Apart from the viceregal operations of the governor, the direct action of the Crown was called for by the province in one notable but unfortunate incident, the choice of a new capital. Torn asunder by the strife of French and English, Canada was unable, or at least unwilling, to commit herself to the choice of a definitive capital, after Montreal had been rendered impossible by the turbulence of its mobs. So the Queen's personal initiative was invited. But the awkwardness of the step was revealed in 1858, when a division in the House practically flung her decision contemptuously aside--happily only for the moment, and informally. George Brown was absolutely right when he said: "I yield to no man for a single {327} moment in loyalty to the Crown of England, and in humble respect and admiration of Her Majesty. But what has this purely Canadian question to do with loyalty? It is a most dangerous and ungracious thing to couple the name of Her Majesty with an affair so entirely local, and one as to which the sectional feelings of the people are so excited."[29] It had become apparent, long before 1867, that while the loyalty of the province to the Sovereign, and the personal influence of her representative were bonds of union, real, if hard to describe in set terms, the headship over the Canadian people was assumed to be official, ornamental, and symbolical, rather than utilitarian. In other directions, the formal and legal elements of the connection were loosening---more especially in the departments of commerce and defence.[30] The careers of men like Buchanan and Galt, through whom the Canadian tariff received a complete revision, illustrate how little the former links to Britain were allowed to remain in trade relations. There was a day when, as Chatham himself would have contended, the regulation of trade was an indefeasible right of the Crown. That contention {328} received a rude check not only in the elaboration of a Canadian tariff in 1859, but in the claims made by the minister of finance: "It is therefore the duty of the present government, distinctly to affirm the right of the Canadian Legislature to adjust the taxation of the people in the way they judge best, even if it should meet the disapproval of the Imperial ministry. Her Majesty cannot be advised to disallow such acts, unless her advisers are prepared to assume the administration of the affairs of the colony, irrespective of the views of the inhabitants."[31] Similarly, the adverse vote on the militia proposals of 1862, which so exercised opinion in Britain, was but another result of the spirit of self-government operating naturally in the province. It was not that Canadians desired consciously to check the military plans of the empire. It was only that the grant of autonomy had permitted provincial rather than imperial counsels to prevail, and that a new laxity, or even slipshodness, had begun to appear in Canadian military