d rendered service permanently
beneficial both to Britain and to America by negotiating the Rush-Bagot
treaty, which established the neutralization of the great lakes. In
Europe, he had been known to fame mainly as the recipient of George
Canning's rhyming despatch; and for the rest, he allowed the great
minister to make him, as he had made all {127} his other agents, a pawn
in the game where he alone was player. In his correspondence he stands
out as an old-fashioned, worldly, cultured, and unbusiness-like
diplomatist, worthy perhaps of a satiric but kindly portraiture by
Thackeray--a genuine citizen of Vanity Fair. Apart from his
correspondence, his friendships, and his American achievements, he
might have passed through life, deserving nothing more than some few
references in memoirs of the earlier nineteenth century. But by one
freak of fortune he found himself transported to Canada in 1842, and,
by another, he became one of the foremost figures in the history of
Canadian constitutional development. There have been few better
examples of the curious good-fortune which has attended on the growth
of British greatness than the story of Bagot's short career in Canada.
When a very eminent personage demanded from the existing government
some explanation of their selection of Bagot, Stanley, who was then
Secretary of State for the Colonies, pointed, not to administrative
qualifications, but to his diplomatic services in the United States.
Relations with the American Republic do not here concern us, but it may
be remembered that the situation in 1841 and 1842, just before the
{128} Ashburton Treaty, was full of peril; and Bagot was sent to Canada
as a person not displeasing to the Americans, and a diplomatist of
conciliatory temper. But his work was to be concerned with domestic,
not international, diplomacy.

Three factors must be carefully studied in the year of political
turmoil which followed: the Imperial government, the Canadian political
community, and the new governor-general.

During this and the following governor-generalship, the predominant
influence at the Colonial Office was Lord Stanley, almost the most
distinguished of the younger statesmen of the day. Peel's judicial and
scientific mind usually controlled those of his subordinates; but even
Peel found it hard to check the brilliant individualism of his colonial
secretary; and this most interesting of all the great failures in
English politics exerc