possesses the powers and emoluments of office_."[13] Unlike the majority of his contemporaries, he believed in assuming the colonists to be inspired with love for their mother country, common sense, and a regard for their own welfare; and it seemed obvious that men so disposed were infinitely better qualified than the Colonial Office to manage their own affairs. Nothing but evil {243} could result "from the attempt to conduct the internal affairs of the colonies in accordance with the public opinion, not of those colonies themselves, but of the mother country."[14] It may seem a work of supererogation to complete the sketch of this group with an examination of the opinions expressed in Lord Durham's Report; yet that Report is so fundamental a document in the development of British imperial opinion that time must be found to dispel one or two popular illusions.[15] It is a mistake to hold that Durham advocated the fullest concession of local autonomy to Canada. Sir Francis Hincks, a protagonist of Responsible Government, once quoted from the Report sentences which seemed to justify all his claims: "The crown must submit to the necessary consequences of representative institutions, and if it has to carry on the government in union with a representative body, it must consent to carry it on by means of those in whom that representative body has confidence"; and again, "I admit that the system which I propose would in fact place the internal government of the colony in the hands of the {244} colonists themselves, and that we should thus leave to them the execution of the laws of which we have long entrusted the making solely to them."[16] Public opinion in Canada also put this extreme interpretation on the language of the Report. Yet, as a first modification, it was Lord Metcalfe's confident opinion that the responsibility of ministers to the Assembly for which Durham pled, was not that of a united Cabinet, but rather of departmental heads in individual isolation,[17] and certainly one sentence in the Report can hardly be interpreted otherwise: "This (the change) would induce responsibility for every act of the Government, and, as a natural consequence, it would necessitate _the substitution of a system of administration by means of competent heads of departments, for the present rude machinery of an executive council_."[18]