from the fact that the example of Canada was certain, mutatis mutandis, to be followed by the other greater colonies of the British race.

On the first issue Elgin found opinion in a highly aggravated condition. The rebellion of 1837 had made it plain that the former grant of semi-representative government was useless, unless British statesmen were willing to let representative government be followed by its necessary consequence-a ministry representing the majority in the popular assembly, accepted and consulted by the local representative of the Crown. But neither Whigs nor Tories were prepared to make so complete a surrender to local autonomy. A considerable section of the colonists had but lately made armed resistance to British government, and many, especially among the French leaders, had been at least suspects in 1837 and 1838. The Canadian community was still in its immature youth, and its leaders had had few opportunities of learning political methods-except perhaps, which was worse than ignorance, some democratic crudities from the United States. The population was composed of Frenchmen who had already rebelled, Irishmen whose conduct at home and in America under the stimulus of famine and nationalist agitation could hardly have been more threatening, and if there were Scotch and English in Upper Canada, the majority had come from the unenfranchised classes in Britain, and were of the submerged three-fourths-the helots of English politics. At best, government could be entrusted only to very carefully selected representatives of this sub-political A popular assembly might state its views, but how could the Governor-General accept its dictation in the making of his Executive Council?

mass.

A constitutional subtlety complicated the general situation, arising from the difference between the relations of the ministers to the Crown in Britain, and of the ministers to the GovernorGeneral in Canada. Lord John Russell defined the point in a famous despatch to Poulett Thomson, the first governor of the United Provinces.1 The power for which a minister is responsible in England is not his own power, but the power of the Crown, of which he is for the time the organ. It is obvious that the executive councillor of a colony is in a situation totally different. The Governor, under whom he serves, receives his orders from the Crown of England; but can the colonial council be the advisers of the Crown of England? Evidently not, for 1 Russell to Poulett Thomson (later, Lord Sydenham), 14 October, 1839.

the Crown has other advisers, for the same functions, and with superior authority.'

This constitutional point, operating in conjunction with the natural unwillingness of Britain to let colonists usurp too much authority in what were, after all, imperial concerns, created a curious dilemma for Russell, fresh from democratic innovations in Britain itself. Russell centred his hopes on mutual forbearance The Governor must only oppose the wishes of the Assembly when the honour of the Crown, or the interest of the empire are deeply concerned; and the Assembly must be ready to modify some of its measures for the sake of harmony, and from a reverent attachment to the authority of Great Britain.'1

But opportunism is useless where a direct political principle is at stake, where the home government has avowedly gone half way towards concession, and where they refuse, on principle, to complete their surrender. The very reason which drives them to resist further concession, must force the colonial democrats to insist on their rights. From 1841 to 1846, a battle royal raged over this ground. Sydenham, one of the ablest servants of the empire in his time, accepted Russell's principle, and, combining in his own person the offices of Governor-General and Prime Minister, attempted at once to maintain the dignity of the Governor, that is, the predominance of the mother country, and by management and occasionally by subtle corruption, to placate the local Progressive party. After a brilliant Parliamentary session-that of 1841-he found his cabinet on the brink of defeat; only a premature death saved him from confessing his failure. His successor, Bagot, surrendering in the face of orders to the contrary from the colonial office, was endured at home for a short year; and, on his retirement through ill health, Sir Charles Metcalfe, who followed him, came to maintain, and more than maintain, Lord John Russell's status quo, backed by the entire approval of Stanley, who was then administering the Colonial Office with all his power of brilliant and doctrinaire shortsightedness. Unfortunately for Metcalfe and Stanley, a Progressive party had organized itself in the province of Upper and Lower Canada, with the demand for 'responsible government' as the main plank in their platform-Robert Baldwin, a conscientious, sure-footed Whig lawyer, leading Upper Canadian 1 Russell to Poulett Thomson, 14 October, 1839.

2 For the conflict, see Scrope, Life of Lord Sydenham; Kaye, Life of Metcalfe; and Dent, Forty Years of Canada.

resistance to Government, and Lower Canada finding in La Fontaine a French leader who had learned, and could teach his followers, how to resist on constitutional lines. The personal influence of Metcalfe, based on his great generosity and singlemindedness, the assistance of all the old Canadian Tories, and the uncomfortable feeling that the Progressives were, somehow or other, disloyal, held Canada in a state of unstable equilibrium. But this could hardly endure.

When Elgin arrived in 1847 the alternatives were a grant of really responsible government, or a rebellion, with annexation. to the United States as its probable end. The new Governor saw very clearly the dangers of his predecessor's policy. The distinction,' he wrote at a later date, between Lord Metcalfe's policy and mine is twofold. In the first place he profoundly distrusted the whole Liberal party in the province-that great party which, excepting at extraordinary conjunctures, has always carried with it the mass of the constituencies. He believed its designs to be revolutionary, just as the Tory party in England believed those of the Whigs and Reformers to be in 1832. And secondly, he imagined that when circumstances forced the party upon him, he could check these revolutionary tendencies by manifesting his distrust of them, more especially in the matter of the distribution of patronage, thereby relieving them in a great measure from that responsibility which is in all free countries the most effectual security against the abuse of power, and tempting them to endeavour to combine the rôle of popular tribunes with the prestige of ministers of the crown.'1

And Metcalfe's anti-democratic policy had been something more than the expression of a personal mood; for when Gladstone, then for a few months Colonial Secretary, wrote to instruct Cathcart, who was acting Governor in succession to Metcalfe, he assured him that the favour of his sovereign and the acknowledgment of his country, have marked (Metcalfe's) administration as one which, under the peculiar circumstances of the task he had to perform, may justly be regarded as a model for his successors.' 2 In truth, the British Colonial Office was not only wrong in its working theory, but ignorant of the boiling tumult of Canadian opinion in these days, the steadily increasing vehemence of the demand for true home rule, and the enormous risk which existed, 1 Elgin-Grey Corr.: Elgin to Grey on Grey's Colonial Policy, 8 October, 1852.

2 Gladstone to Cathcart, 3 February, 1846. The italics are my own.

that French nationalism, Irish nationalism, and American aggression, would be united in the agitation until the political tragedy should find its consummation in another Declaration of Independence.

Never was man better fitted for his work than Elgin. He came, a Scotsman to a colony one-third Scottish, and the name of Bruce was itself soporific to a perfervid section of the reformers. His wife was the daughter of Lord Durham, whom Canadians regarded as the beginner of a new age of Canadian constitutionalism. He had been appointed by a Whig Government, and Earl Grey, the new Colonial Secretary, was already learned in liberal theory, both in politics and economics, understanding that Britons, abroad as at home, must have liberty to misgovern themselves. However unwise as relates to the real interests of Canada their measures may be,' he wrote to Elgin a propos of an early crisis, they must be acquiesced in, until it shall pretty clearly appear that public opinion will support a resistance to them.'1 Besides all this, Elgin's personal qualities were precisely those best fitted to control a would-be self-governing community. He had the Scottish gifts of caution and pawky humour. He had, to an extraordinary degree, the power of seeing both sides, and more especially the other side, of any question. In Canada, too, as later in China and India, he exhibited qualities of humanity which some might term quixotic, and which are certainly often lacking in proconsular minds. And, as will be illustrated very fully below, his gifts of tact and bonhomie made him one of the most notable diplomatists of his time, and gave Britain at least one clear diplomatic victory over America.

His solution of the constitutional question was so natural and easy that the reader of his despatches forgets how completely Elgin's task had baffled all his predecessors, and that several generations of colonial secretaries had refused to admit what in his hands seems a self-evident constitutional truth. He came to Canada with a traditional suspicion of the French Canadians and the British Canadian Progressives, and within a year he had accepted a cabinet composed entirely of these two sections. On his way to the formation of that cabinet he had not only brushed aside old suspicions, but he had refused to surrender to the seductions of the eclectic principle, whereby his predecessors had 1 Elgin-Grey Corr.: Grey to Elgin, 22 February, 1848. 2 Walrond, Letters and Journals of Lord Elgin, p. 424. During a public service of twenty-five years I have always sided with the weaker party.'

evaded the force of popular opinion by selecting representatives of all shades of that opinion-a plan which in practice secured individuals, but severed them in sympathy from the parties which they were supposed to represent. It was important, he saw, to remove that most delicate and debatable subject' responsible government from the region of party politics; and he did this by conceding the whole position. I never cease,' he wrote of Sydenham's policy, 'to marvel what study of human nature, or of history, led him to the conclusion that it would be possible to concede to a pushing and enterprising people, unencumbered by an aristocracy, and dwelling in the immediate vicinity of the United States, such constitutional privileges as were conferred on Canada at the time of the Union, and yet to restrict in practice their powers of self-government as he proposed.'1

When his first general election proved beyond a doubt that Canadians desired a Progressive ministry, he made the change in 1848 with perfect success. It was the year of revolution, and the men whom he called to advise him were 'persons denounced very lately by the Secretary of State to the Governor-General as impracticable and disloyal'; but before the year was out he was able to boast that when so many thrones are tottering and the allegiance of so many people is waxing faint, there is less political disaffection in Canada than there ever was before.' From 1848 until the year of his recall he remained in complete accord with this Liberal administration, and never was constitutional monarch more intimately and usefully connected with his ministers than was Elgin, first with Baldwin and La Fontaine, and then with Hincks and Morin.

Old

Elgin gave a rarer example of what fidelity to colonial constitutionalism meant. In these years of Liberalism, Toryism' faced a new strain, and faced it badly. The party had supported the empire, when that empire meant their supremacy. They had befriended the representative of the Crown, when they had all the places and profits. When the British connexion took a liberal colour; when the Governor-General acted constitutionally towards the undoubtedly progressive tone of popular opinion, some of the Tories became annexationists; many of them, as will be shown later, encouraged a dastardly assault on the person of their official head; and all of them, supported by gentlemen of Her 1 Elgin-Grey Corr.: Elgin to Grey, 26 April, 1847. 2 Elgin-Grey Corr.: Elgin to Grey, 5 February, 1848. 3 Elgin-Grey Corr.: Elgin to Grey, 29 June, 1848.

1