[Sidenote:  against internal disorder;]

In the first place, as regards the preservation of order within the province, he thought it clear that, as a general rule, the cost of this should fall on the Colony itself wherever it enjoyed self-government; but there were peculiar circumstances in Canada which made him hesitate to apply the doctrine unreservedly there.  Owing to the contiguity of the United States, the abettors of any mischief in the Colony might count on help constantly at hand, not indeed from the Government of the Union, which never acted disloyally,[6] but from the Unruly spirits that were apt to infest the borders; and it seemed to him at least doubtful, whether both justice and policy did not require that Great Britain should afford to the supporters of order some material aid to counterbalance this.  Again, the peculiar social and political state of Lower Canada, arising mainly from the conditions under which it had passed into the hands of England, and from the manner in which England had fulfilled those conditions, created special difficulties as to the maintenance of internal quiet.  On the one hand England’s respect for treaty obligations had induced her to resist all attempts to break down by fraud or violence those rights and usages of the French population, which had tended to keep alive among them feelings of distinctive nationality; while on the other hand the effect of the working of the old system of colonial administration had been to confer upon British or American settlers a disproportionate share in the government of the province.  It followed that the French-Canadian majority and the Anglo-Saxon minority were dwelling side by side in that section of the Colony without, to any sensible extent, intermingling, and under conditions of equilibrium which could never have been established but for the presence on the same scene of a directing and overruling power.  In this state of things, while confidently hoping that an impartial adherence to the principles of constitutional government would by degrees obliterate all national distinctions, he saw reason to fear that the sudden withdrawal of Britain’s moderating control, whether as the result of separation or of a change of Imperial policy, would be followed at no distant period by a serious collision between the races.

[Sidenote:  against foreign attack.]

Similarly, as regards defence against foreign attack, while agreeing that a self-governing colony should be self-dependent, Lord Elgin felt that the peculiar position of Canada, having no foreign attack to apprehend except hi quarrels of England’s making, made her case somewhat exceptional.  And any wholesale withdrawal of British troops he strongly deprecated, as likely to imperil her connection with the mother-country, if it took place suddenly, before the old notion—­the ’axiom affirmed again and again by Secretaries of State and Governors, that England was bound to pay all expenses connected with the defence of the Colony’—­had lost its hold on men’s minds, and a feeling of the responsibilities attaching to self-government had had time to grow up.