nised, not only as
having an opinion, but as supreme and irresponsible, except to the Home
government, for {153} your acts in your executive capacity.
Practically you are (influenced) by the advice you receive, and by
motives of prudence, in not running counter to the advice of those who
command a majority in the Legislature; but you cannot throw on them the
onus of your actions in the same sense that the Crown can in this
country."[25]

Yet, so far as Canada was concerned, Bagot had reason to feel
satisfied. Threatened with half a dozen hostile combinations, he had
forestalled them all, and found the Assembly filled with friends, not
enemies. He had approached a sullen French nation--and thereafter the
French party formed as solid an accession to Canadian political
stability as they had once been dangerous to Imperial peace; and their
union with the moderate reformers in government, while it gave them all
they asked, enabled the governor to exercise a natural restraint on
them, should they again be tempted to nationalist excesses. He had not
explicitly surrendered to any sweeping doctrine of responsible
government. There was peace at last. The Assembly which passed over
thirty acts, reaffirmed the rights of the royal prerogative, and {154}
was dismissed in the most amiable temper with itself, and the
governor-general.

One may discern, however, a curious contradiction between the
superficial consequences of the crisis, as described by Bagot, and the
fundamental changes the beginnings of which he was able to trace in the
months which followed. On the face of it, Bagot's policy of frank
expediency had saved Stanley and his party from a crushing defeat and a
humiliating surrender to extreme views. So far, he had assisted the
cause of conservatism. But the disaster and the humiliation would have
come, not from the grant of responsible government, but from the misuse
of it to which a victory, won against a more resolute governor, might
have tempted Baldwin and La Fontaine, and from the false position in
which the imperial government would have stood, towards the men who had
challenged imperial authority and won. It is interesting to follow the
process by which Bagot came to see all that lay in his action.
Yielding to Canadian autonomy, he went on to new surrenders. He had
already warned Stanley that the agitation over the Civil List would
certainly reawaken; to the end he seems to have been considering the
advi