I. INTRODUCTORY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 II. THE CANADIAN COMMUNITY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 III. THE GOVERNORS-GENERAL: LORD SYDENHAM . . . . . . . . . . 70 IV. THE GOVERNORS-GENERAL: SIR CHARLES BAGOT . . . . . . . . 126 V. THE GOVERNORS-GENERAL: LORD METCALFE . . . . . . . . . . 158 VI. THE GOVERNORS-GENERAL: LORD ELGIN . . . . . . . . . . . . 187 VII. BRITISH OPINION AND CANADIAN AUTONOMY . . . . . . . . . . 230 VIII. THE CONSEQUENCES OF CANADIAN AUTONOMY . . . . . . . . . . 293 INDEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 347 {1} CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTORY. There are antinomies in politics as in philosophy, problems where the difficulty lies in reconciling facts indubitably true but mutually contradictory. For growth in the political world is not always gradual; accidents, discoveries, sudden developments, call into existence new creations, which only the generous logic of events and the process of time can reconcile with pre-existing facts and systems. It is the object of this essay to examine one of these political antinomies--the contradiction between imperial ascendancy and colonial autonomy--as it was illustrated by events in early Victorian Canada. The problem was no new one in 1839. Indeed it was coeval with the existence of the empire, and sprang from the very nature of colonial government. Beneath the actual facts of the great {2} American revolution--reaching far beyond quarrels over stamp duties, or the differentiation between internal and external taxation, or even the rights of man--was the fundamental difficulty of empire, the need to reconcile colonial independence with imperial unity. It was the perception of this difficulty which made Burke so much the greatest political thinker of his time. As he wrote in the most illuminating of his letters, "I am, and ever have been, deeply sensible of the difficulty of reconciling the strong presiding power, that is so useful towards the conservation of a vast, disconnected, infinitely diversified empire, with that liberty and safety of the provinces, which they must enjoy (in opinion and practice, at least), or they will not be provinces at all. I know, and have long felt, the difficulty of reconciling the unwieldy haughtiness of a great ruling nation, habituated to command, pampered by enormous wealth, and confident from a long course of prosperity and victory, to the high spirit of free dependencies, animated with the first glow and activity of juvenile heat, and assuming to themselves as their birthright, some part of that very pride which oppresses them."[1] {3}