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It is now time to return to the fortunes of the La Fontaine ministry, at the close of the parliamentary session in 1850. They had had other troubles besides those introduced by the clergy reserves question. In spite of the difficult position with regard to the British connection in Canada, British politicians, and among them, unfortunately, Lord John Russell, insisted on speaking as though separation were an inevitable fate, and Britain coolly prepared for the catastrophe. Baldwin, whose loyalty was as steady as it was quiet, felt the unwisdom of Russell’s speech acutely, and Elgin bluntly told the colonial secretary that he must renounce the habit of telling the colonies that the colonial is a provisional existence. Later in the year Merritt, who had accepted office, resigned, on the score of economy. A cry had arisen for retrenchment, and although a large and various committee had frittered away its time in making useless suggestions, and although the ministers saw clearly that the possibilities of reduction were very limited, Merritt, who had an irritable conscience on the matter, and a gift for impracticable ideas, decided to clear himself from the responsibility of extravagance by retirement.

Meanwhile parties and groups were exhibiting themselves in strange combinations and profitless freaks. Enough has been said already of the annexationist section and the British American League. Besides these there was Papineau, playing the ineffectual revolutionist in company with his four or five rouges and MacNab, whom not even the Montreal riots had calmed down into decent conservatism. The truth was that Canada had not yet learned the methods of conducting a true opposition, and ministerial strength produced as its natural result inconsistency and lack of principle in the opposition. How little reality the various opposing fragments possessed is revealed by such facts as, that the Independent, the only annexationist paper in Upper Canada, died in April ‘of inanition’; that at the end of the parliamentary session MacNab made approaches to the governor-general, whom he and his paper, the Hamilton Spectator, had previously been interested in abusing; and that in January 1852, L’Avenir, the journal through which Papineau expressed his views, found the same fate as the Independent.

Nevertheless the position of the ministry was no longer what it had been. Brown’s accumulating hostility was breaking up the solidarity of reform in Upper Canada, and, by connecting violent anti-Roman views with radicalism, was beginning to endanger the connection between French and British. Here, in fact, lay the most dangerous element in the situation; and Elgin must receive credit for being the first to notice it. Aware, as he could not but be, that his impartiality and the solid wisdom of Baldwin and La Fontaine had done much to give the French section their natural place in politics, he saw that the French were naturally conservative in their outlook, and that the British Reform party, with which La Fontaine had co-operated since Union, was, under the influence of Brown and the ‘Clear Grits,’ changing its tone. ‘If Clear-Gritism absorbs all lines of Upper Canadian liberalism,’ wrote Elgin, more than a year before Macdonald understood what his new policy must be, ‘the French, unless some interference from without checks the natural current of events, will fall off from them, and form an alliance with the Upper Canadian Tories.’ The main political interest, then, lies in tracing the decline and fall of the reform party to the point at which a new force, liberal-conservatism, takes over its duties.