ut mutually
contradictory. For growth in the political world is not always
gradual; accidents, discoveries, sudden developments, call into
existence new creations, which only the generous logic of events and
the process of time can reconcile with pre-existing facts and systems.
It is the object of this essay to examine one of these political
antinomies--the contradiction between imperial ascendancy and colonial
autonomy--as it was illustrated by events in early Victorian Canada.

The problem was no new one in 1839. Indeed it was coeval with the
existence of the empire, and sprang from the very nature of colonial
government. Beneath the actual facts of the great {2} American
revolution--reaching far beyond quarrels over stamp duties, or the
differentiation between internal and external taxation, or even the
rights of man--was the fundamental difficulty of empire, the need to
reconcile colonial independence with imperial unity. It was the
perception of this difficulty which made Burke so much the greatest
political thinker of his time. As he wrote in the most illuminating of
his letters, "I am, and ever have been, deeply sensible of the
difficulty of reconciling the strong presiding power, that is so useful
towards the conservation of a vast, disconnected, infinitely
diversified empire, with that liberty and safety of the provinces,
which they must enjoy (in opinion and practice, at least), or they will
not be provinces at all. I know, and have long felt, the difficulty of
reconciling the unwieldy haughtiness of a great ruling nation,
habituated to command, pampered by enormous wealth, and confident from
a long course of prosperity and victory, to the high spirit of free
dependencies, animated with the first glow and activity of juvenile
heat, and assuming to themselves as their birthright, some part of that
very pride which oppresses them."[1]

{3}

Dissatisfied as he ever was with merely passive or negative views,
Burke was led to attempt a solution of the problem. He had never been
under any illusion as to the possibility of limiting colonial
constitutional pretensions. A free government was what the colonists
thought free, and only they could fix the limit to their claims. But
many considerations made him refuse to despair of the empire. His
intensely human view of politics led him to put more trust in the bonds
of kindred and affection than in constitutional forms. He hated the
petty quibbles of politi