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Metcalfe’s first beginnings were not unpeaceful. In a tour through part of the province he was received ‘with demonstrations of loyalty to H.M. the Queen, and with kindness towards himself,’ and in his first parliament the address was adopted without opposition. But the air was in a highly electric condition. The question of a change in the seat of government threatened to set the British against the French inhabitants; and both of them against the little circle of dwellers near Kingston, Lord Sydenham’s choice of capital. Not only was the eternal trouble of the clergy reserves ready to fill any gap in the proceedings of government, but there was a strong anti-Anglican movement to secularize the provincial university, and the political and religious turbulence of Orange societies demanded some kind of solution. Deeper down in men’s minds were the doubts entertained by Canadian reformers as to the reality of the self-government granted them by Britain.

In the struggle which followed, pamphleteers and speakers contradicted and asseverated with reckless disregard for truth. To Gibbon Wakefield it was ‘a great disturbance, apparently about nothing,’ a complication of reforming ambition with sheer bad manners.^[1] To Egerton Ryerson it was a factious attempt of unscrupulous politicians to snatch from the governor-general powers of patronage which they had previously disavowed as undesirable in administration. To Metcalfe and Stanley it was a bold attempt to erect an independent Canada; and the former was convinced enough of the villainy of his earlier ministers to write:

I regard their faint profession of a desire to perpetuate their connection of the colony with the mother country as utterly worthless; although I do not imagine that generally they have separation as their immediate object, their present views being to establish the power of their party, and to be sustained at the expense of the British nation, but with perfect independence of its supremacy in the government of the province.

Through the summer and autumn of 1843 relations between the new governor and his ministers grew more and more strained. Harrison, who was member for Kingston, resigned over the question of the change of capital. The control of the Orange society organization could not be effected along the lines desired by the ministers. The legislative council remained weak through the impossibility of getting politicians from Lower Canada to accept positions in it. The differences in temper and political ideal between governor and ministers grew, and were not simplified by the ill-mannered disregard for Metcalfe’s feelings, which allowed his councils to propose measures without consulting him, and to indulge in ill-tempered criticism behind his back.

The crisis came on November 24. There had been some petty strife over minor appointments, and on that day the two leaders, Baldwin and La Fontaine, came to demand that Metcalfe should ‘not make any appointment, without first taking their advice; and then should make it with a view to sustain their influence.’ It is quite fair to say that the ground of resignation was a demand, ungranted, concerning patronage; but the whole question of responsible government lay beneath, and the views entertained on that subject by Baldwin and La Fontaine on the one hand, and by Metcalfe and Stanley on the other, were absolutely irreconcilable. Nothing remained but battle à outrance. Nor must supporters of the modern system of British democratic government allow surface crudities or rudenesses to conceal the fact that on the main issue the Canadian statesmen were as completely in the right as the British tories were in the wrong. Even on the assumption that ill-manners in politics often amount to constitutional error, and that Metcalfe was pressed beyond decent limits in matters of personal patronage, it was still true that he was supporting an untenable position in constitutional practice. He had come, he said, to govern Canada, not in the interests of a party, but of the whole; and he had no intention of yielding to party pressure. But there was really no such thing as the will and mind of the Canadian population apart from that of the majority, and the majority is most easily expressed in the usual party form. Had Metcalfe been perfectly frank with himself he would have admitted that, since his desires in government coincided with those of the Canadian tories, he must use all his strength and influence to maintain in power not a United-Canada party, but a tory party which could hope for but temporary supremacy, if even that, in the minds of the general mass. Even assuming that the Canadian conservatives were all that he declared them to be—‘the men of wealth and education ... those to whom the country is deeply indebted for putting down the rebellion in Upper Canada ... those who were formerly most conspicuous in their devotion to connection with the British Empire’—they could only secure practical expression for their patriotism by securing a majority in the country; and when Metcalfe and his supporters sought to evade that penalty by talking of ‘the violence of party spirit,’ or by accusations of factiousness, they were not merely ignoring the whole tendency of British politics since 1660, but forgetting that the rebellion in both provinces had been the result of that very position which they seemed inclined to support.

But there was a second and perhaps more excusable error in Metcalfe’s stand. He had adopted Sydenham’s position with regard to the governorship. He had a double responsibility—to the Canadian people, whose wishes he must consider, but also more seriously to the British crown, whose representative he was, and to the British connection, of which he was the most concrete and dignified symbol. It had been Sydenham’s theory that, where discontent existed with the governor in the popular mind, it was much more correct to petition the crown for his removal than to ask him to change his ministers at popular dictation. Metcalfe re-emphasized this position. ‘I could not assent to it,’ he declared, when his ministers asked for guarantees in matters of patronage, ‘without degrading the office of the governor, and submitting to the supremacy of the Council, which it has been the undeviating endeavour of Messrs La Fontaine and Baldwin to establish since their accession to office.’ He regarded these endeavours as pretensions whose consequence would be the subversion of Her Majesty’s government, and he determined to resist them at all cost.

[1]	Wakefield, in his View of Sir Charles Metcalfe’s Government of Canada, declares that it was Kingston town-talk that Metcalfe’s ministers ‘called him Square-toes, to intimate that they deemed him an old-fashioned person of very inferior capacity.’