gislature; and that the governor
should carry on his government by heads of departments, in whom the
United Legislature repose confidence.... The general responsibility of
heads of departments, acting under the orders of the Governor, each
distinctly in his own department, might exist without the destruction
of the former authority of her Majesty's Government."[7] So set was he
in his opposition to cabinet government on British lines in Canada,
that he prophesied separation as the obvious consequence of concession.
It was natural that one so distrustful of cabinet machinery in a colony
should altogether fail to see the place of party. It must always be
remembered that party, in Canada, had few of those sanctions of
manners, tradition, and national service, which had given Burke his
soundest arguments, when he wrote the apologetic of the eighteenth
century Whigs. Personal and sometimes corrupt interests, petty ideas,
ignoble quarrels, a flavour of pretentiousness which came from the
misapplication of British terms, and a {167} lack of political
good-manners--in such guise did party present itself to the British
politician on his arrival in British North America. Metcalfe, from his
previous experience, had come to identify party divisions with
factiousness, a political evil which the efficient governor must seek
to extirpate. His triumph in Jamaica had secured the death of party
through the benevolent despotism of the governor, and there can be no
doubt that he hoped in Canada to perform a precisely similar task.
"The course which I intend to pursue with regard to all parties," he
wrote to Stanley in April, 1843, "is to treat all alike, and to make no
distinctions, as far as depends on my personal conduct." But since
parties did exist, and were unlikely to cease to exist, the
governor-general's distaste for party in theory merely forced him to
become in practice the unconscious leader of the Canadian
conservatives, who, under men like MacNab and the leaders of the Orange
Lodges, differed only from other parties in the loudness of their
loyalist professions, and the paucity of their supporters among the
people. Metcalfe complained that at times the whole colony must be
regarded as a party opposed to her Majesty's Government.[8] He might
have {168} seen that what he deplored proceeded naturally from the
identification of himself with the smallest and least representative
group of party politicians in the colony.