between the two peoples.  The French colonists had quite forgotten the gratitude they had once felt for the maintenance of their religion and of their social organisation, and there was a strong party among them who were bent upon open revolt, and hoped to be able to establish a little isolated French community upon the St. Lawrence.  This party of hotheads got the upper hand, and their agitation culminated in the rebellion of Papineau in 1837.  In the other colonies, and especially in Upper Canada, the conditions were almost equally ominous; when Papineau revolted in Quebec, William Mackenzie led a sympathetic rising in Ontario.  The situation was quite as alarming as the situation in the American colonies had been in 1775.  It is true that the risings were easily put down.  But mere repression formed no solution, any more than a British victory in 1775 would have formed a solution of the American question.

Realising this, the Whig government sent out Lord Durham, one of their own number, to report on the whole situation.  Durham was one of the most advanced Liberals in Britain, a convinced believer in the virtues of self-government, and he took out with him two of the ablest advocates of scientific colonisation, Edward Gibbon Wakefield and Charles Buller.  Durham’s administrative work was not a success:  his high-handed deportation of some of the rebel leaders was strongly condemned, and he was very quickly recalled.  But he had had time to study and understand the situation, and he presented a masterly Report on Canada, which is one of the classics in the history of British imperialism.  His explanation of the unhappy condition of Canadian politics was not (as some were tempted to say) that the colonists had been given too much liberty, but that they had not been given enough.  They must be made to feel their responsibility for the working of the laws which they adopted, and for the welfare of the whole community.  As for the conflict of races, its only cure was that both should be made to feel their common responsibility for the destinies of the community in which both must remain partners.

Lord Durham’s recommendations were fully carried into effect, partly in the Canada Act of 1840, but more especially by a simple instruction issued to governors, that their ministries must henceforward be chosen, in the British fashion, on the ground that they commanded the support of a majority in the elected house; and that the governors themselves must be guided by their advice.  A crucial test of this new policy came in 1849, when the ministers and the parliamentary majority proposed to vote compensation for property destroyed in 1837.  This to many seemed compensation for rebels, and the indignant loyalists were urgent that the governor, Lord Elgin, should veto it.  He firmly declined to do so; and thus gave an invaluable lesson to both parties.  The Canadian people, acting through their representatives, were now responsible for their actions.  If they chose to vote for irresponsible and dangerous devices, they must henceforward realise that they must themselves answer for the consequences.