e." Lord
John Russell, polished, sober, scorning to descend to the mere vulgar
abuse of the colonials which disfigured the utterances of many of his
opponents, struggling visibly to reconcile Liberalism with Empire,
nevertheless arrived at the same conclusion. In a debate of March 6, for
example, in the same year, in proposing the defiant Resolutions which
provoked the rebellion in Canada, he argued at length that a responsible
Colonial Ministry was "incompatible with the relations of a Mother
Country and a Colony," and would be "subversive of the power of the
British Crown," and again, on December 22, that it meant "independence."
O'Connell rightly replied to the former speech that Russell and his
followers were supporting "principles that had been the fruitful source
of civil war, dissension, and distractions in Ireland for centuries."
The Radical group pushed home the Irish parallel. Hume quoted, as
applicable to Canada, Fox's saying: "I would have the whole Irish
Government regulated by Irish notions and Irish prejudices, and I firmly
believe ... that the more she is under Irish Government the more she
will be bound to English interests." Molesworth declared, what was
perfectly true at that moment of passion and folly, that his extreme
political opponents wanted to make the reconquest of Ireland a precedent
for the reconquest of Canada.

It would repay the reader to turn back from this debate to the Irish
Repeal Debate of three years earlier, and listen to Sir Robert Peel
stating as one of the "truths which be too deep for argument," that the
Repeal of the Union "must lead to the dismemberment of this great
Empire, must make Great Britain a fourth-rate Power, and Ireland a
savage wilderness," which, as a matter of fact, it was at the very time
he was speaking, after thirty years of the Legislative Union, and seven
hundred years of irresponsible government. We must listen to him
claiming that the beneficent and impartial British Government was
"saving Ireland from civil war" between its own "warring sects,"
whereas, in fact, it was that Government which had brought those warring
sects into being, which had fomented and exploited their dissensions,
which had provoked the rebellion of 1798, and by its shameful neglect
and partiality in the succeeding generation had flung Ireland into a
social condition hardly distinguishable from "civil war." And we must
realize that closely similar arguments, with special stress on th