outside Great Britain was entrusted.  Save for an occasional full-dress debate at some peculiarly critical juncture, the debates were ill-attended.  The prevailing sentiment seems to have been that Ireland and Canada, leavened by a few respectable “loyalists” and officials, on the whole, were two exceedingly mutinous and embarrassing possessions, which, nevertheless, it was the duty of every self-respecting Briton to dragoon into obedience.  Both dependencies were assumed to be equally expensive, though, in fact, Ireland, as we know now, was showing a handsome profit at the time, whereas Canada was costing a quarter of a million a year.  For the rest, the pride of power tempered a sort of fatalistic apathy.  In the case of Ireland the element of pure selfishness was stronger, because the immense vested interests, lay and clerical, in Irish land were strongly represented.  The proximity of Ireland, too, rendered coercion more obvious and easy.  Otherwise, her case was the same as that of Canada.  “The Canadas are endeavouring to escape from us, America has escaped us, but Ireland shall not escape us,” said an English member to O’Connell just before the Repeal debate of 1834.  Such was the current view.

Yet, as in the case of Ireland and of the lost American Colonies, the materials for knowledge of Canada were considerable.  Petitions poured in; Committees and Commissions were appointed, and made reports which were consigned to oblivion.  Roebuck, one of the small Radical group, was himself a Lower Canadian by birth, and acted as agent at Westminster for the popular party in that Province.  He was as impotent as O’Connell, the spokesman of the Irish popular party.  If the Colonial Office was not quite the “den of peculation and plunder” which Hume called it in 1838,[26] it was an obscure and irresponsible department, where jobbery was as rife as in Dublin Castle.  In the ten years of colonial crisis (1828-1838), there were eight different Colonial Secretaries and six Irish Chief Secretaries.

Over and above all this apathy and arrogance was the perfectly genuine incapacity to comprehend that idea of responsible government which even the most hot-headed and erratic of the colonial agitators did instinctively comprehend.  Until Durham had at last opened Lord John Russell’s eyes, the great Whig statesman was as positive and explicit as the Tories, Wellington and Stanley, in declaring that it was utterly impossible for the Monarch’s Representative overseas to govern otherwise than by instructions from home and through Ministers appointed by himself in the name of the King.  One constitutional King ruled over Great Britain, Canada, and Ireland.  He could not be advised by two sets of Ministers.  The thing was not only an unthinkably absurd nullification of the whole Imperial theory, but, in practice, would destroy and dissolve the Empire.  William IV. himself told Lord Melbourne that it was his “fixed resolution never to permit any despatch to be sent