Francis Collins or Robert Randal? Had it preserved from the dry pan and the slow fire any one of a score of individuals whose only offence against the State was that they would not willingly sacrifice their rights, and become the tools of venality and corruption? In not one solitary instance had it served any such purpose. Such responsibility was a mockery, "a broken reed, which it would be folly ever again to rest upon."[217] Of real, constitutional responsibility to the people there was not so much as a pretence. "All the powers of the Government," says Mr. Lindsey, "were centralized in Downing Street, and all the colonial officers, from the highest to the lowest, were puppets in the hands of the Secretary of State for the Colonies. At the same time, the outward trappings of a constitutional system, intended to amuse the colonists, served no other end than to irritate and exasperate men who had penetration enough to detect the mockery, and whose self-respect made them abhor the sham."[218] In an early paragraph of these instructions, Lord Glenelg had objected, on behalf of His Majesty's Government, to any resort on the part of the Assembly to that ulterior measure--the stoppage of the supplies--to which allusion had been made in the Address of that body, and had referred to it as a proceeding to be justified only by an extreme emergency. He concluded with an expression of earnest hope that the representatives of the Upper Canadian people would receive with gratitude and cordiality this renewed proof of His Majesty's paternal solicitude for the welfare of his loyal subjects in the Province, and that, laying aside all groundless distrusts, they would cheerfully cooeperate with the King and the Lieutenant-Governor in advancing the prosperity of "that interesting and valuable portion of the British Empire."