f the news of rebellion, he had proclaimed the end of
the British dominion in America as his sincere desire.[52] But he
believed in a colonial empire, if England would only guarantee good
government. "The emancipation of colonies," he said, in a cooler mood,
"must be a question of time and a question, in each case, of special
expediency ... a question which would seldom or never arise between a
colony and its mother country if all colonies were well governed"; and
he explained his language about Canada on grounds of bad government.
"I hope that the people of {282} that country (Lower Canada) will
either recover the constitution which we have violated, or become
wholly independent of us."[53] It is not necessary to quote Hume's
confused but well-intentioned wanderings--views sharing with those of
the people whom Hume represented, their crude philanthropy and
imperfect clearness. But Roebuck marked a definite stage in advance;
for, while he was willing to keep "the connexion," where it could be
kept with honour, he seems to have regarded separation as
inevitable--"come it must," he said--and his best hopes were that the
separation might take place in amity and that a British North American
federation might counterbalance the Union to the south.[54] Grote's
placid and facile radicalism accepted the growing breach with Canada as
the most desirable thing which could happen both to the mother country
and the colony; and Brougham directed all his eccentric and ill-ordered
energy and eloquence, not only to denounce the Whig leaders, but to
proclaim the necessity of the new Canadian republic. "Not only do I
consider the possession as worth no breach of the Constitution ... but
in a national view I really hold those colonies to {283} be worth
nothing. I am well assured that we shall find them very little worth
the cost they have entailed on us, in men, in money, and in injuries to
our trade; nay, that their separation will be even now a positive gain,
so it be effected on friendly terms, and succeeded by an amicable
intercourse."[55]

Separation was indubitably a dogma of philosophic radicalism; and yet
it was not so much the influence of this metaphysical and doctrinaire
belief which moved Whig opinion. It was rather the plain business-like
and matter-of-fact radicalism of the economist statesmen, led by Bright
and Cobden. Of the two forces represented by Peel and by Cobden, which
completed the formation of a modern Lib