The most obvious and natural effect of Elgin's concessions was a revolution in the programmes of the provincial parties, and in their relations to each other and to government. It may be remembered that all the governors of the period agreed in reprobating the factiousness and pettiness of Canadian party politics. Even Elgin had been unable to see very much rationality in their methods. There was, he held, little of public principle to divide {294} men, apart from the fundamental question of responsible government.[1] But it is possible to underestimate the reality and importance of the party system as it existed down to 1847. To have admitted that men differed on the principle of responsible government, was to have admitted that party strife had some justification; and all the other details--affections and antipathies, national, sectarian, and personal--were the circumstances natural to party life as that life has everywhere come into existence. Burke himself sought no higher ground for the grouping of men into parties than that of family connection, and common friendships and enmities. No doubt the squalor and pettiness of early Canadian party life contrasted meanly with the glories of the eighteenth century Whigs, and the struggles of Fox and Pitt. But a nation must begin somewhere, and these trivial divisions received a kind of consecration when they centred round the discussion of colonial self-government. After all, so long as autonomy was only partially conceded, and so long as men felt impelled to take opposite sides on that subject, it was foolish to deny that there were Canadian parties, and that their differences were of some importance. {295} Moreover, before 1847 there were other good reasons for the existence of two distinct parties. It was true, as Sydenham had said, that the British party names were not quite appropriate to the parties in Canada who had adopted them. Yet there were some links between British and Canadian parties. The British and the Canadian Tories had, in 1840, many views in common. In a time of change both stood for a pronounced distrust of democracy; both regarded the creation of responsible government in Canada as disastrous to the connection; both were the defenders of Church and State. On the other hand, it was not unnatural, as Elgin came to see, to compare the party led by Baldwin and La Fontaine with the Reformers in England who looked to Lord John Russell as their true leader. Until the political traditions, which most of the recent immigrants had brought with them from Britain, had disappeared or been transformed into a new Canadian tradition, and so long as certain grave constitutional defects which cried for remedy remained unaltered, Canadian Tories and Reformers must exist, and government, as Metcalfe discovered, was impossible, unless it recognized in these provincial divisions the motive power of local administration. {296}