rength took the lead in demanding the fuller
political rights, and formed the Responsible Government Association. The
controversy was embodied in a Blue-Book laid before Parliament,[35] and
at every stage of its progress the facts were cabled home by Lord Milner
to the Government, who thus had the whole situation before them when
they came to their decision.

It would be worth the reader's while to study with some care the terms
of the despatch announcing that decision.[36] He will feel himself in
contact with fundamental principles, undisturbed by individual bias; for
no one could suspect Mr. Lyttelton, the genial and popular Secretary of
State who penned the despatch, of any violent prejudices. Yet the spirit
of the whole despatch, though gentle and persuasive in its terms, is the
spirit of Fitzgibbon's brutally outspoken argument for the extinction of
the Irish Parliament, and the complete exclusion of Irish Roman
Catholics from influence over their country's affairs. The despatch
begins, it is true, by explaining that the proposed Constitution is only
intended to be temporary; that it had been the invariable custom to
grant freedom to the Colonies by degrees, and that the custom must be
followed; but the reasons adduced for following it, if we consider that
they were adduced in the year 1905, instead of a century and a half
back, constitute one of the strangest of all the strange inversions of
historical cause and effect which a Home Rule controversy has ever
suggested to the human brain. Instead of inferring from our bitter
experiences in Upper and Lower Canada, which are mentioned in the
despatch, and in Ireland, which is not, that race distinctions increase
instead of lessening the necessity for responsible government, Mr.
Lyttelton complacently quotes bi-racial Lower Canada as a precedent for
his Transvaal Constitution. Quite frankly, though in curiously
misleading terms,[37] he records the fact that a similar Constitution
there led to deadlock and rebellion. Without intention to deceive, he
ignores the fact that wholly British Upper Canada reached the same pass
for the same reasons; and he appears to look forward with equanimity to
the passage of the unfortunate Transvaal through an identically painful
phase of history toward the same sanguinary climax. The radical error
in the official version of events in Canada appears in the comparison
between the rebellions of 1837 and the South African War of 1899-1902.
T