the Secretary of State, he has never during
the period of his official career obtained sufficient information to
make him independent of the aid on which he must have been thrown at
the outset. Thus we find both these marked and responsible
functionaries dependent on the advice and guidance of another; and that
other person must of course be one of the permanent {235} members of
the office.... That mother-country which has been narrowed from the
British Isles into the Parliament, from the Parliament into the
executive government, from the executive government into the Colonial
Office, is not to be sought in the apartments of the Secretary of
State, or his Parliamentary Under-Secretary. Where you are to look for
it, it is impossible to say. In some back-room--whether in the attic,
or in what storey we know not--you will find all the mother-country
which really exercises supremacy, and really maintains connexion with
the vast and widely-scattered colonies of Britain."[5]

The directness and strength of the influence which men like Sir Henry
Taylor and Sir James Stephen exercised, both on opinion and events, may
be inferred from Taylor's confessions with regard to the slave question
in the West Indies, and the extent to which even Peel himself had to
depend for information, and occasionally for direction, on the
permanent men.[6] It seems clear, too, that up till the year when Lord
John Russell took over the Colonial Office, Stephen had a great {236}
say in Canadian affairs, especially under Glenelg's regime. "As to his
views upon other Colonial questions," says Taylor, "they were perhaps
more liberal than those of most of his chiefs; and at one important
conjuncture he miscalculated the effect of a liberal confidence placed
in a Canadian Assembly, and threw more power into their hands than he
intended them to possess."[7] On the assumption that he was
responsible for Glenelg's benevolent view of Canadian local rights, one
might attribute something of Lord John Russell's over logical and
casuistical declarations concerning responsible government to Buller's
"Mr. Mother-country." But it is absurd to suppose that Russell's
independent mind operated long under any sub-secretarial influence;
more especially since the rapid succession of startling events in
Canada made his daring and unconventional statesmanship a fitter means
of government than the plodding methods of the bureaucrat. After 1841,
Stanley and Stephen w