principle; to establish upon that great continent a monarchy free as that of this country, even freer still with regard to the popular influence exercised, but yet a monarchy worthy of the name, and not a mere empty shadow.  I can hardly believe that, under such a system, the friendly connection and close intimacy between the colonies and the mother-country would in any way be affected; but, on the contrary, I feel convinced that the change to which I have referred would be productive of nothing, for years and years to come, but mutual harmony and friendship, increased and cemented as that friendship would be by mutual appreciation of the great and substantial benefits conferred by a free and regulated monarchy.

    But pass this Bill, and that dream is gone for ever.  Nothing like a
    free and regulated monarchy could exist for a single moment under such
    a constitution as that which is now proposed for Canada.

    From the moment that you pass this constitution, the progress must be
    rapidly towards republicanism, if anything could be more really
    republican than this Bill.

The dream has been realised, at least in one of its most important features; the gloomy forebodings have hitherto happily proved groundless.  But the speaker of these words, and the author of the measure to which they refer, would probably have been alike surprised at the course which events have taken respecting the particular point then in question.  For once the stream that sets towards democracy has been seen to take a backward direction; and the constitution of the Dominion of Canada has returned, as regards the Legislative Council, to the Conservative principle of nomination by the Crown.

* * * * *

It does not fall within the scope of this memoir to give an account of the numerous administrative measures which made the period of Lord Elgin’s Government so marked an epoch in the history of Canadian prosperity.  It may be well, however, to notice a few points to which he himself thought it worth while to advert in official despatches, written towards the close of his sojourn in the country, and containing a statistical review of the marvellously rapid progress which the Colony had made in all branches of productive industry.

The first extracts bear upon questions which have lost none of their interest or importance—­the kindred questions of emigration, of the demand for labour, and of the acquisition and tenure of land.

[Sidenote:  Emigration.]

The sufferings of the Irish during that calamitous period [1847] induced philanthropic persons to put forward schemes of systematic colonisation, based in some instances on the assumption that it was for the interest of the emigrants that they should be as much as possible concentrated in particular portions of the territories to which they might proceed, so as to form communities complete in themselves,