in set terms, the headship over the Canadian people
was assumed to be official, ornamental, and symbolical, rather than
utilitarian.

In other directions, the formal and legal elements of the connection
were loosening---more especially in the departments of commerce and
defence.[30] The careers of men like Buchanan and Galt, through whom
the Canadian tariff received a complete revision, illustrate how little
the former links to Britain were allowed to remain in trade relations.
There was a day when, as Chatham himself would have contended, the
regulation of trade was an indefeasible right of the Crown. That
contention {328} received a rude check not only in the elaboration of a
Canadian tariff in 1859, but in the claims made by the minister of
finance: "It is therefore the duty of the present government,
distinctly to affirm the right of the Canadian Legislature to adjust
the taxation of the people in the way they judge best, even if it
should meet the disapproval of the Imperial ministry. Her Majesty
cannot be advised to disallow such acts, unless her advisers are
prepared to assume the administration of the affairs of the colony,
irrespective of the views of the inhabitants."[31] Similarly, the
adverse vote on the militia proposals of 1862, which so exercised
opinion in Britain, was but another result of the spirit of
self-government operating naturally in the province. It was not that
Canadians desired consciously to check the military plans of the
empire. It was only that the grant of autonomy had permitted
provincial rather than imperial counsels to prevail, and that a new
laxity, or even slipshodness, had begun to appear in Canadian military
affairs, weakening the formal military connection between Britain and
{329} Canada. Canadian defence, from being part of imperial policy,
had become a detail in the strife of domestic politics. "There can be
no doubt," Monck reported, "that the proposed militia arrangements were
of a magnitude far beyond anything which had, up to that time, been
proposed, and this circumstance caused many members, especially from
Lower Canada, to vote against it; but I think there was also, on the
part of a portion of the general supporters of government, an intention
to intimate by their vote the withdrawal of their confidence from the
administration."[32]

Even before 1867, then, it had become apparent that the imperial system
administered on Home Rule principles was something enti