British Supremacy & Canadian Self-Government, 1839-1854 Part 7

[9] Bagot Correspondence: W. H. Draper to Bagot, 18 May, and 16 July, 1842.

[10] Bagot Correspondence: Murdoch to Bagot, 3 September, 1842.

[11] Goulburn to Stanley, 16 September, 1842.

[12] Bagot Correspondence: Bagot to Stanley, 26 March, 1842.

[13] Stanley to Bagot, 27 May, 1842.

[14] Bagot Correspondence: Stanley to Bagot, describing an interview with Murdoch, 1 September, 1842.

[15] See Bagot's admirable a.n.a.lysis of French conditions in his public and confidential despatches, 26 September, 1842.

[16] Bagot Correspondence: Bagot to Stanley, 12 June, 1842.

[17] Bagot to Stanley: 26 September, 1842--confidential.

[18] Peel to Stanley, 28 August, 1842.

[19] Bagot to Stanley, 26 September, 1842--confidential.

[20] Bagot Correspondence: Bagot to Stanley, 28 July, 1842.

[21] Bagot Correspondence: Bagot to Stanley, 13 September, 1842.

[22] Bagot Correspondence: Bagot to Stanley, 13 September, 1842.

[23] Bagot Correspondence: letters to Sherwood 16 September, and to Ogden 19 September. Dismissal is far too blunt a term in which to describe the transaction.

[24] Bagot Correspondence: Bagot to Stanley, 28 October, 1842.

[25] Bagot Correspondence: Stanley to Bagot, 3 November and 3 December, 1842.

[26] Bagot Correspondence: Bagot to Stanley, 28 October, 1842.

[27] Hincks, _Reminiscences of his Public Life_, p. 89.

[28] Kaye, _Papers and Correspondence of Lord Metcalfe_, p. 416.

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CHAPTER V.

THE GOVERNORS-GENERAL: LORD METCALFE.

A surrender of the official Imperial position so unexpected and so contrary to the intentions of the Colonial Office, as that which Bagot had made, provoked a natural reaction. Bagot's successor was one of those men of principle who are continually revealing the flaws and limitations implicit in their principles by earnest over-insistence on them. It is unfortunate that Sir Charles Metcalfe should appear in Canadian history as the man whose errors almost precipitated another rebellion, for among his predecessors and successors few have equalled him, none has outstripped him, in public virtue or experience. He had earned, throughout thirty-seven years in India, a reputation for efficiency in every kind of administrative work. As a lad of little more than twenty he had negotiated with Ranjit Singh the treaty which, for a generation, kept Sikhs and British at peace. In the {159} residency at Hyderabad he had fought, in the face of the governor-general's displeasure, a hard but ultimately successful battle for incorrupt administration. After Bentinck had resigned, Metcalfe had been appointed acting governor-general, and he might have risen even higher, had not the courageous act, by which he freed the press in India from its earlier disabilities, set the East India Company authorities against him. He was something more than what Macaulay called him--"the ablest civil servant I ever knew in India"; his faculty for recommending himself to Anglo-Indian society on its lighter side, and the princely generosity which bound his friends to him by a curious union of reverence and affection, combined with his genius for administration to make him an unusual and outstanding figure in that generation of the company officials in India. Led by the sense of duty which ever dominated him, he had pa.s.sed from retirement in England to reconcile the warring elements in Jamaica to each other; and his success there had been as great as in India. In English politics, in which he had naturally played little part, he identified himself with the more liberal wing of the Whigs, although his long absence from the centre of affairs, and the inclination natural to {160} an administrator, to think of liberalism rather as a thing of deeds and acts than of opinion, gave whatever radicalism he may have professed a bureaucratic character. He described himself not inaptly to a friend thus: "A man who is for the abolition of the corn laws, Vote by Ballot, Extension of the Suffrage, Amelioration of the Poor-laws for the benefit of the poor, equal rights to all sects of Christians in matters of religion, and equal rights to all men in civil matters...; and (who) at the same time, is totally disqualified to be a demagogue--shrinks like a sensitive plant from public meetings; and cannot bear to be drawn from close retirement, except by what comes in the shape of real or fancied duty to his country."[1] Outside of the greater figures of the time, he was one of the first citizens of the Empire, and Bagot, as he thought of possible successors, only dismissed the suggestion of Metcalfe's appointment because it seemed too good news to be true.

Nevertheless Sir Charles Metcalfe had one great initial disadvantage for work in Canada. Distinguished as were his virtues, a very little discernment in the home government might have discovered the obstacles which must meet an absolutely efficient, {161} liberal administrator in a country where democracy, the only possible principle of government for Canada, was still in its crude and repulsive stage. The delimitation of the frontier between Imperial control and Canadian self-government required a subtler and more flexible mind than Metcalfe's, and a longer practice than his in the ways of popular a.s.semblies. Between March, 1843, when he a.s.sumed office, and the end of 1845, when he returned to die in England, Metcalfe's entire energy was spent in grappling with the problem of holding the balance level between local autonomy and British supremacy. His real contribution to the question was, in a sense, the confusion and failure with which his career ended; for his serious practical logic reduced to an absurdity, as nothing else could have done, the position stated so firmly by Russell in 1839.

Sir Charles Metcalfe came to Canada at a moment when responsible government in its most extended interpretation seemed to have triumphed. In Upper and Lower Canada the reforming party had accepted Bagot's action as the concession of their principle, and the two chief ministers, Baldwin and La Fontaine, were men resolute to endure no diminution of their share of responsibility. Bagot's {162} illness had given additional strength to their authority, and Gibbon Wakefield, who was then a member of a.s.sembly, believed that Baldwin had already taken too great a share of responsibility to be willing to occupy a secondary place under an energetic governor.[2] Indeed an unwillingness to allow the governor-general his former unlimited initiative becomes henceforth a mark of the leaders of the Reformers, and La Fontaine, who had resented Sydenham's activity as much as his anti-nationalist policy, protested against the suggestion that Charles Buller should be sent to Canada, because he "apprehended that Buller would be disposed to take an active part himself in our politics."[3] There seemed to be no obstacle in the way of a complete victory for reforming principles.

The French remained as solidly as ever a unit, and under La Fontaine they were certain to continue to place their solidarity at the disposal of the Upper Canada reformers. The latter, _ultras_ and moderates alike, were too adequately represented, in all their shades and aspects, in the cabinet, to be willing to shake its power; and {163} the sympathetic co-operation between Irishmen in Canada, and those who at that time in Ireland were beginning another great democratic agitation, made the stream of Hibernian immigration a means of reinforcing the Canadian progressives. One of the best evidences of the growth of Reform was the persistent agitation of the Civil List question. Following up their action under Bagot, the reformers demanded the concession of a completer control than they seemed then to possess over their own finances, and a more economical administration of them. The inspector-general, in a report characterized by all his admirable clearness, stated the issue thus: "It is impossible for any government to support a Civil List to which objections are raised, and with justice, by the people at large; first, on the ground that its establishment was a violation of their const.i.tutional rights; second, that the services provided for are more than ought to be placed on the permanent Civil List; third, on the ground that the salaries provided are higher than the province can afford to pay with a due regard to the public interests, and more especially to the maintenance of the public credit."[4]

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Metcalfe, then, found in Canada a ministry not far from being unanimous, supported by a union of French and British reformers; and he ought to have realized how deeply the extended view of self-government had affected the minds of all, so that only by a serious struggle could Sydenham's position of 1839 be recovered. But Metcalfe was an Anglo-Indian, trained in the school of politics most directly opposed to the democratic ways of North America. He was entirely new to Canadian conditions; and one may watch him studying them conscientiously, but making just those mistakes, which a clever examination candidate would perpetrate, were he to be asked of a sudden to turn his studies to practical account. The very robustness of his sense of duty led him naturally to the two most contentious questions in the field--those which concerned the responsibility of the colonial executive government, and the place of party in dictating to the governor-general his policy and the use to be made of his patronage.

His study of Sydenham's despatches revealed to him the contradiction between that statesman's resolute proclamation of Russell's doctrine, and the course of practical surrender which his actions seemed to have followed in 1841. "In adopting {165} the very form and practice of the Home Government, by which the princ.i.p.al ministers of the Crown form a Cabinet, acknowledged by the nation as the executive administration, and themselves acknowledging responsibility to Parliament, he rendered it inevitable that the council here should obtain and ascribe to themselves, in at least some degree, the character of a cabinet of ministers."[5] In a later despatch, Metcalfe attempted to demonstrate the inapplicability of such a form of government to a colony: "a system of government which, however suitable it may be in an independent state, or in a country where it is qualified by the presence of a Sovereign and a powerful aristocracy, and by many circ.u.mstances in correspondence with which it has grown up and been gradually formed, does not appear to be well adapted for a colony, or for a country in which those qualifying circ.u.mstances do not exist, and in which there has not been that gradual progress, which tends to smooth away the difficulties, otherwise sure to follow the confounding of the legislative and executive powers, and the inconsistency of the practice with the theory of the Const.i.tution."[6]

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To his mind, what Durham had advocated was infinitely sounder--"that all officers of the government except the governor and his secretary should be responsible to the united Legislature; and that the governor should carry on his government by heads of departments, in whom the United Legislature repose confidence.... The general responsibility of heads of departments, acting under the orders of the Governor, each distinctly in his own department, might exist without the destruction of the former authority of her Majesty's Government."[7] So set was he in his opposition to cabinet government on British lines in Canada, that he prophesied separation as the obvious consequence of concession.

It was natural that one so distrustful of cabinet machinery in a colony should altogether fail to see the place of party. It must always be remembered that party, in Canada, had few of those sanctions of manners, tradition, and national service, which had given Burke his soundest arguments, when he wrote the apologetic of the eighteenth century Whigs. Personal and sometimes corrupt interests, petty ideas, ign.o.ble quarrels, a flavour of pretentiousness which came from the misapplication of British terms, and a {167} lack of political good-manners--in such guise did party present itself to the British politician on his arrival in British North America. Metcalfe, from his previous experience, had come to identify party divisions with factiousness, a political evil which the efficient governor must seek to extirpate. His triumph in Jamaica had secured the death of party through the benevolent despotism of the governor, and there can be no doubt that he hoped in Canada to perform a precisely similar task.

"The course which I intend to pursue with regard to all parties," he wrote to Stanley in April, 1843, "is to treat all alike, and to make no distinctions, as far as depends on my personal conduct." But since parties did exist, and were unlikely to cease to exist, the governor-general's distaste for party in theory merely forced him to become in practice the unconscious leader of the Canadian conservatives, who, under men like MacNab and the leaders of the Orange Lodges, differed only from other parties in the loudness of their loyalist professions, and the paucity of their supporters among the people. Metcalfe complained that at times the whole colony must be regarded as a party opposed to her Majesty's Government.[8] He might have {168} seen that what he deplored proceeded naturally from the identification of himself with the smallest and least representative group of party politicians in the colony.

The radical opposition between the governor and the coalition which his executive council represented led naturally to the crisis of November 26th, 1843. For months the feeling of mutual alienation had been growing. On several occasions, more notably in the appointment to the speakers.h.i.+p of the legislative council, and in one to a vacant clerks.h.i.+p of the peace, the governor's use of patronage had caused offence to his ministers; and, towards the end of November, the entire Cabinet, with the exception of Daly, whose nickname "the perpetual secretary" betokened that he was either above party feeling or beneath it, handed in their resignations. The motives of their action became, as will be shown, the subject of violent controversy; but the statement of Sir Charles Metcalfe seems in itself the fairest and most probable account of what took place. "On Friday, Mr. La Fontaine and Mr.

Baldwin came to the Government House, and after some irrelevant matters of business, and preliminary remarks as to the course of their proceedings, demanded of {169} the Governor-general that he should agree to make no appointment, and no offer of an appointment, without previously taking the advice of the Council; that the lists of candidates should in every instance be laid before the Council; that they should recommend any others at discretion; and that the Governor-general in deciding, after taking their advice, shall not make any appointment prejudicial to their influence."[9]

At a slightly later date the ministers attributed their resignation to a serious difference between themselves and the governor-general on the theory of responsible government. To that statement Metcalfe took serious exception, but he admitted that "in the course of the conversations which both on Friday and Sat.u.r.day followed the explicit demand made by the Council regarding the patronage of the Crown, that demand being based on the construction put by some of the gentlemen on the meaning of responsible government, different opinions were elicited on the abstract theory of that still undefined question as applicable to a colony."[10] There can be no doubt that the _casus belli_ was an absolute a.s.sertion of the right of the council to control patronage, but it is, at the same time, {170} perfectly clear that in the opinion of the ministers the disposal of patronage formed part of the system of responsible government, and that they were quite explicit to Metcalfe in their statements on that point. The incident, striking enough in itself, gave occasion for an extraordinary outburst of pamphleteering; and the reckless or incompetent statements of men on either side make it necessary to dispel one or two illusions created by the partizan excitement of the time. On the side of the council, Hincks, the inspector-general, then and afterwards contended that the incident was only an occasion and a pretext; that Stanley had sent Metcalfe out to wreck the system of responsible government, so far conceded by Sydenham and Bagot; and that the episode of 1843 was part of a deeper plot to check the growth of Canadian freedom.[11] Apart from the absurdities contained in Hincks' statement of the case, the only answer which need be made to the charge is that, if Stanley could have descended to such ign.o.ble plotting, Metcalfe was the last man in the world to act as his dishonoured instrument. On the other side, Gibbon Wakefield believed that {171} the council chose the occasion to escape from a defeat otherwise inevitable, in the hope that a renewed agitation for responsible government might reinstate them in public favour. As Metcalfe gave the suggestion some authority by accepting it provisionally in a despatch,[12] the details of Wakefield's charge may be given. The ministry, he held, had been steadily weakening. Two bills, advocated by them, had been abandoned owing to the opposition of their followers. The French solidarity had begun to break up, and La Fontaine had found in Viger a rival in the affections of his adherents.

The ministers, intoxicated by the possession of a little brief authority, had offended the sense of the House by their arrogance; and the debates concerning the change of the seat of government from Kingston to Montreal had been a cause of stumbling to many. With their authority weakened in the House, doubtful in the country, and more than doubtful with the governor-general, the resignation of the ministers, in Wakefield's view of the case, "upon a ground which was sure to obtain for them much popular sympathy, was about the most politic of their ministerial acts."[13]

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But the ministry possessed and continued to possess a great parliamentary majority; and a dissolution could not in any way have improved their position. Besides this, the alienation of the councillors from the governor-general had developed far more deeply than was generally supposed; indeed it is difficult to see how common action between the opposing interests could have continued with any real benefit to the public. On May 23rd, that is six months before the resignation, Captain Higginson, the Governor's civil secretary, had an interview with La Fontaine, to ascertain his views on the appointment of a provincial aide-de-camp, and on general topics. The accuracy of Higginson's _precis_ of the conversation was challenged by La Fontaine, but its terms seem moderate and probable, and do not misrepresent the actual position of the Executive Council in 1843--a determined opposition to the governor-general's attempt to destroy government by party: "Mr. La Fontaine said, 'Your attempts to carry on the government on principles of conciliation must fail. Responsible government has been conceded, and when we lose our majority we are prepared to retire; to strengthen us we must have the entire confidence of the Governor-general exhibited most {173} unequivocally--and also his patronage--to be bestowed exclusively on our political adherents. We feel that His Excellency has kept aloof from us. The opposition p.r.o.nounce that his sentiments are with them. There must be some acts of his, some public declaration in favour of responsible government, and of confidence in the Cabinet, to convince them of their error.

This has been studiously avoided.'"[14] The truth is that the ministry felt the want of confidence, which, on the governor's own confession, existed in his mind towards them. Believing, too, as all of them did more or less, in party, they must already have learned the views of Metcalfe on that subject, and they suspected him of taking counsel with the conservatives, whom Metcalfe declared to be the only true friends to Britain in Canada. Matters of patronage Metcalfe had determined, as far as possible, to free from party dictation; and so he and his ministers naturally fell out on the most obvious issue which their mutual differences could have raised. There was nothing disingenuous in the popular party claiming that the patronage question stood in this case for the broader issue. Indeed Metcalfe's own statement that "he objected to the {174} exclusive distribution of patronage with party views and maintained the principle that office ought, in every instance, to be given to the man best qualified to render efficient service to the State" was actually a challenge to the predominance of the party-cabinet system, which no const.i.tutionalist could have allowed to pa.s.s in silence. Egerton Ryerson, to whom in this instance the maxim about the cobbler sticking to his last is applicable, erected a ridiculous defence for Metcalfe, holding that "according to British practice, the councillors ought to have resigned on what Metcalfe had done, and not on what he would not promise to do. If the Crown intended to do just as they desired the governor-general to do, still the promise ought not to be given, nor ought it to have been asked.

The moment a man promises to do a thing he ceases to be as free as he was before he made the promise."[15] The actual struggle lay between two schools directly opposed in their interpretation of responsible government; and since Sir Charles Metcalfe definitely and avowedly set himself against cabinet government, the party system, and the place of party in allocating patronage, the ministers were not free to allow him to {175} appoint men at his own discretion. For the sake of a theory of government for which many of them had already sacrificed much, they were bound to defend what their opponents called the discreditable cause of party patronage.

The line of action which the members of council followed had already been sketched out by Robert Baldwin in his encounter with Sydenham. In the debate of June 18th, 1841, Baldwin had admitted that should the representative of the Crown be unwilling to accept the advice offered to him by his council, it would be impossible by any direct means to force that advice upon him. But he also held that this did not relieve the members of council for a moment from the fulfilment of an imperative duty. "If their advice," he said, "were accepted--well and good. If not, their course would be to tender their resignations."[16]

This indeed was battle _a outrance_ between two conflicting theories of government. Russell, Sydenham, and Metcalfe, had refused to admit self-government beyond a certain limit, and Metcalfe, in accepting the situation created by the resignation of his ministers, was battling very directly for his view. On the other side, Baldwin and the {176} colonial politicians had claimed autonomy as far as it might be granted within the empire. By resigning their offices, they called on their opponents to make the alternative system work. For two years Metcalfe occupied himself with the task they set him.

It is not necessary to enter into all the details of those years. The relevant facts group themselves round three centres of interest--the painful efforts put forth by Metcalfe to build up a new council, the general election through which he sought to find a party for his ministers, and the att.i.tude of the colony towards the new ministers, and of both toward the representative of the Crown on the eve of his departure for England in 1845.

The struggle to reconstruct the ministry was peculiarly distressing, and ended in a very qualified success. Daly, Metcalfe's one remaining councillor, carried no weight in the country. Baldwin and his group could not be approached; and Harrison, the most moderate of the reformers, had previously resigned over the question of the removal of the seat of government from Kingston. In Lower Canada, Metcalfe found himself almost as much the object of French hatred as Sydenham had been, and it was with great difficulty that he {177} secured Viger to represent the French Canadians in his council--at the expense of Viger's influence among his compatriots.[17] By the end of 1843, Metcalfe had secured the services of three men, "Viger representing the French party, and Mr. Daly and Mr. Draper representing in some degree as to each both the British and moderate Reform parties."[18]

Officious supporters, of whom Egerton Ryerson was chief, did their best to introduce to the governor competent outsiders, and Draper used his reputation for moderation in the effort to secure suitable candidates.

Even after the election of 1844 was over, Draper, and Caron, the Speaker in the Upper House, actually attempted an intrigue with La Fontaine; and although the episode brought little credit to any of the parties concerned, La Fontaine at least recognized how much was involved in acceptance or rejection of the proposals of government--when he said: "If under the system of accepting office at any price, there are persons, who, for a personal and momentary advantage, do not fear to break the only bond which const.i.tutes our strength, union among ourselves, I do not wish to be, and I never will be, of the {178} number."[19] Eventually a patchwork ministry was constructed, but its pitiable weakness proved how difficult it was to create a council, except along orthodox British party lines. It was a _reductio ad absurdum_ of the eclectic principle of cabinet building.

The reconstruction of the council involved a dissolution of Parliament.

The late councillors had a steady and decisive majority in the existing a.s.sembly; and the governor-general found it necessary to face the risk of an appeal to the country. The fate of Lower Canada he could imagine beforehand; nothing but accident could prevent the return of an overwhelming majority against his men. Even among the western British settlers an unprejudiced observer reported early in 1844 that more than nine-tenths of the western voters were supporters of the late Executive Council.[20] Montreal, which, thanks to Sydenham's manoeuvres, counted among the British seats, returned an opponent of the new Ministers at a bye-election in April, 1844, although the {179} government party explained away the defeat by stories of Irish violence. But Metcalfe's extraordinary persistence, and his belief that the battle was really one for the continuance of the British connection, gave him and his supporters renewed vigour, and, even to-day, the election of November, 1844, is remembered as one of the fiercest in the history of the colony. Politics in Canada still recognized force as one of the natural, if not quite legitimate, elements in the situation, and it was eminently characteristic of local conditions that, early in his term of office, Metcalfe should have reported that meetings had been held near Kingston at which large numbers of persons attended armed with bludgeons, and, in some cases, with firearms.[21] Montreal, with all its possibilities of conflict, and with its reputation for disorder to maintain, led the-way in election riots. In April, 1844, according to the loyalists, the reformers had won through the use of Irish labourers brought in from the Lachine ca.n.a.l. However that may be, the military had been called in, and at least one death had resulted from the confused rioting of the day.[22] In November, the loyalists in their turn organized {180} a counter demonstration, and the success of the loyal party was not altogether disconnected with physical force.[23]

From the west came similar stories of violence and trickery. In the West Riding of Halton, the Tories were said to have delayed voting, which seemed to be setting against them, by various stratagems, including the swearing in of old grey-headed men as of 21 years of age, and among the accusations made by the defeated candidate was one that certain deputy returning officers had allowed seven women to vote for the sitting member.[24] On the whole the election went in favour of the governor-general, although Metcalfe took too favourable a view of the situation when he reported the avowed supporters of government as 46, as against 28 avowed adversaries. At best his majority could not rise above six. Yet even so, the decision of the country still seems astonis.h.i.+ng. There was the unflinching Tory element at the centre; and the British members from Lower Canada. Ryerson had used his great influence among the Methodists, and, since the cry was one of loyalty to the Crown, many waverers {181} may have voted on patriotic grounds for the government candidates. Metcalfe's reputation, too, counted for him, for he had already become known as more than generous, and one of his successors estimated that he spent 6,000 a year in excess of his official income. "It must be admitted," he himself wrote to Stanley, "that this majority has been elected by the loyalty of the majority of the people of Upper Canada, and of those of the Eastern towns.h.i.+ps in Lower Canada."[25]

The government, and presumably also the governor-general, were accused of having secured their victory by doubtful tactics, and Elgin reported in 1847 that his a.s.sembly, which was that of the 1844 election, had had much discredit thrown on it on the ground that the late governor-general had interfered unduly in the elections.[26] Neither side had been perfectly scrupulous in its methods of warfare, and it is not necessary to blame Metcalfe for the misguided zeal and cunning of his Ministers and his country supporters. Be that as it may, the governor-general had won a hard-fought victory--Pyrrhic as it proved.

Throughout this political warfare, Metcalfe had {182} been sustained by the strong support of the home government. The cabinet announced itself ready to give him every possible support in maintaining the authority of the Queen, and of her representative, against unreasonable and exorbitant pretensions.[27] In the debate on the troubles, which Roebuck introduced on May 30th, 1844, all the leading men on either side, Stanley, Peel, Russell, and Buller, warmly supported the governor, Russell and Buller being as strong in their reprobation of the demands of the council as Stanley himself.[28] And the chorus of approval culminated in the letters from Peel and Stanley, which announced the conferring of a peerage on Metcalfe "as a public mark of her Majesty's cordial approbation of the judgment, ability, and fidelity, with which he had discharged the important trust confided to him by her Majesty."[29] In a sense the honours and praise were not altogether out of place. Metcalfe had been sent out to conduct the administration of Canada on what we now regard as an impossible system; and unlike his immediate predecessors he had conceded not one point to the other side. In spite of all that his enemies could say, his {183} personal honour and dignity remained untarnished. The nicknames and cruel taunts flung at him, in the earlier months, apparently by his own ministers, recoil now on their heads, as the petty insults of unmannerly politicians; indeed, the accusations which they made of simplicity and honesty, simply reinforce the impression of quixotic high-mindedness, which was not the least n.o.ble feature in Metcalfe's character. His generosity had been unaffected by his difficulties; and there are few finer things in the history of British administration than the sense of duty exhibited throughout 1845 by Lord Metcalfe, when, dying of cancer in the cheek, almost blind, and altogether unable to write his despatches, he still clung to his post "to secure the preservation of this colony and the supremacy of the mother country."

It is easy to separate the man from the official, and to praise the former as one of the n.o.blest of early Victorian administrators.

But even before Lord Metcalfe's departure at the end of 1845, the inadequacy of his system stood revealed. He had indeed a majority in the a.s.sembly, but a small and doubtful majority; and since its members had been elected rather to support Metcalfe than to co-operate with his ill-a.s.sorted {184} ministry, difficulties very soon revealed themselves. There were causes of dissension, chief among them the University question in Upper Canada, which threatened to wreck the government party. But the most ominous sign of coming defeat was the incompatibility of temper which rapidly developed between loyal ministers and loyal a.s.sembly. "It is remarkable," Metcalfe wrote in May, 1845, "that none of the Executive Council, although all are estimable and respectable, exercise any great influence over the party which supports the government. Mr. Draper is universally admitted to be the most talented man in either House of the Legislature, and his presence in the Legislative a.s.sembly was deemed to be so essential, that he resigned his seat in the Upper House, sacrificing his own opinions in order that he might take the lead in the a.s.sembly; nevertheless he is not popular with the party that supports the government, nor with any other, and I do not know that, strictly speaking, he can be said to have a single follower. The same may be remarked of every other member of the Executive Council; and although I have much reason to be satisfied with them, and have no expectation of finding others who would serve her Majesty better, still I do not {185} perceive that any of them individually have brought much support to the government."[30]