Before we come to Durham’s proposals, let us pause and examine the state of home opinion on the Irish and Colonial questions.  The people of Great Britain at large had no opinion at all.  They were ignorant both of Canada and Ireland, and had been engaged, and, indeed, were still engaged, in a political struggle of their own which absorbed all their energies.  The Chartist movement in 1838 was assuming grave proportions.  The Reform, won in 1832 under the menace of revolution and in the midst of shocking disorders, was in reality a first step toward the domestic Home Rule that Ireland and the five Provinces of North America were clamouring for.  Tory statesmen were quite alive to this political fact, and condemned all the political movements, British, Irish, and Colonial, indiscriminately and on the same broad anti-democratic grounds.  The Duke of Wellington, who was not a friend of the Reform Act, and had only adopted Catholic Emancipation in order to avoid civil war in Ireland, speaking about Canada in the House of Lords on January 18, 1838, coupled together the United States, British North America, and Ireland as dismal examples of the folly of concession to popular demands.  Pointing to the results of the Canada Act of 1831, to which I have already alluded, and which gave the Assemblies control of the provincial revenue, and with an eye, no doubt, on the tithe war barely at an end in Ireland, he said:  “Let noble lords learn from Canada and our other dominions in North America what it is to hold forth what are called popular rights, but which are not popular rights here or elsewhere, and what occasion is given thereby to perpetuate a system of agitation which ends in insurrection and rebellion.”

The Whig statesmen who, if we except Peel’s short Administration of 1834-35, were in power from 1830 to 1841, though by no means democratic men, were clear enough about Reform for Great Britain, but nearly as ignorant and quite as wrong about Ireland and Canada as the Tories.  The only prominent Parliamentarian who, as after events proved, correctly diagnosed and prescribed for the disease in both countries was O’Connell.  Not fully alive to the Irish analogy, but correct from first to last about Canada, was a small group of independent Radicals, of whom Roebuck, Hume, Grote, Molesworth, and Leader were the principal representatives.  After the insurrections in Canada came John Stuart Mill, Edward Gibbon Wakefield, Charles Buller, and with them Lord Durham himself.

No one can understand either Irish or Colonial history without reading the debates of this period in the Lords and Commons on Canada and Ireland.  Alternating with one another with monotonous regularity, they nevertheless leave an impression of an extraordinary lack of earnestness, sympathy, and knowledge, and an extraordinary degree of prejudice and of bigotry in the Parliament to whose care for better or worse the welfare of nearly ten millions of British citizens