Losses Bill, for the indemnification of losses sustained in the outbreak of 1837 and 1838, was attacked with extreme violence by the British party in Canada and by the Opposition in the House of Commons. Mr. Gladstone himself described it as a measure for rewarding rebels;' and the strongest pressure was put upon Lord Elgin to induce him to refuse the Royal Assent to the Bill which had passed the Assembly by forty-seven votes to eighteen. To do so would have been to place himself in direct collision with the Canadian Parliament, and this Lord Elgin steadily refused. The result was an extraordinary explosion of party violence. I 'confess,' he said, 'I did not before know how thin is the crust of order that covers the anarchical elements that boil ' and toss beneath our feet.'

The people of Montreal seemed to have lost their reason. The houses of some of the Ministers and of their supporters were attacked by mobs at night, and it was not safe for them to appear in the streets. A hostile visit was threatened to the house in which the GovernorGeneral resided at a short distance from the city; all necessary preparation was made to defend it, and his family were kept for some time in a state of anxiety and suspense.

'For some weeks he himself did not go into the town of Montreal, but kept entirely within the bounds of his country seat at Monklands, determined that no act of his should offer occasion or excuse to the mob for fresh outrage. He knew, of course, that the whole of French Lower Canada was ready at any moment to rise, as one man, in support of the Government; but his great object was to keep them quiet, and "to prevent collision between the races."

"Throughout the whole of this most trying time,' writes Major Campbell, Lord Elgin remained perfectly calm and cool; never for a 'moment losing his self-possession, nor failing to exercise that clear foresight and sound judgment for which he was so remarkable. It came to the knowledge of his Ministers that, if he went into the city again, his life would be in great danger; and they advised that a commission should issue to appoint a Deputy-Governor for the purpose of proroguing Parliament. He was urged by irresponsible advisers to make use of the military forces at his command, to protect his person in an official visit to the city; but he declined to do so, and thus avoided what these infatuated rioters seemed determined to bring on-the shedding of blood. "I am prepared," he said, "to "bear any amount of obloquy that may be cast upon me, but, if I "can possibly prevent it, no stain of blood shall rest upon my 6.66 name.' (Pp. 84, 85.)

Under these circumstances he tendered his resignation of the office of Governor-General. But the Home Government, represented by Lord Grey, firmly supported him, approved his policy, and shortly afterwards conferred upon him a

British peerage as an acknowledgment of the unshaken confidence of the Queen. Never, at the worst of times, would Lord Elgin admit that the relation of the Colonies to the Empire was to be regarded as a provisional relation, incompatible with their full development and the maturity of their power. On the contrary, he argued with enthusiastic eloquence that both to them and to us the union of the Colonies to Great Britain was the surest pledge of their future prosperity and greatness, as well as of our own.

'May I not with all submission ask, Is not the question at issue a momentous one? What is it indeed but this: 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 and Ireland merely-her place and that of her line in the world's history determined by the productiveness of 12,000 square miles of a coal formation, which is being rapidly exhausted, and the duration of the social and political organisation over which she presides dependent on the annual expatriation, with a view to its eventual alienisation, of the surplus swarms of her born subjects?' (Pp. 118, 119.)

'You draw, I know, a distinction between separation with a view to annexation and separation with a view to independence. You say the former is an act of treason, the latter a natural and legitimate step in progress. There is much plausibility doubtless in this position, but, independently of the fact that no one advocates independence in these Colonies except as a means to the end, annexation, is it really tenable? If you take your stand on the hypothesis that the Colonial existence is one with which the Colonists ought to rest satisfied, then, I think, you are entitled to denounce, without reserve or measure, those who propose for some secondary object to substitute the Stars and Stripes for the Union Jack. But if, on the contrary, you assume that it is a provisional state, which admits of but a stunted and partial growth, and out of which all communities ought in the course of nature to strive to pass, how can you refuse to permit your Colonies here, when they have arrived at the proper stage in their existence, to place themselves in a condition which is at once most favourable to their security and to their perfect national development? What reasons can you assign for the refusal, except such as are founded on selfishness, and are, therefore, morally worthless? If you say that your great lubberly boy is too big for the nursery, and that you have no other room for him in your house, how can you decline to allow him to lodge with his elder brethren over the way, when the attempt to keep up an establishment for himself would seriously embarrass him?' (Pp. 119, 120.)

And with equal force he contrasted the genuine working of the representative system in Canada with the absence of effective responsibility in the conduct of the legislation ' and the want of concurrent action between the parts of the

political machine' in the institutions of the United States, especially as displayed in the prevalence of sectional interest and jobbing. And, above all, he steadily maintained the value of the monarchical principle as the corner-stone of the edifice.

"If the monarch be not an indispensable element in our constitutional mechanism, and if we can secure all the advantages of that mechanism without him, I have drawn the wrong moral from the facts. You say that the system the Red Republicans would have established in France would have been the nearest possible approach to our own. It is possible, I think, that we may be tending towards the like issues. It is possible, perhaps probable, that as the House of Commons becomes more democratic in its composition, and consequently more arrogant in its bearing, it may cast off the shackles which the other powers of the State impose on its self-will, and even utterly abolish them; but I venture to believe that those who last till that day comes, will find that they are living under a very different constitution from that which we now enjoy; that they have traversed the interval which separates a temperate and cautious administration of public affairs resting on the balance of powers and interests, from a reckless and overbearing tyranny based on the caprices and passions of an absolute and irresponsible body. You talk somewhat lightly of the check of the Crown, although you acknowledge its utility. But is it indeed so light a matter, even as our constitution now works? Is it a light matter that the Crown should have the power of dissolving Parliament; in other words, of deposing the tyrant at will? Is it a light matter that for several months in each year the House of Commons should be in abeyance, during which period the nation looks on Ministers not as slaves of Parliament but servants of the Crown? Is it a light matter that there should still be such respect for the monarchical principle, that the servants of that visible entity yclept the Crown are enabled to carry on much of the details of internal and foreign administration without consulting Parliament, and even without its cognisance?

'It appears to me, I must confess, that if you have a republican form of government in a great country, with complicated internal and external relations, you must either separate the executive and legislative departments, as in the United States, or submit to a tyranny of the majority, not the more tolerable because it is capricious and wielded by a tyrant with many heads. Of the two evils I prefer the former.' (Pp. 123, 124.)

It was in this spirit, with a steadfast adherence to Parliamentary principles, but a no less steadfast appreciation of his own position as a representative of the Crown, placed above the strife of parties, and bound to look to the general interests of the community, that Lord Elgin conceived and exercised the duties of a Colonial Governor. He returned to England at the close of 1854, being succeeded in the government of Canada by Sir Edmund Head, who had examined him for

a Merton Fellowship at Oxford in 1833. Soon after Lord Elgin's return home, the Chancellorship of the Duchy of Lancaster was offered him by Lord Palmerston, with a seat in the Cabinet. But he preferred to take no active part in public affairs, and enjoyed an interval of two years' rest from official labour, independent of party, and chiefly occupied with the discharge of home duties to his estate and his neighbours at Broom Hall in Fife.

Thus far we have seen Lord Elgin inaugurating free labour in Jamaica at the conclusion of the negro apprenticeship, and inaugurating Parliamentary government in Canada after a colonial revolution. But it was his lot to play the most conspicuous and responsible part in another revolution, of far more momentous interest to mankind, and far less to be anticipated by European statesmanship. The time was come when the frontiers and social systems of the great empires of the far East, hitherto so closely sealed against the enterprise of the Western world, were to be thrown open, and when direct political and commercial engagements were for the first time to be established between Great Britain and the Rulers of China and Japan. It devolved upon Lord Elgin to negotiate and sign those treaties, and at a later period of his career to enforce them at the head of a great expedition which dictated peace under the walls of Pekin. These events were so extraordinary, that they would suffice to confer a rare distinction on the statesman who was principally concerned in the direction of them. They secure to Lord Elgin that page in universal history of which even Napoleon is said at times to have doubted and despaired. For who can ever forget the man who brought these astonishing and secluded nations into close contact with ourselves?

The history of Lord Elgin's first mission to China has been so fully and ably written by Mr. Lawrence Oliphant, who accompanied him as his private secretary, and the incidents of that eventful expedition are so well known, that we shall not attempt to repeat them in this place. But the volume now before us contains, in the shape of Lord Elgin's own journals and letters, a record of these transactions which has a very fresh and lively interest. It puts us in possession of his own feelings and motives-of his tender regard for those he had left behind him, and his warm attachment to that home which was so strange to him-of his sensitive conscientiousness when he was compelled to use force against a treacherous enemy of his singular power of self-control-and of the high religious and moral principles which accompanied him throughout his career.

Arrived at Ceylon in May 1857, the news of the Indian mutiny was the first intelligence he received on landing in the East. It changed for a time the destination of the forces under his orders; it condemned him for many months to a perplexing inactivity; but the magnanimous resolution he took, on his own responsibility, to turn the transports from Singapore to Calcutta and to comply with the urgent entreaty of Lord Canning for the troops, powerfully contributed to save India. Of this act Sir Henry Ward, then Governor of Ceylon, then said:

You may think me impertinent in volunteering an opinion upon what in the first instance only concerns you and the Queen and Lord Canning. But having seen something of public life during a great part of my own, which is now fast verging into the "sere and yellow "leaf," I may venture to say that I never knew a nobler thing than that which you have done in preferring the safety of India to the success of your Chinese negotiations. If I know anything of English public opinion, this single act will place you higher in general estimation as a statesman than your whole past career, honourable and fortunate as it has been. For it is not every man who would venture to alter the destination of a force upon the despatch of which a Parliament has been dissolved, and a Government might have been superseded. It is not every man who would consign himself for many months to political inaction in order simply to serve the interests of his country. You have set a bright example at a moment of darkness and calamity; and, if India can be saved, it is to you that we shall owe its redemption, for nothing short of the Chinese expedition could have supplied the means of holding our ground until further reinforcements are received.' (P. 188.)

The interval which ensued was one of cruel uncertainty. Lord Elgin spent it partly at Singapore, and partly on a bootless voyage in the Shannon' to Hong-Kong. All the objects of his mission were in suspense, and his French colleague, Baron Gros, had not arrived. On the 19th July he took the resolution to go up himself to Calcutta, and on the 8th August the Shannon 'sailed up the Hoogly. It was about the darkest hour of that tremendous eclipse which had overshadowed the power of Britain in India. The European population of Calcutta were dismayed. Fort William was looked to as their last resource and refuge. But as the great ship was brought to an anchor abreast of the Maidan, and fired a salute which thundered over Calcutta, the enthusiasm of the Europeans knew no bounds, for it seemed as if salvation had come to India.

'Speaking afterwards of this scene, Lord Elgin himself said, "I shall never forget to my dying day-for the hour was a dark one, and

VOL. CXXXVII, NO. CCLXXIX.

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