To the Earl Grey.

    Toronto:  December 17, 1850.

Although, as you observe, it seems to be rather idle in us to correspond on what may be termed speculative questions, when we have so much pressing business on hand, I venture to say a few words in reply to your letter of the 23rd ult., firstly, because I presume to dissent from some of the opinions which you advance in it; and, secondly, because I have a practical object of no small importance in view in calling your attention to the contrasts which present themselves in the working of our institutions, and those of our neighbours in the States.  My practical object is this:  when you concede to the Colonists Constitutional Government in its integrity, you are reproached with leading them to Republicanism and the American Union.  The same reproach is hurled with anathemas against your humble servant.  Lord Stanley, if I rightly remember, in the debate on Ryland’s case last year, stated amid cheers, that if you were in the habit of consulting the Ministers of the Crown in the Colony before you placed persons on the colonial pension List, he had no hesitation in saying you had already established a republic in Canada!  Now I believe, on the contrary, that it may be demonstrated that the concession of Constitutional Government has a tendency to draw the Colonists the other way; firstly, because it slakes that thirst for self-government which seizes on all British communities when they approach maturity; and, secondly, because it habituates the Colonists to the working of a political mechanism, which is both intrinsically superior to that of the Americans, and more unlike it than our old Colonial system.

Adopting, however, the views with respect to the superiority of the mechanism of our political system to that of our neighbours, which I have ventured to urge, you proceed to argue that the remedy is in their hands; that without abandoning their republicanism they and their confreres in France have nothing to do but to dismiss their Presidents and to substitute our constitution without a King, the body without the head, for their own, to get rid of the inconveniences which they now experience; and you quote with approbation, as an embodiment of this idea, the project submitted by M. Grevy and the Red Republicans to the French Constituent Assembly.

[Sidenote:  Value of the monarchical principle.]

Now here I confess I cannot go along with you, and the difference between us is a very material one; for if the monarch be not an indispensable element in our constitutional mechanism, and if we can secure all the advantages of that mechanism without him, I have drawn the wrong moral from the facts.  You say that the system the Red Republicans would have established in France would have been the nearest possible approach to our own.  It is possible, I think, that we may be tending towards the like issues.  It is possible, perhaps probable,