The British Ministers had seen with growing uneasiness Bagot's concessions.His successor, Sir Charles Metcalfe, a man of honest and kindly ways but accustomed to governing oriental peoples, determined to make a stand against the pretensions of the Reformers.In this attitude he was strongly backed both by Stanley and by his successor, that brilliant young Tory, William Ewart Gladstone.Metcalfe insisted once more that the Governor must govern.While the members of the Council, as individuals, might give him advice, it was for him to decide whether or not to take it.The inevitable clash with his Ministers came in the autumn of 1843 over a question of patronage.They resigned, and after months of effort Metcalfe patched up a Ministry with W.H.
Draper as the leading member.In an election in which Metcalfe himself took the platform and in which once more British connection was said to be at stake, the Ministry obtained a narrow majority.But opinion soon turned, and when Metcalfe, the third Governor in four years to whom Canada had proved fatal,, went home to die, he knew that his stand had been in vain.The Ministry, after a precarious life of three years, went to the country only to be beaten by an overwhelming majority in both East and West.When, in 1848, Baldwin and La Fontaine were called to office under the new Governor General, Lord Elgin, the fight was won.Many years were to pass before the full implications of responsible government were worked out, but henceforth even the straitest Tory conceded the principle.Responsible government had ceased to be a party cry and had become the common heritage of all Canadians.
Lord Elgin, who was Durham's son-in-law, was a man well able to bear the mantle of his predecessors.Yet he realized that the day had passed when Governors could govern and was content rather to advise his advisers, to wield the personal influence that his experience and sagacity warranted.Hitherto the stages in Canadian history had been recorded by the term of office of the Governors; henceforth it was to be the tenure of Cabinets which counted.Elgin ceased even to attend the Council, and after his time the Governor became more and more the constitutional monarch, busied in laying corner stones and listening to tiresome official addresses.In emergencies, and especially in the gap or interregnum between Ministries, the personality of the Governor might count, but as a rule this power remained latent.Yet in two turning points in Canadian history, both of which had to do with the relations of Canada to the United States, Elgin was to play an important part: the Annexation Movement of 1849 and the Reciprocity Treaty of 1854.
In the struggle for responsible government, loyalty to the British Crown, loyalty of a superior and exclusive brand, had been the creed and the war cry of the Tory party.Yet in 1849 men saw the hotheads of this group in Montreal stoning a British Governor General and setting fire to the Parliament Buildings, while a few months later their elders issued a manifesto urging the annexation of Canada to the United States.Why this sudden shift? Simply because the old colonial system they had known and supported had come to an end.The Empire had been taken to mean racial ascendancy and trade profit.Now both the political and the economic pillars were crumbling, and the Empire appeared to have no further excuse for existence.
In the past British connection had meant to many of the English minority in Lower Canada a means of redressing the political balance, of retaining power in face of a body of French-speaking citizens outnumbering them three or four to one.Now that support had been withdrawn.Britain had consented, unwillingly, to the setting up of responsible government and the calling to office of men who a dozen years before had been in arms against the Queen or fleeing from the province.This was gall and wormwood to the English.But when the Ministry introduced, and the Assembly passed, the Rebellion Losses Bill for compensating those who had suffered destruction of property in the outbreak, and when the terms were so drawn as to make it possible, its critics charged, that rebels as well as loyalists would be compensated, flesh and blood could bear no more.The Governor was pelted with rotten eggs when he came down to the House to sign the bill, and the buildings where Parliament had met since 1844, when the capital had been transferred from Kingston to Montreal, were stormed and burned by a street mob.
The anger felt against the Ministry thus turned against the British Government.The English minority felt like an advance guard in a hostile country, deserted by the main forces, an Ulster abandoned to Home Ruler and Sinn Feiner.They turned to the south, to the other great English-speaking Protestant people.
If the older branch of the race would not give them protection or a share in dominance, perhaps the younger branch could and would.
