[Sidenote:  Discontent due to Imperial legislation.]

I do not think that you are blind to the hardships which Canada is now enduring; but, I must own, I doubt much whether you fully appreciate their magnitude, or are aware of how directly they are chargeable on Imperial legislation.  Stanley’s Bill of 1843 attracted all the produce of the West to the St. Lawrence, and fixed all the disposable capital of the province in grinding mills, warehouses, and forwarding establishments.  Peel’s Bill of 1846 drives the whole of the produce down the New York channels of communication, destroying the revenue which Canada expected to derive from canal dues, and ruining at once mill-owners, forwarders, and merchants.  The consequence is, that private property is unsaleable in Canada, and not a shilling can be raised on the credit of the province.  We are actually reduced to the disagreeable necessity of paying all public officers, from the Governor-General downwards, in debentures, which are not exchangeable at par.  What makes it more serious is, that all the prosperity of which Canada is thus robbed is transplanted to the other side of the lines, as if to make Canadians feel more bitterly how much kinder England is to the children who desert her, than to those who remain faithful.  For I care not whether you be a Protectionist or a Free-trader, it is the inconsistency of Imperial legislation, and not the adoption of one policy rather than another, which is the bane of the colonies.  I believe that the conviction that they would be better off if they were ‘annexed’ is almost universal among the commercial classes at present, and the peaceful condition of the province under all the circumstances of the time is, I must confess, often a matter of great astonishment to myself.

[Sidenote:  How to be remedied.]

His sympathy, however, with the sufferings caused by the introduction of Free-trade was not accompanied by any wish to return to a Protective policy.  On the contrary, he felt that the remedy was to be sought in a further development of the Free-trade principle, in the repeal of the Navigation Laws, which cramped the commerce Canada by restricting it to British vessels, and in a reciprocal reduction of the duties which hampered her trade with the United States.  In this sense he writes to Lord Grey:—­

I am glad to see your bold measure on the Navigation Laws.  You have no other course now open to you if you intend to keep your colonies.  You cannot halt between two opinions:  Free-trade in all things, or general Protection.  There was something captivating in the project of forming all the parts of this vast British empire into one huge Zollverein with free interchange of commodities, and uniform duties against the world without; though perhaps, without some federal legislation, it might have been impossible to carry it out.  Undoubtedly, under such a system, the component parts of the empire would have been