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It would be absurd to make a hero of the man. He belonged to a school of British radicalism, very useful, but almost on principle unromantic; and where he diverged from his fellows into fopperies and conceits, the divergence hardly raised him in the scale of manhood. That sound and concrete critic of politicians, Charles Greville, records the impression Thomson made on him before he left Britain: ‘Civil, well-bred, intelligent and agreeable,’ high in the good opinion of his political leaders, counting in the house through a knowledge which Greville half suspected to be borrowed, unable to recommend himself absolutely to the sceptical analysis of the man of the world. He had not yet had his chance, but the undoubted self-complacency, not to say vanity, which helped him so much in Canada, his minor moral defects, the valetudinarian element in him, and the absence of a definite certificate of aristocratic standing, made most men hesitate in their judgments. Not excepting the Duke, there were few heroes in early Victorian politics, and a man ‘with a finikin manner, and a dangling after an old London harridan,’ seemed hardly likely even to approximate to the heroic stature. Yet Thomson had an immense reserve power for administrative purposes, a mind of great strength and self-sufficiency, an unflagging industry, a disinterestedness which came as a revelation to Canadian politicians, and, most unsuspected of all, a persuasiveness and power of managing men which even enemies were bound to acknowledge. ‘He was,’ says Greville, ‘in the habit of talking over the most inveterate opponents of his government, so much so, that at last it became a matter of joking, and the most obstinate of his enemies used to be told that if they set foot in Government House, they would be mollified and enthralled whether they would or no.’ He came to Canada, then, in character an English gentleman with just a dash of the sensualist; in training, one of the aristocracy of British commerce, with all the culture and knowledge involved in that training; in politics, a whig joined in sympathy to the radical and free-trade wing; in general power, one of those rare administrators to whom slovenliness in others comes only as a challenge to introduce order and energy, and finding in work an ever-fresh incentive to further labours. He was no Canadian, nor even sought to be one. ‘I long for September,’ he wrote in 1841, ‘beyond which I will not stay if they were to make me Duke of Canada, and Prince of Regiopolis.’ Yet he did for Canada what no Canadian could have done for her, and must count along with the greatest of his successors as a true founder of the Dominion.