his post; imprudently in the simplicity of his heart he added to the
recall a private letter stating rumours against the governor's personal
character. These he had taken on trust from the bishop of the diocese
and others. The bishop left him in the lurch; the recall was one affair,
the personal rumours were another; nimble partizanship confused the two,
to the disadvantage of the secretary of state; the usual clatter that
attends any important personage in a trivial scrape ensued; Mr.
Gladstone's explanations, simple and veracious as the sunlight in their
substance, were over-skilful in form, and half a dozen blunt, sound
sentences would have stood him in far better stead. 'There was on my
part in this matter,' he says in a fugitive scrap upon it, 'a singular
absence of worldly wisdom.'[214] To colonial policy at this stage I
discern no particular contribution, and the matters that I have named
are now well covered with the moss of kindly time.

Almost from the first he was convinced that some leading maxims of
Downing Street were erroneous. He had, from his earliest parliamentary
days, regarded our colonial connection as one of duty rather than as one
of advantage. When he had only been four years in the House he took a
firm stand against pretensions in Canada to set their assembly on an
equal footing with the imperial parliament at home.[215] On the other
hand, while he should always be glad to see parliament inclined to make
large sacrifices for the purpose of maintaining the colonies, he
conceived that nothing could be more ridiculous, or more mistaken, than
to suppose that Great Britain had anything to gain by maintaining that
union in opposition to the deliberate and permanent conviction of the
people of the colonies themselves.[216]

He did not at all undervalue what he called the mere political
connection, but he urged that the root of such a connection lay in the
natural affection of the colonies for the land from which they sprang,
and their spontaneous desire to reproduce its laws and the spirit of its
institutions. From first to last he always declared the really valuable
tie with a colony to be the moral and the social tie.[217] The master
key with him was local freedom, and he was never weary of protest
against the fallacy of what was called 'preparing' these new communities
for freedom: teaching a colony, like an infant, by slow degrees to walk,
first putting it into long clothes, then into short cloth