligible. They are united to form part of a community which is neither suffering nor free-trading... a community, the members of which have been within the last few weeks pouring into their multifarious places of worship, to thank God that they are exempt from the ills which affect other men, from those more especially which affect their despised neighbours, the inhabitants of North America, who have remained faithful to the country which planted them.' With free-trade in the ascendant, and possibly correct, Elgin had to dismiss schemes of British preference from his mind; and, towards the end of his rule, when American economics and politics were irritating the Canadian mind, he had even to restrict the scope within which Canadian retaliation might be practised.2 There could be no imperial Zollverein. But he said that a measure of Reciprocity might give the Canadians all the economic benefits they sought, and yet leave them the allegiance and the government which, in their hearts, they preferred. The annexationist clamour fell and rose, mounting highest in Montreal, and in the dire year of the Rebellion Losses disturbance; but Elgin, while sometimes he grew despondent, always kept his head, and never ceased to hope for the Reciprocity which would at once bring back prosperity, and still the disloyal murmurs. Once or twice, when the annexationists were at their worst, and when his Tory opponents chose support of that disloyal movement as the means of insulting their Governor, he took very justifiable means of repressing an unnatural evil. 'We intend,' he wrote in November, 1849, after an annexation meeting in which servants of the State had taken part, 'to dismiss the militia officers and magistrates who have taken part in these affairs, and to deprive the two Queen's Counsels of their silk gowns.' But he held to the positive 1 Walrond, op. cit. p. 105.

2 Nothing is clearer in Grey's letters to Elgin than his refusal to countenance retaliation in any shape, except perhaps as restricting American use of Canadian

waters.

side of his policy, and few statesmen ever gave Canada a more substantial boon than did Elgin when, just before his recall, he came to Washington on that mission which Laurence Oliphant has made classic by his description, and concluded by far the most favourable commercial treaty with the United States ever negotiated by Britain.

There is perhaps a tendency to underestimate the work of his predecessors and assistants, but no one can doubt that it was Elgin's persistence in urging the treaty on the home Cabinet, and his wonderful diplomatic gifts, which ultimately won the day. Oliphant, certainly, had no doubt as to his chief's share in the matter. 'He is the most thorough diplomat possible-never loses sight for a moment of his object, and while he is chaffing Yankees, and slapping them on the back, he is systematically pursuing that object'; and again, 'There was concluded in exactly a fortnight a treaty to negotiate which had taxed the inventive genius of the Foreign Office, and all the conventional methods of diplomacy, for the previous seven years.' 2

1

It was a long, slow process by which Elgin restored the tone of Canadian loyalty. Frenchmen who had dreamed of renouncing allegiance he won by his obviously fair mind, and the place accorded by him to their leaders. He took the heart out of Irish disaffection by his popular methods and love of liberty. Tory dissentients fell slowly in to heel, as they found their Governor no lath painted to look like iron, but very steel; to desponding Montreal merchants his Reciprocity treaty yielded naturally all they had expected from the more drastic change. It is true that, owing to untoward circumstances, the treaty lasted only for the limited period prescribed by Elgin; but it tided over an awkward period of disaffection and disappointment.

He did more, however, than cure definite phases of Canadian disaffection; his influence through Earl Grey told vehemently for a fuller and more optimistic conception of empire. With all its virtues the bureaucracy of the Colonial Office did not understand the government of colonies such as Canada; and where colonial secretaries had the ability to will, they had not knowledge sufficient to lead them into paths at once democratic and imperial. Even Grey had his moments of falling from the optimism which empire demands of its statesmen. It was not simply that he emphasized the wrong points-military and

1 Mrs. Oliphant, Life of Laurence Oliphant, p. 120.

2 Laurence Oliphant, Episodes in a Life of Adventure, p. 56.

B

diplomatic issues, which in Canada were minor and even negligible matters; but at times he seemed prepared to let things go.

In 1848 he had impaled himself on the horns of one of those dilemmas which present themselves so frequently to absentee governors and governments-no reciprocity with America and Canadian rebellion, or, reciprocity, and in consequence Americanization! In 1849, 'looking at these indications of the state of feeling in Canada, but the equally significant indications as to the feeling of the House of Commons respecting the value of our colonies,' he had begun to despair of their retention.2 But there were greater sinners than those of the Colonial Office. While Elgin was painfully removing all the causes of trouble in Canada, and proving without argument, but in deeds, that the British connexion represented normal conditions for both England and Canada, politicians insisted on making foolish speeches; until an offence by the Prime Minister himself drove Elgin into a passion unusual in so equable a mind, and which, happily, he expressed in the best of all his letters. I have never been able to comprehend why, elastic as our constitutional system is, we should not be able, now more especially when we have ceased to control the trade of our colonies, to render the links which bind them to the British Crown at least as lasting as those which unite the component parts of the Union.... You must renounce the habit of telling the colonies that the colonial is a provisional existence.... Is the Queen of England to be the sovereign of an empire, growing, expanding, strengthening itself from age to age, striking its roots deep into fresh earth and drawing new supplies of vitality from virgin soils? Or is she to be for all essential purposes of might and power monarch of Great Britain and Ireland merely, her place and that of her land in the world's history determined by the productiveness of 12,000 square miles of a coal formation which is being rapidly exhausted, and the duration of the social and political organization over which she presides dependent on the annual expatriation, with a view to its eventual alienization, of the surplus swarm of her born subjects?' That is the final question of imperialism; and an age which prides itself on its imperial creations, may well ask whether the man who first wrought out in hard labour an optimistic answer to the question 1 Elgin-Grey Corr.: Grey to Elgin, 27 July, 1848.

2 Elgin-Grey Corr.: Grey to Elgin, 20 July, 1849.

3 Elgin-Grey Corr.: 23 March, 1850. The letter, which may be found in Walrond's volume, pp. 115-120, ought to be read from its first word to its last.

before he asked it, and who then put it with vehemence to the Colonial Office and the Prime Minister, when they offended, does not merit some remembrance.

Space forbids any mention of the more human chapters of Elgin's Canadian adventure; his whimsical capacity for getting on with men, French, British, and American; the sly humour of his correspondence with his official chief; the searching comments made by him on men and manners in America; the charm of such social and diplomatic episodes as Laurence Oliphant has sketched in his letters and his Episodes in a Life of Adventure. It only remains to sum up such impressions as may be gathered from his opera majora recorded above.

I began by calling him Victorian, and the phrase seems fitting. He was too human, easy, unclassical, and, on the other hand, too little touched with Byronic or revolutionary feeling, even to suggest the age of Pitt, Napoleon, Canning; he was too sensible, too orthodox, too firmly based on fact and on the past, to have any affinity with our own transitionary politics. Like Peel, although to a less degree, he had at once a firm body of opinions, a keen eye for new facts, and a sure, slow capacity for bringing new fact to bear on old opinion.

He was able, as few have been, to set the personal equation aside in his political plans, administering to friends and foes with almost uncanny fairness, and astonishing his petty enemies by his moderation. His mind could regard not merely Canada but also Britain, as it reflected on future policy; and he sometimes seems, in his letters, the one man in the empire at the time who understood the true relation of colonial autonomy to British supremacy. Not even his foolishest eulogist will attribute anything romantic to his character. There was nothing of Disraeli's glitter of dubious gems' about the honest phrases in which he bade Russell think imperially. Unlike Mazzini, it was his business to destroy false nationalism, not to exalt that which was true, and for that cool business the glow and fervour of prophecy was not required. We like to see our leaders standing rampant, and with sulphurous, or at least thundery, backgrounds. But Elgin's ironic Scottish humour forbade the pose, and it was his business to keep the cannon quiet, and to draw the lightning harmless to the ground. The most heroic thing he did in Canada was to refrain from entering Montreal at a time when his entrance must have meant insult, resistance, and bloodshed, and he bore quietly the taunts of cowardice which his enemies flung at his head.

He was far too clear-sighted to think that statesmanship consists in decisions between very definitely stated alternatives of right and wrong. My choice,' he wrote in characteristic words, 'was not between a clearly right and clearly wrong course -how easy is it to deal with such cases, and how rare are they in life-but between several difficulties. I think I chose the least.'1 His kindly, shrewd, and honest countenance looks at us from his portraits with no appeal of sentiment or pathos. He had given the greatest of British dependencies the government fittest to its needs; he had saved a little people from the disasters of false nationalism; he had corrected the imperial practice of a great Government. He asked of men that which they find it most difficult to give-moderation, common-sense, a willingness to look at both sides, and to subordinate their egoisms to a wider good; and was content to do without their worship. Such as he was, he seems to me the greatest in the long line of Canadian viceroys; for at a crisis in Canadian history, he did, without a single slip, exactly that which was necessary, and he refused to stain the national triumph with any personal vainglory.

J. L. MORISON.

1 Elgin-Grey Corr.: Elgin to Grey, 7 October, 1849.