empire, that our adversaries should be informed that the difference between them and the prime minister of England is only one of time?  If the British government has really come to the conclusion that we are a burden to be cast off, whenever a favourable opportunity offers, surely we ought to be warned.”  In Lord Elgin’s opinion, based on a thorough study of colonial conditions, if the Canadian or any other system of government was to be successful, British statesmen must “renounce the habit of telling the colonies that the colonial is a provisional existence.”  They should be taught to believe that “without severing the bonds which unite them to England, they may attain the degree of perfection, and of social and political development to which organized communities of free men have a right to aspire.”  The true policy in his judgment was “to throw the whole weight of responsibility on those who exercise the real power, for after all, the sense of responsibility is the best security against the abuse of power; and as respects the connection, to act and speak on this hypothesis—­that there is nothing in it to check the development of healthy national life in these young communities.”  He was “possessed,” he used the word advisedly, “with the idea that it was possible to maintain on the soil of North America, and in the face of Republican America, British connection and British institutions, if you give the latter freely and trustingly.”  The history of Canada from the day those words were penned down to the beginning of the twentieth century proves their political wisdom.  Under the inspiring influence of responsible government Canada has developed in 1902, not into an independent nation, as predicted by Lord John Russell and other British statesmen after him, but into a confederation of five millions and a half of people, in which a French Canadian prime minister gives expression to the dominant idea not only of his own race but of all nationalities within the Dominion, that the true interest lies not in the severance but in the continuance of the ties that have so long bound them to the imperial state.

Lord Elgin in his valuable letters to the imperial authorities, always impressed on them the fact that the office of a Canadian governor-general has not by any means been lowered to that of a mere subscriber of orders-in-council—­of a mere official automaton, speaking and acting by the orders of the prime minister and the cabinet.  On the contrary, he gave it as his experience that in Jamaica, where there was no responsible government, he had “not half the power” he had in Canada “with a constitutional and changing cabinet.”  With respect to the maintenance of the position and due influence of the governor, he used language which gives a true solution of the problem involved in the adaptation of parliamentary government to the colonial system.  “As the imperial government and parliament gradually withdraw from legislative interference,