of what they wrote. They, like the Irish
Unionist leaders of to-day, were able and sincere men, unconscious, we
may assume, that their pessimism about the tendencies of their
fellow-citizens was really due to the defective institutions which they
themselves were upholding, and to the forcible suppression of the finer
attributes of human nature; unconscious, we may also assume, of
identifying loyalty with privilege, and "the supreme ruling power" with
their own ruling power; unconscious that what they called "Imperial
Unity" was in reality on the verge of producing Imperial disruption; and
wholly unconscious, certainly, of the ghastly irony of their analogy
drawn from the brutally misgoverned, job-ridden, tithe-ridden,
rack-rented Ireland of their day, living, for no fault of its own, under
a condition of intermittent martial law, and hurrying at that moment
towards the agony of the famine years. Less severe in degree, analogous
abuses perpetuated in their own interest existed in their own Colony,
and were only abolished under the new regime which they attacked with
such vehemence before it came, and which, because it transformed and
elevated their own character and that of their fellow-citizens, while
drawing them closer to the old country, they afterwards learned to
regard with pride and thankfulness.

As an effective contrast to the mistaken views of the Upper Canadian
statesmen, the reader cannot do better than study the letters of Joseph
Howe, the brilliant Nova Scotia "agitator," to Lord John Russell, in
answer to that statesman's speech of June 3, 1839, when he argued
against responsible government, and quoted the Upper Canadian manifesto
as his text. These letters make a wonderful piece of sustained and
humorous satire, of which every word was true and every word applicable
to Ireland. Howe's portrait, for example, of the average Colonial
Governor applies line for line to the average Chief Secretary, coming at
an hour's notice to a country he has never seen, and knows nothing of,
vested with absolute powers of patronage, and often pledged to carry out
a policy in direct conflict with the wishes of the vast majority of the
people whose interests he is supposed to guard.

The Act of 1840 went through, but it had little to do with the
regeneration and reconciliation of Canada. Poulett Thompson, the first
Governor, peremptorily declined to admit the principle of Ministerial
responsibility. Some good reforms were, in