The Act of 1840 went through, but it had little to do with the regeneration and reconciliation of Canada.  Poulett Thompson, the first Governor, peremptorily declined to admit the principle of Ministerial responsibility.  Some good reforms were, indeed, made in the early years, but the Act was on the verge of breaking down when Lord Elgin, Durham’s son-in-law, came to Canada as Governor-General in 1847.  After many party changes and combinations, French influence was temporarily in the ascendant, and in 1849 a Bill was on the stocks for compensating French as well as British subjects for losses in the rebellion of 1837.  Elgin, following the advice of his Ministers, of whom Baldwin was one, Lafontaine another, gave the Royal Assent to the Bill.  The British, with the old cry of “loyalism,” and with Orangemen in the van, rioted, mobbed the Governor, and burnt down the Parliament House at Montreal.  Elgin, expostulating with Lord John Russell, who was as pessimistic as ever, and threatened with recall, stuck to his guns under fierce obloquy, and the principle of responsible government was definitely established.  It was applied at about the same period to the other British Provinces of North America, with the ulterior results I have described, and in a few years to Australia.

The great year, then, was 1847, the year of the Irish famine, and the year before the pitiful rebellion of Smith O’Brien, surrendering in the historic cabbage-garden.  Our thoughts go back sixty-four years to 1783, when the American War of Independence ended; when, as a result of that war, British Canada and Australia were founded, and when, at the crisis—­premature, alas!—­of Ireland’s fortunes, the Volunteers in vain demanded the Reform which might have saved their country.  Look into historical details, read contemporary debates, and watch the contrast.  Within five years of responsible government Canada solved all the great questions which had been convulsing society for so long, and turned her liberated energies towards economic development.  In Ireland the abuses of ages lingered to a point which seems incredible.  The Church was not disestablished, amid outcries of imminent ruin and threats of a Protestant rebellion, till 1869, when Canada had already become a Federated Dominion.  The Irish land question, dating from the seventeenth century, was not seriously tackled until 1881, not drastically and on the right lines till 1903.  Education languishes at the present day.  Canada started an excellent system of municipal and local government in the forties.  In Ireland, while the minority, in Greville’s words, were “bellowing spoliation and revolution,” an Act was passed in 1840 with the utmost difficulty, removing an infinitesimal part of the gross abuses of municipal government under the ascendancy system, and it was not till 1898 that the people at large are admitted to a full share in county and town government.  Even this step inverted the natural order of things, for the new authorities are hampered in their work by the incessant political agitation for the Home Rule which should have preceded their establishment, as it preceded it in Great Britain and Canada.  Home Rule, the tried specific, was resisted, as those who read the debates of 1886 and 1893 will recognize, on the same grounds as Canadian Home Rule, in the same spirit, and often in terms absolutely identical.