l Administration in 1850:
"I anticipate, indeed, with others that some of the colonies may so
grow in population and wealth that they may say, 'Our strength is
sufficient to enable us to be independent of England. The link is now
become onerous to us; the time is come when we think we can, in amity
and alliance with England, maintain our independence.' I do not think
that that time is yet approaching. But let us make them as far as
possible fit to govern themselves ... let them increase in wealth and
population; and whatever may happen, we of this great empire shall have
the consolation of saying that we have contributed to the happiness of
the world."[37] It is possible to {264} argue that because Russell
admitted that the time for separation was not yet approaching he was
therefore an optimist. But the evidence leans rather to the less
glorious side. It was this speech which kindled Elgin into a passion
and made him bid Grey renounce for himself and his leader the habit of
telling the colonies that the colonial is a provisional existence. The
same speech, too, extorted complaints from Robert Baldwin, the man whom
Sydenham and Russell had once counted half a traitor. "I never saw him
so much moved," wrote Elgin, to whom Baldwin had frankly said about a
recent meeting. "My audience was disposed to regard a prediction of
this nature proceeding from a Prime Minister, less as a speculative
abstraction than as one of that class of prophecies which work their
own fulfilment."[38] The speech was not an accidental or occasional
flash of rhetoric. The mind of the Whig leader, acquiescing now in the
completeness of Canadian local powers, and reading with disquiet the
signs of the times in the form of Canadian turbulence, seems to have
turned to speculate on the least harmful form which separation might
take. Of this there is direct evidence in a private letter from Grey
to Elgin: "Lord {265} John in a letter I had from him yesterday,
expresses a good deal of anxiety as to the prospects of Canada, and
reverts to the old idea of forming a federal union of all the British
provinces, in order to give them something more to think of than their
mere local squabbles;[39] and he says that if to effect this a
separation of the two Canadas were necessary he should see no objection
to it. His wish in forming such a union would be to bring about such a
state of things, that, _if you should lose our North American
provinces, they