Goldwin Smith party, which, after {290} all, is not a very small one; and the Derbyites make no secret of what they would do if they were in power,--let Canada take her chance."[63] Even Earl Grey was prepared, at that crisis, to submit to the British and Canadian parliaments a clear issue, calling on the latter to afford adequate support to the British forces left in British North America, or to permit the last of them to leave a country heedless of its own safety.[64] From that time forth, more especially after Lee, Jackson, Grant, and Sherman had revealed the military possibilities of the American Republic, even military men began to accept the strategic arguments against the retention of Canada as unanswerable, and joined the ranks of those who called for separation. Richard Cartwright, who had opportunities for testing British opinion, more especially among military officers, found a universal agreement that Canada was indefensible, and that separation had better take place, before rather than after war.[65] So John Bright and the leaders of the British army had at last found a point in diplomacy and strategy on which they might agree. {291} A considerable portion of authoritative British opinion has now been traversed; and beneath all its contradictions and varieties a deep general tendency has been discovered. That tendency made for the separation of Canada from England and the Empire. It is strange to see how resolutely writers have evaded the conclusion, and yet, if the views discussed above have been fairly stated, only four men of note and authority, Durham, Buller, Elgin, and Grey remained unaffected by the growing pessimism of the time, and of these, the last seemed at the end to find it difficult to maintain the confidence of 1853 under the trials of 1862. Britain was, in fact, undergoing a great secular change of policy. She had been driven, step by step, from the old position of supremacy and authority. As in commerce the security of protection had been abandoned for the still doubtful advantages of free trade, so, in the colonies, the former cast-iron system of imperial control had been abandoned for one of _laissez-faire_ and self-government. It would have been impossible for British statesmen to follow any other course than that which they actually chose. Self-government, and self-government to the last detail and corollary of the argument they must perforce concede. But {292} in the stress of their imperial necessities, it was not strange that they should discern all the signs of disruption, rather than the gleams of hope; and men like Disraeli who claimed at a later date that they had never despaired of the Empire, did so at the expense of their sincerity, and could do so only because the false remedies they prescribed were happily incapable of application. Little Englandism, if that unfortunate term may be used to describe an essential and inevitable phase of imperial