nd Ireland merely, her
place and that of her land in the world's history determined by the
productiveness of 12,000 square miles of a coal {225} formation which
is being rapidly exhausted, and the duration of the social and
political organization over which she presides dependent on the annual
expatriation, with a view to its eventual alienization, of the surplus
swarm of her born subjects?"[37] That is the final question of
imperialism; and Elgin had earned the right not only to put it to the
home government with emphasis, but also to answer it in an affirmative
and constructive sense.

The argument forbids any mention of the less public episodes in Elgin's
Canadian adventure; his whimsical capacity for getting on with men,
French, British, and American; the sly humour of his correspondence
with his official chief; the searching comments made by him on men and
manners in America; the charm of such social and diplomatic incidents
as Laurence Oliphant has related in his letters and his _Episodes in a
Life of Adventure_. But it may be permitted to sum up his qualities as
governor, and to connect his work with the general movement towards
self-government which had been proceeding so rapidly since 1839.

He was too human, easy, unclassical, and, on {226} the other hand, too
little touched with Byronic or revolutionary feeling, even to suggest
the age of Pitt, Napoleon, Canning; he was too sensible, too orthodox,
too firmly based on fact and on the past, to have any affinity with our
own transitionary politics. Like Peel, although in a less degree, he
had at once a firm body of opinions, a keen eye for new facts, and a
sure, slow capacity for bringing the new material to bear on old
opinion.

He was able, as few have been, to set the personal equation aside in
his political plans, holding the balance between friends and foes with
almost uncanny fairness, and astonishing his petty enemies by his
moderation. His mind could regard not merely Canada but also Britain,
as it reflected on future policy; and, in his letters, he sometimes
seems the one man in the empire at the time who understood the true
relation of colonial autonomy to British supremacy. Not even his most
foolish eulogist will attribute anything romantic to his character.
There was nothing of Disraeli's "glitter of dubious gems" about the
honest phrases in which he bade Russell think imperially. Unlike
Mazzini, it was his business to destroy false national