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 invited 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 {220} America, who have remained faithful to the country which planted them."[31] With free-trade in the ascendant, and, to the maturest minds of the time, unanswerably sound in theory, Elgin had to dismiss schemes of British preference from his mind; and, towards the end of his rule, when American policy was irritating Canada, he had even to restrict the scope within which Canadian retaliation might be practised. There could be no imperial Zollverein. But he saw that a measure of reciprocity might give the Canadians all the economic benefits they sought, and yet leave to them the allegiance and the government which, in their hearts, they preferred. The annexationist clamour fell and rose, mounting highest in Montreal, and reaching a crisis in the 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 stern measures for repressing an unnatural evil. "We intend," {221} he wrote in November, 1849, after an annexation meeting at which servants of the State had been present, "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 relied mainly on the positive side of his policy, and few statesmen have given Canada a more substantial boon than did Elgin when, just before his recall, he went to Washington on that mission which Laurence Oliphant has made classic by his description, and concluded by far the most favourable commercial treaty ever negotiated by Britain with the United States.