We have seen that he had not favoured the policy of dividing the province of Quebec into two provinces, and that he had shown sympathy with Chief Justice Smith’s proposals for establishing a general government for British North America. In the summer of 1793, after the Canada Act had come into force but while he was still in England on leave, he raised again this question of a central government for all the King’s provinces in British North America, receiving an answer from Dundas to the effect that the measure would require a new Act of Parliament and that in Dundas’ opinion it would not add to the real strength or happiness of the different provinces. After his return to Canada Dorchester took up his text again, laying stress on the necessity of welding together the different provinces. In existing conditions he saw a revival of the system which had caused rebellion and the dismemberment of the Empire. While the United States were pursuing a policy of consolidation, the aim of the King’s Government seemed to be to divide and sub-divide and form independent governments. All power, he continued, was withdrawn from the Governor-General, and instructions were sent directly from home to inferior officers, so that the intermediate authority was virtually superseded. Everything was favourable to insubordination, and the fruits of it might be expected at an early season. This was in February 1795, when the governor was smarting under what he considered to be unjust censure by the Home Government; and, though he remained in Canada for some time longer, he continued to show, by the tone of his dispatches, that he entirely disapproved of the existing régime. In November, 1795, he wrote of ‘all command, civil and military, being disorganized and without remedy’; in the following May he wrote that ‘this unnatural disorder in our political constitution, which alienates every servant of the Crown from whoever administers the King’s Government, leaving only an alternative still more dangerous, that of offending the mass of the people, cannot fail to enervate all the powers of the British Empire on this Continent’; and in June he wrote, that the old colonial system was being strengthened with ruinous consequences. [Sidenote: Relations of the Governor-in-Chief and Lieutenant-Governors.]