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A general estimate of his work must, however, be based on something more comprehensive than the few short months of parliament at Kingston. There were the pioneer labours in the separate provinces, the sallies beyond the Canadas themselves into general British North American politics, and the arrogant assertions of his right to dictate and change at his will the instructions of the British government to his province.

It is possible, and perhaps correct, to contend that his main service to the country lay in ‘things done’; for he left Canada the richer by two years of the most incessant work. He was a kind of Hercules, attempting with amazing success the seemingly impossible tasks set him by British North America. Under him local government became a practical thing: schools were called into existence, public works were started, immigration controlled, the United States taught to respect the decencies of the border, land-granting systematized, and the clergy reserves troubles modified, if not ended. In this sphere a simple list of the statutes passed in the first Union parliament is the best evidence of his success. More important perhaps than any of these—he set a new standard of efficiency in public administration, rebuking, dismissing, economizing. Even Bishop Strachan had to own a master, and put on a humility which ill became him, when Sydenham, discovering that a large sum of money had been borrowed from the funds of the university by the Right Rev. President of King’s College ‘for his private purposes, on the security of various notes of hand, and that several of these notes had not been paid when due,’ proceeded to read a lesson to him, and at the same time to the whole community. ‘It appears,’ wrote his secretary in his name, ‘that a loan of a considerable sum was made by one of the Council to one of the members of the Board. Such a proceeding His Excellency cannot by any means view in the light of an ordinary money transaction. The employment of the funds of a public trust, by one of the Trustees, for his own advantage, is a proceeding which in His Excellency’s opinion is highly objectionable, and calculated to destroy the confidence of the public in the management of the University.’ The British standard in the administration of public money has ever been high, and Canada, between 1839 and 1841, received more than one lesson in this first postulate of public life.

But the most vital and important service rendered by Sydenham to Canada was something subtler and more difficult to describe—he gave her an organized political life. To have effected a union was only the beginning of the battle. It is true that Sydenham’s part in the Union was more important than that of the imperial legislature which sanctioned it, for he conciliated the individual interests antagonistic to the measure. ‘It was by playing with men’s vanity,’ says an eccentric pamphleteer, ‘tampering with their interests, their passions and their prejudices, and placing himself in a position of familiarity with those of whom he might at once obtain assistance and information, that he succeeded in carrying out what Lord Durham had left to some more practical person to effect.’ What is this, if only we change the temper of the utterance, but to confess the man a great diplomatist, and possessed of one of the first essentials of the practical statesman?

Still there was sterner work than mere diplomacy to be accomplished. Before Union could be regarded as secure, there had to be created, not only a new system of political machinery, but a school of public manners, and that atmosphere of compromise and understanding which is at least half of the British constitution. How little Sydenham could rely on the material at his disposal a brilliant dispatch of December 15, 1839, reveals. It was written in Toronto, and from his picture of Upper Canada politics and their chaotic conditions it is easy to imagine what the Union parliament would have been if some higher power had not intervened. The assembly was a chaos, in which not even the members of government had any coherent scheme. On the most important questions public officers were to be found on both sides, and the desires of government had no apparent influence on the conduct of its so-called upholders. Individualism ruled supreme, with its usual satellite, jobbery, in its train. Above the assembly, the council was conducted on lines which necessarily involved collision with the more popular body. ‘The whole power of this branch of the legislature has been really exercised by a very few individuals, representing a mere clique in the capital, frequently opposed both to the government and the Assembly, and considered by the people hostile to their interests.’ In the same way, while the governor had practically abdicated his power in favour of the executive council, and while all men counted the council the responsible body, it was ‘composed of men, not only in whom confidence is not placed, but whose opinions are known to be opposed to those of the people.’ In keeping with all this confusion worse confounded, the administration of the province had fallen into such disrepair that, said the governor-general, ‘if the province should escape without loss, the circumstance is to be attributed rather to the character of the public servants than to any precautionary measures.’

Such were conditions on the eve of a great gift of popular government to Canada, and the situation became all the more critical because it had not yet become clear what relation the growing colony was to have to the mother country. It is easy to be wise in the light of later experiences, and to point out the obvious advantages of home rule; but absolute home rule was both unthought of then, and impossible of achievement even had it been advocated. Sydenham came at a transition stage in Canadian political life, and while his system depended too exclusively on the man who worked it, and was certain to involve its own defeat, Canada could only attain her true government through this ‘Sydenham’ stage, and Sydenham was almost the only man who could have done the work.

The key of the situation, for him, lay in the governorship. He was a radical entirely imperial in his outlook, and he could have brooked the peaceful dissolution of the Empire as little as Lincoln was prepared to accept the claim of the individual states against the Federal Union. Now the imperial power resided for Sydenham in the governorship, and that he could delegate to no executive, nor stultify to please any popular assembly. Time and again he asserted his doctrine, correcting the colonial secretary himself where he seemed to require tuition. When the Upper Canada provincial assembly inquired whether any communication had been received from the colonial secretary on the subject of responsible government, Sydenham coldly intimated his regret that it was not in his power to communicate to the House of Assembly any dispatches upon the subject referred to, and Lord John Russell had his procedure corrected for him from Canada.

‘The governor,’ to quote his own terse phrase, ‘must be personally responsible for all his administrative acts, and an executive council cannot therefore be made so.’ He represented at once the royal power, and, through it, the bond of imperial union, and nothing must weaken either. Equally valid in its own way with this imperatorial power was popular right, but the people in Sydenham’s eyes were a flock to be guided, and he believed in the oriental fashion of the shepherd going before his sheep. In the House of Assembly, the express image of the people, it was his ambition not to see petty divisions—he knew that Canada was too small in politics, had too few great exciting issues, to be able to support real party divisions—but to see a union of the moderates.

Nowhere is the man more splendidly clear-sighted than when he dismisses existing so-called ‘parties’ with a sweep of the pen. ‘Party, according to our English sense, can scarcely be said to exist, and the English party names, though adopted here, do not in the slightest degree describe the opinions of those who assume them or to whom they are assigned.’ And, again, he refers to ‘the delusive nature of the party nicknames borrowed from England.’ With the instinct of a great administrator he determined, like Bismarck and Cavour, to govern through a liberal-conservative party; for that is really what his support from the moderates amounted to. But such a party is always the creation of some master influence, and in Sydenham’s relation to this party we face the most remarkable aspect of his governmental practice. It was his desire, in spite of autocratic leanings, to meet the wishes of the people, although at times these were ill-informed; but to divest himself of his viceregal and imperial authority would be both a crime and a blunder. Between him and the popular assembly there came an executive, but that executive was not the creature of the people; it was his own instrument. Looking back, he saw instance after instance where a dictatorial governor had flaunted a hostile executive in the face of his assembly. In his opinion the fault there lay, not in the power possessed by the governor, but in the use he made of it. ‘I consider it,’ he wrote in 1840 during trouble in Nova Scotia, ‘both unwise and imprudent to have persevered in maintaining a particular set of men in such a capacity in whom the Assembly had notoriously no confidence, rather than select others more acceptable to them.’ To him a colonial governor, because of his peculiar position, represented the royal power as it had been when the king was his own prime minister, the council really his servants, and the one check on his autocracy the knowledge that government was possible only when the people’s wishes were considered.

It is easy to see the dangers involved in Sydenham’s position. He feared that the representative of monarchy should be deprived of all real power, and, in his place, there should arise a cabinet, the creature of uninstructed and irresponsible public opinion. That, on the whole, would mean separation, and separation never occurred to Sydenham as a possible solution to anything. But was there not as serious a risk, even on his theory? Assume a grave divergence of opinion between the governor and his executive, and the people; what then? If the king or his representative has all the power, he has the power to do wrong; and constitutional government is erected on the maxim that he cannot. Sydenham saw the point and accepted the risk. It says much for his logic that when the Nova Scotians did differ from their governor, and actually petitioned that he might be removed, the governor-general approved of their line of action as contrasted with the claim of the people to control the executive council. However unusual, it was ‘the legitimate mode for the legislature to adopt when it was dissatisfied with the executive government’; and he proceeded in luminous words to speak of ‘the mischief which must inevitably arise from intrusting the delicate and difficult task of governing with a popular assembly, to persons whose previous pursuits have left them practically unacquainted with the management and working of such bodies.’ What he dreamed of was a popular government, but one where the truest popularist was the autocrat at the top; and I suppose he justified himself, as against critics of all such ‘patriot princes,’ by pointing out that, in the case of Canada, the governor was chosen, not born, and that it was easy to get the right man. At least, he cherished no doubts as to his own appropriateness.

At the same time, Sydenham was fortunate in the period set to his work by death. He seems to have been conscious that he had played his part, for the fatal accident of September merely precipitated the termination of an administration which would have ended with 1841. While the political and social life of Canada was crude, it was only for lack of opportunity; and when once a proper start had been made and a fit example set, Canadians learned so rapidly that the viceregal pedagogue-prime-minister was certain to find his position untenable. Even before the end of the first parliament symptoms of trouble had appeared. The faculty for accepting tuition, more particularly in politics, is one of the least permanent elements in ordinary humanity; and not all Sydenham’s tact could disguise the fact that Canada was being consciously and firmly educated by her governor-general. Besides, the united legislature was no ideal group of men, but a turbulent and divided mass, with racial hate at the centre lying in wait for its opportunity. Sydenham’s success, as has been shown, was less than he himself thought, thanks chiefly to the French. He tried to conciliate those restless spirits, but ‘members of that party who accepted office were invariably rejected from their seats, when they sought to be re-elected, and an overture made to the party through Mr La Fontaine was abruptly broken off. As the session advanced, the supporters of the government, thus weakened, were so reduced in numbers that, with all their exertions, some of the most important ministerial measures were passed by a bare majority, and in one or two cases by the casting vote of the speaker.’

It may seem a lame conclusion to a great man’s work—the lamer because his political practice has been chosen as the most eminent contribution made by Sydenham to Canadian progress. But there are things, doomed to failure, which yet are necessary before the next step in progress can be made, and in his two short years Sydenham taught Canada the meaning of true authority, the importance of public honour and spirit, the methods by which honourable politicians combine in cabinet and party, and the possibility of being popular without pandering to the low inclinations of the political mob. I doubt if he ever could have comprehended the real danger of his system, but then he was perhaps the one man living who might have made it work. And, if the opposition to him grew, it is well to remember that, coincident with that opposition, he was carrying through a mass of legislation such as no ordinary legislature would accomplish in ten years; and that in addition he had taken from discontent all its real sting and danger. To recur once more to Greville’s estimate of the man:

He was always known to be a man of extraordinary industry, but nobody knew that he had such a knowledge of human nature, and such a power of acquiring influence over others.... Though of a weak and slender frame, and his constitution wretched, he made journeys which would have appeared hard work to the most robust men.... These are the materials out of which greatness is made—indefatigable industry, great penetration, powers of persuasion, confidence in himself, decision, boldness, firmness.

Few groups of men have so disguised the higher things of life—its heroics—in utilities, as that to which Sydenham belonged. Yet free trade, and the relief of the poor, and the quest for peace, and the bringing of innumerable humanities into our average lives are no despicable achievements, and if the establishment of decency and order in Canada, and the origination of a great experiment in colonial democracy, have little in them to win popular cheers, wise men appreciate in silence, and remember.