would be lost,
and responsible government, whether he and Stanley willed it or not,
would be established in its most obnoxious form. To fill the vacant
places, or to reconstruct the ministry, the field of choice was very
small, even if men of every connection were included. "Out of the 84
members of the House of {147} Assembly," he told Stanley, "not above
30, as far as I can judge, are at all qualified for office, by the
common advantages of intelligence and education, and of these, ten at
least are not in a position to accept it."[17] In the case of the
French he seemed to have reached an absolute deadlock. He found offers
to individual Frenchmen useless, for he did not gain the party, and he
ruined the men whom he honoured. The Assembly was to meet on the 8th
of September, and as that date drew near, the excitement rose. It was
a crisis with many possibilities both for England and for Canada.

As certainly as Stanley, with all the wisdom of Peel's cabinet behind
him, was wrong, and fatally so, Bagot's conduct between September 10th
and September 14th was precisely right. In a correspondence with Peel,
just before the crisis, Stanley sought to get his great leader to take
his view. Even Peel's genius proved incompetent to settle a problem of
local politics, three thousand miles away from the scene of action.
The wisdom of his answer lay, not in its suggestions, which were
useless to Bagot, but in its hint "that much must be left to the
judgment and discretion of those who have to act at a great distance
from the supreme {148} authority."[18] Stanley himself, from first to
last, was for allowing Bagot to face defeat, although he always thought
it possible that stubborn resistance to what he counted treason would
rally a secure majority to Bagot and the Crown. Time and again after
assuring Bagot that he and the ministry acquiesced, which, to do them
justice, they did like men, he harked back to the idea of allowing
events to prove that the government was indeed powerless, before it
made a definitive surrender. Long before Parliament met, the situation
had been discussed in all its bearings; and the only doubt that
remained was concerning which out of three or four foreshadowed
catastrophes would end the existence of the government. The ministers
themselves had their negative programme ready; for, having consented to
the constitutional resolutions of September, 1841, they forewarned
Bagot that if they were l