The Canadas are endeavouring to escape from us, America has
escaped us, but Ireland shall not escape us," said an English member to
O'Connell just before the Repeal debate of 1834. Such was the current
view.

Yet, as in the case of Ireland and of the lost American Colonies, the
materials for knowledge of Canada were considerable. Petitions poured
in; Committees and Commissions were appointed, and made reports which
were consigned to oblivion. Roebuck, one of the small Radical group, was
himself a Lower Canadian by birth, and acted as agent at Westminster for
the popular party in that Province. He was as impotent as O'Connell, the
spokesman of the Irish popular party. If the Colonial Office was not
quite the "den of peculation and plunder" which Hume called it in
1838,[26] it was an obscure and irresponsible department, where jobbery
was as rife as in Dublin Castle. In the ten years of colonial crisis
(1828-1838), there were eight different Colonial Secretaries and six
Irish Chief Secretaries.

Over and above all this apathy and arrogance was the perfectly genuine
incapacity to comprehend that idea of responsible government which even
the most hot-headed and erratic of the colonial agitators did
instinctively comprehend. Until Durham had at last opened Lord John
Russell's eyes, the great Whig statesman was as positive and explicit as
the Tories, Wellington and Stanley, in declaring that it was utterly
impossible for the Monarch's Representative overseas to govern otherwise
than by instructions from home and through Ministers appointed by
himself in the name of the King. One constitutional King ruled over
Great Britain, Canada, and Ireland. He could not be advised by two sets
of Ministers. The thing was not only an unthinkably absurd nullification
of the whole Imperial theory, but, in practice, would destroy and
dissolve the Empire. William IV. himself told Lord Melbourne that it was
his "fixed resolution never to permit any despatch to be sent ... that
can for a moment hold out the most distant idea of the King ever
permitting the question even to be entertained by His Majesty's
confidential servants of a most remote bearing relative to any change of
the appointment of the King's Councils in the numerous Colonies." Lord
Stanley said, in 1837, that the "double responsibility" was impossible,
that there must either be separation or no responsible government, and
that it was "no longer a question of expediency but of Empir