ca. Peel's
sweeping reforms in the tariff had rekindled annexationist talk; for
while Lord Stanley's bill of 1843 had attracted all the produce of the
west to the St. Lawrence by its grant of preference to the {219}
colony, "Peel's bill of 1846 drives the whole of the produce down the
New York channels of communication ... ruining at once mill-owners,
forwarders and merchants."[30] And every petty and personal
disappointment, every error in colonial office administration, raised a
new group to cry down the British system, and to call for a peaceful
junction with the United States.

Elgin had not been long in Canada before he saw one important
fact--that the real annexationist feeling had commercial, not political
roots. Without diminishing the seriousness of the situation, the
discovery made it more susceptible of rational treatment. A colony
suffering a severe set-back in trade found the precise remedy it looked
for in transference of its allegiance. "The remedy offered them,"
wrote Elgin, "is perfectly definite and intelligible. They are invited
to form part of a community which is neither suffering nor free-trading
... a community, the members of which have been within the last few
weeks pouring into their multifarious places of worship, to thank God
that they are exempt from the ills which affect other men, from those
more especially which affect their despised neighbours, the inhabitants
of North {220} America, who have remained faithful to the country which
planted them."[31] With free-trade in the ascendant, and, to the
maturest minds of the time, unanswerably sound in theory, Elgin had to
dismiss schemes of British preference from his mind; and, towards the
end of his rule, when American policy was irritating Canada, he had
even to restrict the scope within which Canadian retaliation might be
practised. There could be no imperial Zollverein. But he saw that a
measure of reciprocity might give the Canadians all the economic
benefits they sought, and yet leave to them the allegiance and the
government which, in their hearts, they preferred. The annexationist
clamour fell and rose, mounting highest in Montreal, and reaching a
crisis in the year of the Rebellion Losses disturbance; but Elgin,
while sometimes he grew despondent, always kept his head, and never
ceased to hope for the reciprocity which would at once bring back
prosperity and still the disloyal murmurs. Once or twice, when the
annexationists