d policy did not require that Great Britain should afford to the
supporters of order some material aid to counterbalance this. Again, the
peculiar social and political state of Lower Canada, arising mainly from
the conditions under which it had passed into the hands of England, and
from the manner in which England had fulfilled those conditions, created
special difficulties as to the maintenance of internal quiet. On the one
hand England's respect for treaty obligations had induced her to resist all
attempts to break down by fraud or violence those rights and usages of the
French population, which had tended to keep alive among them feelings of
distinctive nationality; while on the other hand the effect of the working
of the old system of colonial administration had been to confer upon
British or American settlers a disproportionate share in the government of
the province. It followed that the French-Canadian majority and the Anglo-
Saxon minority were dwelling side by side in that section of the Colony
without, to any sensible extent, intermingling, and under conditions of
equilibrium which could never have been established but for the presence on
the same scene of a directing and overruling power. In this state of
things, while confidently hoping that an impartial adherence to the
principles of constitutional government would by degrees obliterate all
national distinctions, he saw reason to fear that the sudden withdrawal of
Britain's moderating control, whether as the result of separation or of a
change of Imperial policy, would be followed at no distant period by a
serious collision between the races.

[Sidenote: against foreign attack.]

Similarly, as regards defence against foreign attack, while agreeing that a
self-governing colony should be self-dependent, Lord Elgin felt that the
peculiar position of Canada, having no foreign attack to apprehend except
hi quarrels of England's making, made her case somewhat exceptional. And
any wholesale withdrawal of British troops he strongly deprecated, as
likely to imperil her connection with the mother-country, if it took place
suddenly, before the old notion--the 'axiom affirmed again and again by
Secretaries of State and Governors, that England was bound to pay all
expenses connected with the defence of the Colony'--had lost its hold on
men's minds, and a feeling of the responsibilities attaching to self-
government had had time to grow up.

His first letter on the subj