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It is a significant fact that the seven years of Canadian history during which the Earl of Elgin and Kincardine held office are the last in which one thinks rather of the British representative in Canada than of the Canadian parliamentary leaders. The concession of popular government was at last to have its free operation, and the last real political leader among the governors-general was last because it fell to him to secure the final triumph of responsible government.

Elgin’s place in the parliamentary development of Canada is outstanding, without being in any sense abnormal. He seldom cared to fling his unrestrained personal influence into the work, to achieve a triumph, possibly complete, but distinctly personal and irregular. He was always the constitutionalist in Canada, with a clear perception of real issues in politics, and bent on convincing men, even when he was most personal in his application, that they were to seek not his friendship, but the political good of the community. He belonged to the most distinguished school of politicians and administrators produced in England during the nineteenth century—the Peelites. His fellow-students at Oxford included Gladstone, Dalhousie and Canning, and all of them reflected the calm wisdom, the faculty for imperial and objective judgment, and the love of peace and order which distinguished their great master. The accomplishment of constitutional government in Canada is of a piece with the reorganization of India, which Dalhousie superintended, the revolution in commercial theory and practice, secured by Peel himself, and the beginning of scientific administration in Ireland, made by Gladstone. Although they never used the name, these men formed such a liberal-conservative party in England as Bismarck created for his work in Germany, as Macdonald found essential for Canada; in other words, they struck a happy average between routine administration and the excitement of reform.

Elgin had already won his spurs; and if he added little to Metcalfe’s beneficent labours, he was able to boast that his rule in Jamaica had been one of considerable social progress. He had other recommendations. He was a Scotsman, coming to a colony where the name of Bruce awakened memories of Scottish glory; and once at least, in 1849, he found the adage ‘Highlanders, shoulder to shoulder’ operate in his favour among his fellow-countrymen in Glengarry. He was also the husband of the daughter of the man who had reawakened hopes of popular control in Canada; and the name of Durham was a personal link between him and the reformers, who looked to Durham as their first real friend in high quarters.