Closely akin to the question of the maintenance of the connection between the Colony and Great Britain, especially when viewed as affected by the commercial and financial condition of the former, was the question of throwing upon it the expense of defending itself; a problem which was then only beginning to attract the attention of liberal statesmen. For though it may be true that the practice of defending the Colonies with the troops and at the cost of the mother-country was an innovation upon the earlier Colonial system, introduced at the time of the great war, it is not the less certain that to the generation of colonists that had grown up since that time the abandonment of it had all the effect of novelty. It was a question on which, as affecting Canada, Lord Elgin was in a peculiar degree 'between two fires;' exposed to pressure at once from the Government at home and from his own Ministers, and seeing much to agree with in the views of both. [Sidenote: against internal disorder;] In the first place, as regards the preservation of order within the province, he thought it clear that, as a general rule, the cost of this should fall on the Colony itself wherever it enjoyed self-government; but there were peculiar circumstances in Canada which made him hesitate to apply the doctrine unreservedly there. Owing to the contiguity of the United States, the abettors of any mischief in the Colony might count on help constantly at hand, not indeed from the Government of the Union, which never acted disloyally,[6] but from the Unruly spirits that were apt to infest the borders; and it seemed to him at least doubtful, whether both justice and policy did not require that Great Britain should afford to the supporters of order some material aid to counterbalance this. Again, the peculiar social and political state of Lower Canada, arising mainly from the conditions under which it had passed into the hands of England, and from the manner in which England had fulfilled those conditions, created special difficulties as to the maintenance of internal quiet. On the one hand England's respect for treaty obligations had induced her to resist all attempts to break down by fraud or violence those rights and usages of the French population, which had tended to keep alive among them feelings of distinctive nationality; while on the other hand the effect of the working of the old system of colonial administration had been to confer upon British or American settlers a disproportionate share in the government of the province. It followed that the French-Canadian majority and the Anglo- Saxon minority were dwelling side by side in that section of the Colony without, to any sensible extent, intermingling, and under conditions of equilibrium which could never have been established but for the presence on the same scene of a directing and overruling power. In this state of things, while confidently hoping that an impartial adherence to the