... that can for a moment hold out the most distant idea of the King ever permitting the question even to be entertained by His Majesty’s confidential servants of a most remote bearing relative to any change of the appointment of the King’s Councils in the numerous Colonies.”  Lord Stanley said, in 1837, that the “double responsibility” was impossible, that there must either be separation or no responsible government, and that it was “no longer a question of expediency but of Empire.”  Lord John Russell, polished, sober, scorning to descend to the mere vulgar abuse of the colonials which disfigured the utterances of many of his opponents, struggling visibly to reconcile Liberalism with Empire, nevertheless arrived at the same conclusion.  In a debate of March 6, for example, in the same year, in proposing the defiant Resolutions which provoked the rebellion in Canada, he argued at length that a responsible Colonial Ministry was “incompatible with the relations of a Mother Country and a Colony,” and would be “subversive of the power of the British Crown,” and again, on December 22, that it meant “independence.”  O’Connell rightly replied to the former speech that Russell and his followers were supporting “principles that had been the fruitful source of civil war, dissension, and distractions in Ireland for centuries.”  The Radical group pushed home the Irish parallel.  Hume quoted, as applicable to Canada, Fox’s saying:  “I would have the whole Irish Government regulated by Irish notions and Irish prejudices, and I firmly believe ... that the more she is under Irish Government the more she will be bound to English interests.”  Molesworth declared, what was perfectly true at that moment of passion and folly, that his extreme political opponents wanted to make the reconquest of Ireland a precedent for the reconquest of Canada.

It would repay the reader to turn back from this debate to the Irish Repeal Debate of three years earlier, and listen to Sir Robert Peel stating as one of the “truths which be too deep for argument,” that the Repeal of the Union “must lead to the dismemberment of this great Empire, must make Great Britain a fourth-rate Power, and Ireland a savage wilderness,” which, as a matter of fact, it was at the very time he was speaking, after thirty years of the Legislative Union, and seven hundred years of irresponsible government.  We must listen to him claiming that the beneficent and impartial British Government was “saving Ireland from civil war” between its own “warring sects,” whereas, in fact, it was that Government which had brought those warring sects into being, which had fomented and exploited their dissensions, which had provoked the rebellion of 1798, and by its shameful neglect and partiality in the succeeding generation had flung Ireland into a social condition hardly distinguishable from “civil war.”  And we must realize that closely similar arguments, with special stress on the right of taxation, had been used for the coercion of the