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The second stage in the political development of United Canada extends from the death of Sydenham to the departure of Lord Metcalfe, his second successor, in 1845. In these years, as in those which preceded them, the centre of political interest is still rather the governor-general than the assembly, or rather is the relation of the governor to the spirit of independence which made such rapid strides in parliament after the first ‘non-political session’—if Gibbon Wakefield’s phrase may be accepted. By his virtues and his defects Sydenham had scattered the seeds of tempest, and his successors reaped the whirlwind.

The causes of trouble were many and obvious. First and foremost came the need for readjustment of the British theory of colonial autonomy. The timid days of paternalism were past, but neither whigs nor tories understood the system for which the colonial leaders were calling—responsible government—nor the actual constitution of the bonds which were to hold Canada to Britain. A colony in their eyes was something tentative, its population British, no doubt, but rudely British, and its government a compromise between a crown colony and the British parliament, but with the emphasis on the crown colony features. Sydenham’s logic, as has been shown, had fixed on the governor-generalship as the key of the situation. As his own prime minister he had determined to create, if necessary, a party. This party was to support an administration of the recognized liberal-conservative type, and his ministers were to represent not a predominant factor, but all shades of Canadian opinion.

The fundamental error in this logical device was that Canadians, being Britons living abroad, naturally claimed the privileges of self-government enjoyed in the mother country; that they were divided into parties; and that they expected party opinion to be as dominant in Canadian government as it was in England. Burke’s eloquent refutation of non-party rule was as valid for nineteenth-century Canada as it had been for Rockingham against the scheme of George iii. To a modern critic nothing seems more obvious than that parliamentary government, exactly as it was practised in Britain, in all its details and with all its liberties, was the only possible method of satisfying Canadian claims.

It was nevertheless difficult for any British government to consent to what seemed simple and logical. The fate of the American colonies hung still over the councils of the Colonial Office, like the clouds of some storm, spent for the present, but with possibilities of recurrence. Catastrophes were still possible in the colonial world. Nor did the colonial reformers make matters simpler. ‘Politics,’ said the Hon. Isaac Buchanan to Ryerson, ‘in a new country are either the essential principles of society, or parish business’; and, unfortunately, not only were parochial details discussed with all the seriousness of essential principles, but the principles, wedded to obscure local matters, and darkened with the violence and personality of village disputes, led Canadian reformers into action neither mannerly, nor useful, nor wise. The work of Somers, Walpole and Pitt, in England, had sometimes to be done in Canada by eccentric reformers and party intriguers. Members of the administration were not always faithful to their cabinets; responsible officials had to be reminded even of so elementary a duty as attendance in the cabinet or assembly; and the air of compromise and consideration for the other side, which is the most valid explanation of British efficiency, was usually absent in Canadian political crises. Friction in practically every serious political resettlement delayed and weakened the work of administration. In spite of Sydenham’s work as political tutor to the colony, the conventions of the game were not yet understood.

The racial question complicated the merely political situation. Durham’s scheme of self-government for Canada had presupposed the swamping of French national spirit as the condition of future peace. Sydenham had systematically ignored French-Canadian claims, and he had not restrained himself from the use of most improper influence to secure predominance for the British party in Lower Canada. The national consequence, more especially of Sydenham’s action, was ‘something very like a private quarrel on his part, with the whole mass of the French inhabitants of Lower Canada.’ Sydenham’s successors, then, had to count, not merely on the normal party divisions, but on this rampant nationalism, dividing existing divisions, and running deep into the social as well as the political fabric of the colony. So tense had the state of French-Canadian feeling become, that the acceptance of government office by one of their number automatically set him apart and ensured his impotence in all matters of active political influence.

Add to the various troubles the youth and crudity of the community, the lack of political education in the new masses of immigrants, the difficulties attached to mere existence in a new land, the slow operation of any but material motives and appeals, the naturalness of what more advanced communities would call corruption, and all the elements of an acute political difficulty are present.