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But before liberal-conservatism came into full power, Elgin had gone. His last year of office had been, perhaps, his most illustrious. Already he had proved himself an infallible constitutionalist. He had wooed and won the French into ways of quiet government and confidence in British administration. He had refused to give way to tory violence, and not a little of the confidence which, even after 1851, the country placed in their government, was due to his astute moderation. He was to complete the tale of a successful rule by bringing to Canada the measure of reciprocity with the United States for which Canadians had so long been calling.

Not slowly, but surely, Elgin had been winning his way into the good graces of the United States. As early as 1849 he had found the republican government willing to protect his province against improper interference along the border-line. In the following year a rapprochement between the citizens of Buffalo and Toronto had found Elgin the real centre of attraction. ‘By Heaven,’ one of the visitors had declared, ‘if he were on our side, we’d make him President.’ A year later he had met and dominated, by his diplomatic friendliness, all sections of American society at Boston. And now, during the last months of his tenure of office, he turned all this general popularity to very definite account. Since the commercial revolution in Britain in 1846 the great object before Canadian commerce had been to restore the balance lost through the disappearance of the British preference, and to create freer trafficking with the United States. Reciprocity was mentioned in Elgin’s earliest speech to parliament, and he saw from the first that the cry for annexation, being really commercial and not political, could best be met by gaining without annexation all the fruits which Canadian merchants looked for as the consequences of annexation. The idea had been flung back and forward between the two states in the intervening years.

The Committee on Commerce, in the House of Representatives, had been instructed, as early as December 1846, to inquire into the question. Two years later a bill passed through the House of Representatives only to die a natural death thereafter, and between that date and 1854 the balance swung up and down, the desire to complete negotiations being as absent among the Americans as the power to complete was lacking in Canada. The commercial settlement has been traced elsewhere.^[1] The political interest lies in the final proof which it gave of Elgin’s diplomatic skill. Happily the story of the whole affair, not too whimsically humorous, remains behind in the writings and letters of that eccentric genius Laurence Oliphant, who served with Elgin throughout the short campaign.

On May 23, 1854, Elgin arrived in New York, and hurried on to Washington. In the next two weeks his assiduous friendliness and seeming absence of reserve had won the democratic votes, which might have wrecked his work; and on June 5 ‘there was concluded, in exactly a fortnight, a treaty, to negotiate which had taxed the inventive genius of the Foreign Office and all the conventional methods of diplomacy for the previous seven years.’ To appraise the value of his labours it is unnecessary to attribute to Elgin any great genius in economic theory, or even to claim unusual subtlety in what Europe called statecraft. But he understood the genius of the people with whom he had to cope; and where his reason refused acquiescence in their political methods, he was courtier enough to seem friendlier even than he was. ‘He is the most thorough diplomat possible,’ wrote Oliphant with an admiration which was not entirely lacking in wonder,’ never loses sight of his object, and while he is chaffing Yankees, and slapping them on the back, he is systematically pursuing that object. The consequence is, he is the most popular Englishman that ever visited the United States.’

[1]	See ‘Economic History, 1840-1867’ in this volume.