a higher position in political history than their elders and
leaders. Lord John Russell, for instance, was not a member of Lord
Grey's Cabinet; he only held the office of Paymaster of the Forces.
From his first entrance into the House of Commons Lord John Russell had
distinguished himself as a reformer. In 1819 he had brought forward a
motion for a reform in the Parliamentary system, and he had renewed the
motion in almost every succeeding year. He had been a steady supporter
of the movement for the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, which
imposed an unjust and utterly irrational disqualification on
Dissenters, and had been a zealous advocate of the measures for the
emancipation of Roman Catholics. All his early life had been a
training for statesmanship. He had been associated with scholars and
thinkers, with poets and historians. He had gone through Spain while
the war with Napoleon was still going on, and had been welcomed by the
Duke of Wellington in his camp. He had visited Napoleon at Elba, and
had talked over politics and war with the fallen Emperor. As Disraeli
said of him many years later, he had sat at the feet of Fox and had
measured swords with Canning. Lord Palmerston became for the first
time Foreign Secretary in the Grey Administration. He had been a
junior Lord of the Admiralty in a former Government, and he had more
lately been Secretary at War; but at the time that he first became
Foreign Secretary under Lord Grey few indeed could have anticipated
that he was destined to become one of the most powerful English
statesmen known to the century. Sir James Graham became First Lord of
the Admiralty, and {127} some of us can still remember him as one of
the foremost debaters in the House of Commons. Lord Durham, Grey's
son-in-law, accepted what may almost be called the nominal office of
Lord Privy Seal.

At that time Durham was regarded as a brilliant, eccentric sort of man,
a perfervid reformer on whose perseverance or consistency no one could
reckon for a moment--perhaps the comet of a season, but if so then
surely a comet of a season only. We now recognize Durham as the man of
statesmanlike foresight and genius who converted, at a great crisis, a
Canada burning with internal hatred between race and sect, and the one
common hatred of Imperial rule, into the Canada which we now know as
one of the most peaceful, prosperous, and loyal parts of the British
Empire. Mr. Stanley, afterwards Lo