It was hardly wonderful then that the Whigs moved steadily onward until they almost acquiesced in the idea of imperial disruption; and, since Peel {285} had left his party moved almost wholly by Cobden's economic propaganda, it was not unnatural that the Peelites should share the views of their Whig allies. It is indeed possible to find some cold consolation in Gladstone's Chester speech in 1855, when he predicted that if only the colonies were left freedom of judgment, it would be hard to say when the day of separation might come.[57] But Grey had already suspected Gladstone of pessimism on the point, and we now know that as an imperialist Gladstone's course from 1855 had a downward tendency. He could not resist the arguments of his Radical friends and teachers. Almost all the important relevant facts and events which concerned the connection after 1846 assisted these party movements towards belief in separation. Grey, whose confidence in the beneficial results of free trade challenged that of Cobden himself, believed that with Protection there vanished an awkward enemy of the connection between Canada and Britain.[58] But Grey was unmistakably doctrinaire on the point. Elgin warned him, again and again, of "the uneasy feeling which the {286} free-trade policy of the mother country ... has tended to produce in the colonial mind,"[59] and that uneasiness passed gradually over to Britain. It would be to trespass unduly beyond the limits prescribed in this essay to deal with the introduction of the Canadian tariff in 1858 and 1859; yet the statements of Galt who introduced the budget in the latter year strike the reader now, as they must have struck the British reader then, with a sense that the connection was practically at an end: "The government of Canada cannot, through those feelings of deference which they owe to the Imperial authorities, in any measure waive or diminish the right of the people of Canada to decide for themselves both as to the mode and extent to which taxation shall be imposed.... The Imperial government are not responsible for the debts and engagements of Canada. They do not maintain its judicial, educational, or civil service. They contribute nothing to the internal government of the country; and the Provincial Legislature, acting through a ministry directly responsible to it, has to make provision for all these wants. They must necessarily claim and exercise the widest latitude, as to the nature, and {287} the extent of the burdens, to be placed upon the industry of the people."[60] There was almost everything to be said in favour of this enlightened selfishness; and yet a growing coolness on the part of British legislators was, under the circumstances, very comprehensible. It was all the more so, because the innovations in Canada influenced British diplomacy in its relations with the United States; and between 1854, the date of Elgin's Reciprocity Treaty, and 1867, British statesmen learned some of the