A considerable portion of authoritative British opinion has now been traversed; and beneath all its contradictions and varieties a deep general tendency has been discovered. That tendency made for the separation of Canada from England and the Empire. It is strange to see how resolutely writers have evaded the conclusion, and yet, if the views discussed above have been fairly stated, only four men of note and authority, Durham, Buller, Elgin, and Grey remained unaffected by the growing pessimism of the time, and of these, the last seemed at the end to find it difficult to maintain the confidence of 1853 under the trials of 1862. Britain was, in fact, undergoing a great secular change of policy. She had been driven, step by step, from the old position of supremacy and authority. As in commerce the security of protection had been abandoned for the still doubtful advantages of free trade, so, in the colonies, the former cast-iron system of imperial control had been abandoned for one of laissez-faire and self-government. It would have been impossible for British statesmen to follow any other course than that which they actually chose. Self-government, and self-government to the last detail and corollary of the argument they must perforce concede. But in the stress of their imperial necessities, it was not strange that they should discern all the signs of disruption, rather than the gleams of hope; and men like Disraeli who claimed at a later date that they had never despaired of the Empire, did so at the expense of their sincerity, and could do so only because the false remedies they prescribed were happily incapable of application. Little Englandism, if that unfortunate term may be used to describe an essential and inevitable phase of imperial expansion, was the creed of all but one or two of the most capable and daring statesmen of the mid-Victorian age.
Strangely enough, while they had exhausted the materials for their argument so far as these lay in Britain, they had all failed to regard the one really important factor in the situation—the inclinations of the Canadian people. For the connection of Britain with Canada depended less on what the ministers of the Crown thought of Canada than on what the Canadians thought of their mother country.
[[1]] In Fenwick (Scotland), the Improvement of Knowledge Society discussed Canadian affairs on 1 January, 1839, when James Taylor proposed the sentiment, "The speedy success of the Canadian struggle for emancipation from British thraldom." The toast, according to the minute book, was enthusiastically honoured.
[[2]] Elgin-Grey Correspondence: Elgin to Grey, 1 November, 1851.
[[3]] Elgin-Grey Correspondence: Grey to Elgin, 11 May, 1849.