{188} important modification that was made in
Canadian government between 1791 and the year of Confederation. Since
1839, governors-general who took their instructions from Britain, and
who seldom allowed the Canadian point of view to have more than an
indirect influence on their administration, had introduced the most
unhappy complications into politics. Both they and the home government
were now reduced to the gloomiest speculations concerning the
permanence of the British connection. In place of the academic or
official view of colonial dependence which had hitherto dominated
Canadian administration, Elgin came to substitute a policy which
frankly accepted the Canadian position, and which as frankly trusted to
a loyalty dependent for none of its sanctions upon external coercion or
encouragement. With 1846, Great Britain entered on an era of which the
predominating principle was _laissez faire_, and within twelve months
of the concession of that principle in commerce, Elgin applied it with
even more astonishing results in the region of colonial Parliamentary
institutions.

The Canadian episode in Elgin's career furnishes the most perfect and
permanently useful service rendered by him to the Empire. Although he
{189} gathered laurels in China and India, and earned a notable place
among diplomatists, nothing that he did is so representative of the
whole man, so valuable, and so completely rounded and finished, as the
seven years of his work in Canada. Elsewhere he accomplished tasks,
which others had done, or might have done as well. But in the history
of the self-governing dominions of Britain, his name is almost the
first of those who assisted in creating an Empire, the secret of whose
strength was to be local autonomy.

He belonged to the most distinguished group of nineteenth century
politicians, for with Gladstone, Canning, Dalhousie, Herbert, and
others, he served his apprenticeship under Sir Robert Peel. All of
that younger generation reflected the sobriety, the love of hard fact,
the sound but progressive conservatism, and the high administrative
faculty of their great master. It was an epoch when changes were
inevitable; but the soundest minds tended, in spite of a powerful party
tradition, to view the work in front of them in a non-partizan spirit.
Gladstone himself, for long, seemed fated to repeat the party-breaking
record of Peel; and three great proconsuls of the group, Dalhousie,
Canning, and