[Sidenote:  Annexation movement]

The disturbances which followed the passing of the ‘Rebellion Losses Bill’ have been described in the preceding chapter chiefly as they affected the person of the Governor.  But it may be truly said that this was the aspect of them that gave him least concern.  He felt, indeed, deeply the indignities offered to the Crown of England through its representative.  But there was some satisfaction in the reflection that, by taking on himself the whole responsibility of sanctioning the obnoxious Bill, he had drawn down upon his own head the chief violence of a storm which might otherwise have exploded in a manner very dangerous to the Empire.  ’I think I might say,’ he writes, ’with less poetry but with more truth, what Lamartine said when they accused him of coquetting with the Rouges under the Provisional Government:  “Oui, j’ai conspire!  J’ai conspire comme le paratonnerre conspire avec le nuage pour desarmer la foudre."’ But the thunder-cloud was not entirely disarmed; and it burst in a direction which popular passion in Canada has always been too apt to take, threats of throwing off England and joining the American States.  As far back as March 14, 1849, we find Lord Elgin drawing Lord Grey’s attention to this subject.

There has been (he writes) a vast deal of talk about ‘annexation,’ as is unfortunately always the case here when there is anything to agitate the public mind.  If half the talk on this subject were sincere, I should consider an attempt to keep up the connection with Great Britain as Utopian in the extreme.  For, no matter what the subject of complaint, or what the party complaining; whether it be alleged that the French are oppressing the British, or the British the French—­that Upper Canada debt presses on Lower Canada, or Lower Canada claims on Upper; whether merchants be bankrupt, stocks depreciated, roads bad, or seasons unfavourable, annexation is invoked as the remedy for all ills, imaginary or real.  A great deal of this talk is, however, bravado, and a great deal the mere product of thoughtlessness.  Undoubtedly it is in some quarters the utterance of very sincere convictions; and if England will not make the sacrifices which are absolutely necessary to put the colonists here in as good a position commercially as the citizens of the States—­in order to which free navigation and reciprocal trade with the States are indispensable—­if not only the organs of the league but those of the Government and of the Peel party are always writing as if it were an admitted fact that colonies, and more especially Canada, are a burden, to be endured only because they cannot be got rid of, the end may be nearer at hand than we wot of.

In these sentences we have the germs of views and feelings which time only made clearer and stronger;—­indignation at that tendency, so common in all minorities, to look abroad for aid against the power of the majority;