The Canadian episode in Elgin's career furnishes the most perfect and permanently useful service rendered by him to the Empire. Although he {189} gathered laurels in China and India, and earned a notable place among diplomatists, nothing that he did is so representative of the whole man, so valuable, and so completely rounded and finished, as the seven years of his work in Canada. Elsewhere he accomplished tasks, which others had done, or might have done as well. But in the history of the self-governing dominions of Britain, his name is almost the first of those who assisted in creating an Empire, the secret of whose strength was to be local autonomy. He belonged to the most distinguished group of nineteenth century politicians, for with Gladstone, Canning, Dalhousie, Herbert, and others, he served his apprenticeship under Sir Robert Peel. All of that younger generation reflected the sobriety, the love of hard fact, the sound but progressive conservatism, and the high administrative faculty of their great master. It was an epoch when changes were inevitable; but the soundest minds tended, in spite of a powerful party tradition, to view the work in front of them in a non-partizan spirit. Gladstone himself, for long, seemed fated to repeat the party-breaking record of Peel; and three great proconsuls of the group, Dalhousie, Canning, and Elgin, found in imperial administration a more {190} congenial task than Westminster could offer them. Elgin occupies a mediate position between the administrative careers of Dalhousie and Canning, and the parliamentary and constitutional labours of Gladstone. He was that strange being, a constitutionalist proconsul; and his chief work in administration lay in so altering the relation of his office to Canadian popular government, as to take from the governor-generalship much of its initiative, and to make a great surrender to popular opinion. Between his arrival in Montreal at the end of January, 1847, and the writing of his last official despatch on December 18th, 1854, he had established on sure foundations the system of democratic government in Canada.