To his mind, what Durham had advocated was infinitely sounder--"that all officers of the government except the governor and his secretary should be responsible to the united Legislature; and that the governor should carry on his government by heads of departments, in whom the United Legislature repose confidence.... The general responsibility of heads of departments, acting under the orders of the Governor, each distinctly in his own department, might exist without the destruction of the former authority of her Majesty's Government."[7] So set was he in his opposition to cabinet government on British lines in Canada, that he prophesied separation as the obvious consequence of concession. It was natural that one so distrustful of cabinet machinery in a colony should altogether fail to see the place of party. It must always be remembered that party, in Canada, had few of those sanctions of manners, tradition, and national service, which had given Burke his soundest arguments, when he wrote the apologetic of the eighteenth century Whigs. Personal and sometimes corrupt interests, petty ideas, ignoble quarrels, a flavour of pretentiousness which came from the misapplication of British terms, and a {167} lack of political good-manners--in such guise did party present itself to the British politician on his arrival in British North America. Metcalfe, from his previous experience, had come to identify party divisions with factiousness, a political evil which the efficient governor must seek to extirpate. His triumph in Jamaica had secured the death of party through the benevolent despotism of the governor, and there can be no doubt that he hoped in Canada to perform a precisely similar task. "The course which I intend to pursue with regard to all parties," he wrote to Stanley in April, 1843, "is to treat all alike, and to make no distinctions, as far as depends on my personal conduct." But since parties did exist, and were unlikely to cease to exist, the governor-general's distaste for party in theory merely forced him to become in practice the unconscious leader of the Canadian conservatives, who, under men like MacNab and the leaders of the Orange Lodges, differed only from other parties in the loudness of their loyalist professions, and the paucity of their supporters among the people. Metcalfe complained that at times the whole colony must be regarded as a party opposed to her Majesty's Government.[8] He might have {168} seen that what he deplored proceeded naturally from the identification of himself with the smallest and least representative group of party politicians in the colony.