rs of persons who had recently been slaves,
and were still generally illiterate. And the Assembly for which this
constituency had to provide members exercised great authority within its
own sphere. It discharged a large portion of the functions which usually
devolve upon an Executive Government; it initiated all legislative
measures, besides voting the supplies from year to year. What hope was
there that a body so constituted would wield such powers with discretion?

[Sidenote: Harmonising influence of British institutions.]

Lord Elgin's answer to this question shows that he already cherished that
faith in the harmonising influence of British institutions on a mixed
population, which afterwards, at a critical period of Canadian history,
was the mainspring of his policy.

A sojourner in this sea of the Antilles, who is watching with
heartfelt anxiety the progress of the great experiment of Negro
emancipation (an experiment which must result in failure unless
religion and civilisation minister to the mind that freedom which the
enactments of law have secured for the body), might well be tempted to
view the prospect to which I have now introduced you with some
feelings of misgiving, were he not reassured by his firm reliance on
the harmonising influence of British connexion, and the power of self-
adaptation inherent in our institutions. On the one side he sees the
model Republic of Hayti--a coloured community, which has enjoyed
nearly half a century of entire independence and self-rule. And with
what issues? As respects moral and intellectual culture, stagnation:
in all that concerns material development, a fatal retrogression. He
beholds there, at this day, a miserable parody of European and
American institutions, without the spirit that animates either: the
tinsel of French sentiment on the ground of negro ignorance: even the
'sacred right of 'insurrection' burlesqued: a people which has for its
only living belief an ill-defined apprehension of the superiority of
the white man, and, for the rest, blunders on without faith in what
regards this world or that which is to come.

He turns his eyes to another quarter and perceives the cluster of
states which have formed themselves from the breakup of the Spanish
continental dominions. What ground of consolation or hope does he
discover there?

These illustrations of the wo