The dream has been realised, at least in one of its most important features; the gloomy forebodings have hitherto happily proved groundless. But the speaker of these words, and the author of the measure to which they refer, would probably have been alike surprised at the course which events have taken respecting the particular point then in question. For once the stream that sets towards democracy has been seen to take a backward direction; and the constitution of the Dominion of Canada has returned, as regards the Legislative Council, to the Conservative principle of nomination by the Crown. * * * * * It does not fall within the scope of this memoir to give an account of the numerous administrative measures which made the period of Lord Elgin's Government so marked an epoch in the history of Canadian prosperity. It may be well, however, to notice a few points to which he himself thought it worth while to advert in official despatches, written towards the close of his sojourn in the country, and containing a statistical review of the marvellously rapid progress which the Colony had made in all branches of productive industry. The first extracts bear upon questions which have lost none of their interest or importance--the kindred questions of emigration, of the demand for labour, and of the acquisition and tenure of land. [Sidenote: Emigration.] The sufferings of the Irish during that calamitous period [1847] induced philanthropic persons to put forward schemes of systematic colonisation, based in some instances on the assumption that it was for the interest of the emigrants that they should be as much as possible concentrated in particular portions of the territories to which they might proceed, so as to form communities complete in themselves, and to remain subject to the influences, religious and social, under which they had lived previously to emigration. It was proposed, if I rightly remember, according to one of those schemes, that large numbers of Irish with their priests and home associations should be established by Government in some unoccupied part of Canada. I believe that such schemes, however benevolent their design, rest on a complete misconception of what is for the interest both of the Colony and of the emigrants. It is almost invariably found that emigrants who thus isolate themselves, whatever their origin or antecedents, lag behind their neighbours; and I am inclined to think that, as a general rule, in the case of communities whose social and political organisation is as far advanced as that of the North American Colonies, it is for the interest of all parties that new comers, instead of dwelling apart and bound together by the affinities whether of sect or party, which united them in the country which they have left, should be dispersed as widely as possible among the