volumes of the services rendered by that society. The Royal
Agricultural Society of England and the Royal Agricultural Society of
Ireland followed in its wake, and with similarly beneficial results. I
myself was instrumental in establishing an agricultural society in the
West Indies, which has already done much to revive the spirits of the
planters; and I shall be very much disappointed, indeed, if that
society does not prove the means, before many years are past, of
establishing the truth so important to humanity, that, even in
tropical countries, free labour properly applied under a good system
of husbandry is more economical than the labour of slaves.

[Sidenote: Change of Ministry.]

At the close of 1847 the Canadian Parliament was dissolved. When the new
Parliament met early in 1848, the Ministry--Lord Metcalfe's Ministry--
found itself in a decided minority. A new one was accordingly formed from
the ranks of the opposition, 'the members of both parties concurring in
expressing their sense of the perfect fairness and impartiality with which
Lord Elgin had conducted himself throughout the transactions' which led to
this result.[7]

[Sidenote: French _habitans_.]

The French Canadians, who formed the chief element in the new government,
were even at this time a peculiar people. Planted in the days of the old
French monarchy, and cut off by conquest from the parent state long before
the Revolution of 1789, their little community remained for many years
like a fragment or boulder of a distinct formation--an island enshrining
the picturesque institutions of the _ancien regime_, in the midst of
an ever-encroaching sea of British nineteenth-century enterprise. The
English, it has been truly said, emigrate, but do not colonise. No
concourse of atoms could be more fortuitous than the gathering of
'traders, sailors, deserters from the army, outcasts, convicts, slaves,
democrats, and fanatics,' who have been the first, and sometimes the only
ingredients of society in our so-called colonies. French Canada, on the
contrary, was an organism complete in itself, a little model of medieval
France, with its recognised gradations of ranks, ecclesiastical and
social.

It may, indeed, be doubted whether the highest forms of social life are
best propagated by this method: whether the freer system, which 'sows
itself on every wind,' does not produce the larger, and, in the long run,
the more ben