arl Grey told powerfully for a
fuller and more optimistic conception of empire. With all its virtues,
the bureaucracy of the Colonial Office did not understand the
government of colonies such {223} as Canada; and where colonial
secretaries had the ability and will, they had not knowledge sufficient
to lead them into paths at once democratic and imperial. Even Grey
relapsed on occasion from the optimism which empire demands of its
statesmen. It was not simply that he emphasized the wrong
points--military and diplomatic issues, which in Canada were minor and
even negligible matters; but at times he seemed prepared to believe
that the days of the connection were numbered.[34]

In 1848 he had impaled himself on the horns of one of those dilemmas
which present themselves so frequently to absentee governments and
secretaries of state--either reciprocity and an Americanized colony, or
a new rebellion as the consequence of a refusal in Britain to consent
to a reciprocity treaty.[35] In 1849, "looking at these indications of
the state of feeling in Canada, and at the equally significant
indications as to the feeling of the House of Commons respecting the
value of our colonies," he had begun to despair of their retention.[36]
But there were greater sinners than those of the Colonial Office.
While Elgin {224} was painfully removing all the causes of trouble in
Canada, and proving without argument, but in deeds, that the British
connection represented normal conditions for both England and Canada,
politicians insisted on making foolish speeches. At last, an offence
by the Prime Minister himself drove Elgin into a passion unusual in so
equable a mind, and which, happily, he expressed in the best of all his
letters. "I have never been able to comprehend why, elastic as our
constitutional system is, we should not be able, now more especially
when we have ceased to control the trade of our colonies, to render the
links which bind them to the British Crown at least as lasting as those
which unite the component parts of the Union.... You must renounce the
habit of telling the colonies that the colonial is a provisional
existence.... Is the Queen of England to be the sovereign of an
empire, growing, expanding, strengthening itself from age to age,
striking its roots deep into fresh earth and drawing new supplies of
vitality from virgin soils? Or is she to be for all essential purposes
of might and power monarch of Great Britain a