young
Queen Victoria and during her pleasure. The usual and formal language
of the commission, 'especial trust and confidence in the courage,
prudence, and loyalty' of the commissioner, has in this case deep
meaning; for courage, prudence, and loyalty were all needed, and were
all to be put to the test.

The man born for the crisis was a type of a class hardly to be
understood by the Canadian democracy. He was an aristocratic radical.
His recently acquired title, Lord Durham, must not be allowed to
obscure the fact that he was a Lambton, the head of an old county
family, which was entitled by its long descent to look down upon half
the House of Peers as parvenus. At the family seat, Lambton Castle, in
the county of Durham, Lambton after Lambton had lived and reigned like
a petty prince. There John George was born in August 1792. His father
had been a Whig, a consistent friend of Charles James {6} Fox, at a
time when opposition to the government, owing to the wars with France,
meant social ostracism; and he had refused a peerage. The son had
enjoyed the usual advantages of the young Englishman in his position.
He had been educated at Eton and at the university of Cambridge. Three
years in a crack cavalry regiment at a time when all England was under
arms could have done little to lessen his feeling for his caste. A
Gretna Green marriage with an heiress, while he was yet a minor, is
characteristic of his impetuous temperament, as is also a duel which he
fought with a Mr Beaumont in 1820 during the heat of an election
contest. After the period of political reaction following Waterloo,
reaction in which all Europe shared, England proceeded on the path of
reform towards a modified democracy; and Lambton, entering parliament
at the lucky moment, found himself on the crest of the wave. His Whig
principles had gained the victory; and his personal ability and energy
set him among the leaders of the new reform movement. He was a
son-in-law of Earl Grey, the author of the Reform Bill of 1832, and he
became a member of the Grey Cabinet. Before the Canadian crisis he had
shown his {7} ability to cope with a difficult situation in a
diplomatic mission to Russia, where he is said to have succeeded by the
exercise of tact. He was nicknamed 'Radical Jack,' but any one less
'democratic,' as the term is commonly understood, it would be hard to
find. He surrounded himself with almost regal state during his brief
overlordship