icy is scattered broadcast through his speeches.

[57] Morley, _Life of Gladstone_, i. p. 269.

[58] See the preliminary chapter in his _Colonial Policy_.

[59] Elgin-Grey Correspondence: Elgin to Grey, 6 December, 1848.

[60] See Galt, _Canada from_ 1849 _to_ 1859, and his memorandum of 25
October, 1859.

[61] See a despatch from Lord Lyons respecting the Reciprocity Treaty,
Washington, 28 February, 1862: enclosing a copy of the report of the
committee of the House of Representatives on the Reciprocity Treaty.

[62] See Dent, _The Last Forty Years_, ii. p. 426.

[63] Pope, _Life of Sir John Macdonald_, i. p. 242.

[64] Earl Grey, in _Hansard_, 18 July, 1862.

[65] Sir Richard Cartwright, _Reminiscences_, p. 55.

{293}

CHAPTER VIII.

THE CONSEQUENCES OF CANADIAN AUTONOMY.

A change so informally achieved, and yet so decisive, as the completion
of a system of self-government in Canada could not but have
far-reaching and unexpected secondary consequences. It is the object
of this chapter to trace the more important of these as they appeared
in the institutions and public life of Canada, and in the modification
of Canadian sentiment towards Great Britain.

The most obvious and natural effect of Elgin's concessions was a
revolution in the programmes of the provincial parties, and in their
relations to each other and to government. It may be remembered that
all the governors of the period agreed in reprobating the factiousness
and pettiness of Canadian party politics. Even Elgin had been unable
to see very much rationality in their methods. There was, he held,
little of public principle to divide {294} men, apart from the
fundamental question of responsible government.[1] But it is possible
to underestimate the reality and importance of the party system as it
existed down to 1847. To have admitted that men differed on the
principle of responsible government, was to have admitted that party
strife had some justification; and all the other details--affections
and antipathies, national, sectarian, and personal--were the
circumstances natural to party life as that life has everywhere come
into existence. Burke himself sought no higher ground for the grouping
of men into parties than that of family connection, and common
friendships and enmities. No doubt the squalor and pettiness of early
Canadian party life contrasted meanly with the glories of the
eighteenth century Whigs, and the struggles of F