In 1848 he had impaled himself on the horns of one of those dilemmas which present themselves so frequently to absentee governments and secretaries of state--either reciprocity and an Americanized colony, or a new rebellion as the consequence of a refusal in Britain to consent to a reciprocity treaty.[35] In 1849, "looking at these indications of the state of feeling in Canada, and at 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.[36] But there were greater sinners than those of the Colonial Office. While Elgin {224} was painfully removing all the causes of trouble in Canada, and proving without argument, but in deeds, that the British connection represented normal conditions for both England and Canada, politicians insisted on making foolish speeches. At last, 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 {225} 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?"[37] That is the final question of imperialism; and Elgin had earned the right not only to put it to the home government with emphasis, but also to answer it in an affirmative and constructive sense.