n
nationalism. "They seem incapable of comprehending that the principles
of constitutional government must be applied against them, as well as
for them," he wrote to Grey. "Whenever there appears to be a chance of
things taking this turn they revive the ancient cry of nationality, and
insist on their right to have a share in the administration, not
because the party with which they have chosen to connect themselves is
in the ascendant, but because they represent a people of distinct
origin."[9] Most serious of all, because it hampered his initiative,
he found every party except that in office suspicious of the governor's
authority, and newspapers like Hincks' _Pilot_ grumbling over Imperial
interference.

One sweeping remedy, he had, within a few months of his arrival, laid
aside as impossible. Lord John Russell and Grey had discussed with
{197} him the possibility of raising Canadian politics out of their
pettiness by a federal union of all the British North American
colonies. But as early as May 1847, Elgin had come to doubt whether
the free and independent legislatures of the colonies would be willing
to delegate any of their authority to please a British ministry.[10]
It was necessary then to fall back on the unromantic alternative of
modifying the constitution of the ministry; and here French solidarity
had made his task difficult. Yet the amazing thing in Elgin was the
speed, the ease, and the accuracy, with which he saw what none of his
predecessors had seen--the need to concede, and the harmlessness of
conceding, responsible government in Baldwin's sense of the term.
Within two months of his accession to power, he declared, "I am
determined to do nothing which will put it out of my power to act with
the opposite party, if it is forced upon me by the representatives of
the people."[11] Two months later, sick of the struggles by which his
ministers were trying to gain here and there some trivial vote to keep
them in office, he recurred to the same idea as not merely harmless but
sound. That ministers {198} and opposition should occasionally change
places struck him not merely as constitutional, but as the most
conservative convention in the constitution; and in answer to the older
school to whom a change of ministers at the dictation of a majority in
the Assembly meant the degradation of the governor-generalship, he
hoped "to establish a moral influence in the province, which will go
far to compensate for