You ask me about this mare's nest of Bentinck. The facts are these: the Montreal Board of Trade drew up a memorial for the House of Commons _against the Navigation Laws_, containing _inter alia_ a very distinct threat of separation in the event of their _non-repeal_. My secretary (not my private secretary, mark, but my responsible Government Secretary) sent _me a draft_ of a letter to the Board containing very loyal and proper sentiments on this head. I approved of the letter, and sent a copy of it home with the memorial, _instead of a report by myself_, partly because it saved me trouble, and partly because I was glad to show how perfectly my liberal government had expressed themselves on the point. Two or three weeks later, the Board of Trade, not liking Mr. Sullivan to have the last word, wrote an answer, simply justifying what they had already stated in their memorial, which had already gone with my comment upon it to be laid before the House of Commons. To send such a letter home in a separate despatch would have seemed to me worse than absurd, because it would really have been giving to this unseemly menace a degree of importance which it did not deserve. If I _had_ sent it I must have accompanied it with a statement to the effect, that my sentiments on the point communicated in my former letter remained unchanged; so the matter would have rested pretty much where it did before. Bentinck seems to suppose that, in keeping back a letter which stated that Canada would separate if the Navigation Laws were not repealed, I intended by some very ingenious dodge to hasten their repeal![11] [Sidenote: Speech on education.] At the beginning of the winter season of 1848-9, Lord Elgin was present, as patron, at a meeting of the Montreal Mercantile Library Association, to open the winter's course of lectures. It was an association mainly founded by leading merchants, 'with a view of affording to the junior members of the mercantile body opportunities of self-improvement, and inducements sufficiently powerful to enable them to resist those temptations to idleness and dissipation which unhappily abound in all large communities.' He took the opportunity of delivering his views on the subject of education in a speech, parts of which may still be read with interest, after all that has been spoken and written on this fertile topic. It has at least the merit of being eminently characteristic of the speaker, whose whole life was an illustration, in the eyes of those who knew him best, of the truths which he sought to inculcate on the young merchants of Montreal.[12] After remarking that it was vain for him to attempt, in a cursory address, to fan the fervour of his hearers' zeal, or throw light on subjects which they were in the habit of hearing so effectively treated,