One thing has appeared very prominently in the {278} foregoing argument--the prevalence of a fear, or even a fixed belief, that the connection between Britain and Canada must soon cease. Excluding, for the present, the entire group of extreme radicals, there was hardly a statesman of the earlier years of Victoria, who had not confessed that Canada must soon leave England, or be left. Many instances have been already cited. Among the Tories, Stanley thought that Bagot had already begun the process of separation, and that Metcalfe's failure would involve the end of the connection. Peel, ever judicial, gave his verdict in favour of separation, should Canadians persist in resenting imperial action. As Lord John Russell's view of autonomy expanded, his hopes for continued British supremacy contracted; and, on the evidence of a letter from Grey quoted above, Russell was not alone among the Whigs in his opinion, nor Peel among his immediate followers. The reckless and partizan use of the term Little-Englander has largely concealed the fact that apart from Durham, whose faith was not called upon to bear the test of experience, and Buller, Grey, and Elgin, who had special grounds for their confidence, all the responsible politicians of the years between 1840 and 1860 moved steadily towards a "Little England" position. {279} The reasons for that movement are worthy of examination. So far as the Tories were concerned, the change, already traced in detail, was not unnatural. In the eighteenth century, the colonies, possessed of just that responsible government for which Canadian reformers were clamouring, had with one accord left the Empire. The earlier nineteenth century had witnessed in the British American colonies a steadily increasing demand for the liberties, formerly possessed by the New England states. Representative assemblies had been granted; then a modified form of responsibility of the executive to these assemblies; then the complete surrender of executive to legislature. Attempts had been made to gain some countervailing powers by bargain; but, in Canada, the civil list had now been surrendered to local control, the endowment of the Church of England was practically at an end, patronage was in the hands of the provincial ministry, and all the exceptions which the central authority had claimed as essential to its continued existence followed in the wake of the lost executive supremacy. Neither Whigs nor Tories quite understood how an Empire was possible, in which there was no definite federating principle; or, if there {280} were, where the federating principle existed only to be neutralized as, one by one, the restrictions imposed by it were felt by the colonists to be annoying to their sense of freedom. Empire on these terms seemed to mean simply a capacity in the mother country for indefinite surrender. The accomplishment of the purpose proclaimed by Durham, Russell, and Grey, would, to a Tory even less peremptory than