pea-shooter and a bag of peas,
and the old fellow actually took aim at people on the tops of busses,
and shot lots of peas on the way home."[25]

It now becomes necessary to answer the question which, for twenty
years, English politicians had been putting to those who argued in
favour of Canadian self-government. Given a system of local
government, really autonomous, what will become of the connection with
Great Britain? So far as the issue is one purely constitutional and
legal, it may be answered very shortly. Responsible government in
Canada seriously diminished the formal bonds which united that province
to the mother country. For long the pessimists in Britain had been
proclaiming that the diminution of the governor-general's authority and
{324} responsibility would end the connection. After the retirement of
Lord Elgin, that diminution had taken place. It is a revelation of
constitutional change to pass from the full, interesting, and
many-sided despatches and letters of Sydenham, Bagot, and Elgin, to the
perfunctory reports of Head and Monck. Elgin had contended that a
governor might hope to establish a moral influence, which would
compensate for the loss of power, consequent on the surrender of
patronage to an executive responsible to the local parliament;[26] but
it was not certain that either Head or Monck possessed this indirect
control. In 1858 Sir Edmund Head acted with great apparent
independence, when he refused to allow George Brown and his new
administration the privilege of a dissolution; and the columns of _The
Globe_ resounded with denunciations which recalled the days of Metcalfe
and tyranny. But, even if Head were independent, it was not with an
authority useful to the dignity of his position; and the whole affair
has a suspicious resemblance to one of John A. Macdonald's tricks. The
voice is Macdonald's voice, if the hands are the hands of Head. Under
Monck, the most conspicuous assertion of independence was the {325}
governor's selection of J. S. Macdonald to lead the ministry of 1862,
instead of Foley, the more natural alternative for premier.
Nevertheless Monck's despatches, concerned as they are with diplomatic
and military details, present a striking contrast to those of Sydenham
and Elgin, who proved how active was the part they played in the life
of the community by the vividness of their sketches of Canadian
politics and society. So sparing, indeed, was Monck in his
informati