thing I do not doubt at all," he wrote in July 1842, "and that is that,
with the present House of Assembly, you cannot get on without the
French, while it is necessary for me at the same time to declare
frankly that I cannot sit at the {135} council-board with Mr.
Baldwin."[9] In other words, since Draper admitted that the opposition
leaders must receive office, and at the same time declared the
impossibility of his holding office with them, he was consenting to
Cabinet government, not in the restricted form permitted in Lord John
Russell's despatches, but after the regular British fashion.

Outside the sphere of party politics moderate opinion took precisely
the same stand. Murdoch had been Sydenham's right-hand man, and was
still the fairest critic of Canadian politics. That he distrusted
Stanley's methods is apparent in his letters to Bagot; and it was his
suggestion that the Imperial position should be modified, and that some
concession should be made to French national feeling. "No half
measures," he told Bagot, "can now be safely resorted to. After the
Rebellion, the government had the option, either of crushing the French
and anglifying the province, or of pardoning them and making them
friends. And as the latter policy was adopted, it must be carried out
to its legitimate consequences."[10]

{136}

The situation in Canada during the spring and summer of 1842 stood
thus. A governor-general, entirely new to the work of domestic
administration, and to the province which had fallen to his lot, faced
a curious dilemma. The British cabinet, the minister responsible for
the colonies, and all those in Canada who claimed to be the peculiar
friends of the British connection, bade him govern for, but not by the
people, and exclude from office almost all the French-Canadians, on the
ground that they were devotedly French in sympathies. Another group,
at times aggressive, and very little accustomed to the orthodox methods
of parliamentary opposition, bade him venture and trust; and warned him
that no half measures would satisfy the claims of constitutional
liberty and nationality.

The administration of Bagot occupied a single year, and its more
important episodes were crowded into a few weeks in the autumn of 1842.
Yet there have been few years of equal significance in the history of
Canadian political development. There were intervals in which Bagot
had time to reveal to Canada his genius for making friends