Yet, so far as Canada was concerned, Bagot had reason to feel satisfied. Threatened with half a dozen hostile combinations, he had forestalled them all, and found the Assembly filled with friends, not enemies. He had approached a sullen French nation--and thereafter the French party formed as solid an accession to Canadian political stability as they had once been dangerous to Imperial peace; and their union with the moderate reformers in government, while it gave them all they asked, enabled the governor to exercise a natural restraint on them, should they again be tempted to nationalist excesses. He had not explicitly surrendered to any sweeping doctrine of responsible government. There was peace at last. The Assembly which passed over thirty acts, reaffirmed the rights of the royal prerogative, and {154} was dismissed in the most amiable temper with itself, and the governor-general. One may discern, however, a curious contradiction between the superficial consequences of the crisis, as described by Bagot, and the fundamental changes the beginnings of which he was able to trace in the months which followed. On the face of it, Bagot's policy of frank expediency had saved Stanley and his party from a crushing defeat and a humiliating surrender to extreme views. So far, he had assisted the cause of conservatism. But the disaster and the humiliation would have come, not from the grant of responsible government, but from the misuse of it to which a victory, won against a more resolute governor, might have tempted Baldwin and La Fontaine, and from the false position in which the imperial government would have stood, towards the men who had challenged imperial authority and won. It is interesting to follow the process by which Bagot came to see all that lay in his action. Yielding to Canadian autonomy, he went on to new surrenders. He had already warned Stanley that the agitation over the Civil List would certainly reawaken; to the end he seems to have been considering the advisability of a complete surrender {155} on that point. When he wrote communicating to the minister the Assembly's acknowledgment of the royal prerogative, in recognizing the right of the Crown to name the capital, he pointed out that, prerogative or no prerogative, the possessor of the purse had the final voice. He rebuked his new minister, Baldwin, for tacking on question-begging constitutional phrases to a legal opinion, but he told Stanley, quite frankly, that, "whether the doctrine of responsible government is openly acknowledged, or is only tacitly acquiesced in, _virtually it exists_."[26] During the remainder of his tenure of office, partly because of his own ill-health, but partly also, I think, from conviction, he gave his ministers the most perfect freedom of action. And, although he did not gain the point, he was willing to make sweeping concessions in answer to the call for an amnesty for the rebels of 1837. He recognized the