of their action.  Lord Melbourne, the Prime Minister, in a letter to the Queen, charged him with magnifying the Canadian troubles “in order to give greater eclat to his own departure."[28] Still, he did his work of investigation faithfully, and formed his conclusions sanely, and there were plain men of greater ability at his elbow in the persons of Wakefield and Buller, by whose advice he was wise enough to be guided.  All opinion was against him when news came of his recall, and even Roebuck was denouncing him in the Spectator for his autocratic excesses; but a brilliant article by John Stuart Mill in the Westminster Review, pleading for time and confidence, arrested the tide of obloquy.

Durham’s long Report, and the events which followed it, ought to be studied carefully by every voter, however lowly, who has a voice in deciding the fate of Irish Home Rule.  After an exhaustive discussion of the causes of disorder in Canada, Durham made two recommendations, the first of incalculable importance, and proved by subsequent experience to be right; the second of minor consequence, and proved by subsequent experience to be wrong.

The first was that responsible government should be inaugurated both in Canada and in the Maritime Provinces of North America, whose constitutional troubles Durham also discussed.  His proposal was that the Governor should govern in accordance with advice given by Colonial Ministers in whom the popular Assembly reposed confidence, and who, through that Assembly, were in touch with popular opinion; for it was to the strangulation of popular opinion that Durham attributed all the disorders and disasters of the past.  This recommendation was eventually adopted, not in the Act subsequently passed, but by instructions to the Governors concerned; instructions which were first interpreted in the full liberal spirit by Lord Elgin in 1847.  The Maritime Provinces at various dates and under various Governors received full responsible government by 1854.  Responsible government proved the salvation of Canada and the Empire, as it would have proved, if given the chance, the salvation of Ireland and a source of immensely enhanced strength to the Empire.

The second and less important recommendation, afterwards embodied in the Act of 1840, was the Union of the two Provinces of Upper and Lower Canada.  Here Lord Durham, misled unhappily by the Irish precedent, fell into an error.  During his visit to Canada he came near to accepting that higher conception of a Federal Union with local Home Rule for each Province, outlined by Roebuck and Mackenzie, and eventually consummated thirty years later.  When he came home to London he made a volte face, rejecting the Federal idea and accepting its antitype, that Legislative and Administrative Union of the two Provinces which had been rejected by Pitt in 1791.  There were, of course, economic arguments for Union apart from the racial factor; but they do not seem to have been