[20] The Rev. John Ryerson to Egerton Ryerson, February, 1844, in _The Story of my Life_. [21] Metcalfe to Stanley, 23 December, 1843. [22] Montreal Gazette, 23 April, 1844. [23] _Montreal Daily Witness_, 7 March, 1896, containing reminiscences by Dr. William Kingsford. [24] Young, _Early History of Galt and Dumfries_, p. 193. [25] Metcalfe to Stanley, 23 November, 1844. [26] Elgin-Grey Correspondence: Elgin to Grey, 9 December, 1847. [27] Stanley to Metcalfe, 18 May, 1844. [28] _Hansard_, 30 May, 1844. [29] Kaye, _Life of Lord Metcalfe_, ii. pp. 405-9. [30] Metcalfe to Stanley, 13 May, 1845. {187} CHAPTER VI. THE GOVERNORS-GENERAL: LORD ELGIN. The year which intervened between Metcalfe's departure and the arrival of Lord Elgin at the beginning of 1847, may be disregarded in this inquiry. Earl Cathcart, who held office in the interval, was chosen because relations with the United States at that time were serious enough to make it desirable to combine the civil and the military headship in Canada in one person. In domestic politics the governor-general was a negligible quantity, as his successor confessed: "Lord Cathcart, not very unreasonably perhaps, has allowed everything that required thought to lie over for me."[1] But the arrival of Elgin changed the whole aspect of affairs, and introduced the most {188} important modification that was made in Canadian government between 1791 and the year of Confederation. Since 1839, governors-general who took their instructions from Britain, and who seldom allowed the Canadian point of view to have more than an indirect influence on their administration, had introduced the most unhappy complications into politics. Both they and the home government were now reduced to the gloomiest speculations concerning the permanence of the British connection. In place of the academic or official view of colonial dependence which had hitherto dominated Canadian administration, Elgin came to substitute a policy which frankly accepted the Canadian position, and which as frankly trusted to a loyalty dependent for none of its sanctions upon external coercion or encouragement. With 1846, Great Britain entered on an era of which the predominating principle was _laissez faire_, and within twelve months of the concession of that principle in commerce, Elgin applied it with even more astonishing results in the region of colonial Parliamentary institutions.