to hold forth what are called
popular rights, but which are not popular rights here or elsewhere, and
what occasion is given thereby to perpetuate a system of agitation which
ends in insurrection and rebellion."

The Whig statesmen who, if we except Peel's short Administration of
1834-35, were in power from 1830 to 1841, though by no means democratic
men, were clear enough about Reform for Great Britain, but nearly as
ignorant and quite as wrong about Ireland and Canada as the Tories. The
only prominent Parliamentarian who, as after events proved, correctly
diagnosed and prescribed for the disease in both countries was
O'Connell. Not fully alive to the Irish analogy, but correct from first
to last about Canada, was a small group of independent Radicals, of whom
Roebuck, Hume, Grote, Molesworth, and Leader were the principal
representatives. After the insurrections in Canada came John Stuart
Mill, Edward Gibbon Wakefield, Charles Buller, and with them Lord Durham
himself.

No one can understand either Irish or Colonial history without reading
the debates of this period in the Lords and Commons on Canada and
Ireland. Alternating with one another with monotonous regularity, they
nevertheless leave an impression of an extraordinary lack of
earnestness, sympathy, and knowledge, and an extraordinary degree of
prejudice and of bigotry in the Parliament to whose care for better or
worse the welfare of nearly ten millions of British citizens outside
Great Britain was entrusted. Save for an occasional full-dress debate at
some peculiarly critical juncture, the debates were ill-attended. The
prevailing sentiment seems to have been that Ireland and Canada,
leavened by a few respectable "loyalists" and officials, on the whole,
were two exceedingly mutinous and embarrassing possessions, which,
nevertheless, it was the duty of every self-respecting Briton to dragoon
into obedience. Both dependencies were assumed to be equally expensive,
though, in fact, Ireland, as we know now, was showing a handsome profit
at the time, whereas Canada was costing a quarter of a million a year.
For the rest, the pride of power tempered a sort of fatalistic apathy.
In the case of Ireland the element of pure selfishness was stronger,
because the immense vested interests, lay and clerical, in Irish land
were strongly represented. The proximity of Ireland, too, rendered
coercion more obvious and easy. Otherwise, her case was the same as that
of Canada. "