he was the organ.”  The majority of the government was obtained from Upper Canada, where a large body of people were misled by appeals made to their loyalty and attachment to the crown, and where a large number of Methodists were influenced by the extraordinary action of the Rev. Egerton Ryerson, a son of a United Empire Loyalist, who defended the position of the governor-general, and showed how imperfectly he understood the principles and practice of responsible government.  In a life of Sir Charles Metcalfe,[5] which appeared shortly after his death, it is stated that the governor-general “could not disguise from himself that the government was not strong, that it was continually on the brink of defeat, and that it was only enabled to hold its position by resorting to shifts and expedients, or what are called tactics, which in his inmost soul Lord Metcalfe abhorred.”

The action of the British ministry during this crisis in Canadian affairs proved quite conclusively that it was not yet prepared to concede responsible government in its fullest sense.  Both Lord Stanley, then secretary of state for the colonies, and Lord John Russell, who had held the same office in a Whig administration, endorsed the action of the governor-general, who was raised to the peerage under the title of Baron Metcalfe of Fernhill, in the county of Berks.  Earthly honours were now of little avail to the new peer.  He had been a martyr for years to a cancer in the face, and when it assumed a most dangerous form he went back to England and died soon after his return.  So strong was the feeling against him among a large body of the people, especially in French Canada, that he was bitterly assailed until the hour when he left, a dying man.  Personally he was generous and charitable to a fault, but he should never have been sent to a colony at a crisis when the call was for a man versed in the practice of parliamentary government, and able to sympathize with the aspirations of a people determined to enjoy political freedom in accordance with the principles of the parliamentary institutions of England.  With a remarkable ignorance of the political conditions of the province—­too often shown by British statesmen in those days—­so great a historian and parliamentarian as Lord Macaulay actually wrote on a tablet to Lord Metcalfe’s memory:—­“In Canada, not yet recovered from the calamities of civil war, he reconciled contending factions to each other and to the mother country.”  The truth is, as written by Sir Francis Hincks[6] fifty years later, “he embittered the party feeling that had been considerably assuaged by Sir Charles Bagot.”