Great as was Elgin's achievement in rectifying Canadian constitutional practice, his solution of the nationalist difficulty in Lower Canada was possibly a greater triumph of statesmanship; for the present _modus vivendi_, which still shows no signs of breaking down, dates from the years of Elgin's governorship. The decade which included his rule in Canada was pre-eminently the epoch of nationalism. Italy, Germany, and Hungary, with Mazzini as their prophet, were all struggling for the acknowledgment of their national claims, and within the British Islands themselves, the Irish nationalists furnished, in Davis and the writers to _The Nation_, disciples and apostles of the new gospel. It is always dangerous to trace European influences across the Atlantic; but there is little doubt that as the French rebellion of 1837 owed something to Europe, so the arch-rebel Papineau's paper, _L'Avenir_, echoed in an empty blustering fashion, the cries of the nationalist revolution of 1848.[25] Elgin found on his arrival that British administration had thrown every element in French-Canadian politics into headlong opposition to itself. How dangerous the situation was, one may infer from {211} the disquieting rumours of the ambitions of the American Union, and from the passions and memories of injustice which floods of unkempt and wretched Irish immigrants were bringing with them to their new homes in America. In Elgin's second year of office, 1848, he had to face the possibility of a rising under the old leaders of 1837. His solution of the difficulty proceeded _pari passu_ with his constitutional work. In the latter he had seen that he must remove the disquieting subject of "responsible government" from the party programme of the progressives, and the politic surrender of 1847 had gained his end. Towards French nationalism he acted in the same spirit. As has already been seen, he was conscious of the political shortcomings of the French. Yet there was nothing penal in his attitude towards them, and he saw, with a clearness to which Durham never attained, how idle all talk of anglicizing French Canada must be. "I for one," he said, "am deeply convinced of the impolicy of all such attempts to denationalize the French. Generally speaking, they produce the opposite effect from that intended, causing the flame of national prejudice and animosity to burn more fiercely."[26] {212}