Yet honor
made them hesitate to set the defenseless colonies adrift to be
seized by the first hungry neighbor.
At this juncture the plans for uniting all the colonies in one
great federation seemed to open a way out; united, the colonies
could stand alone. Thus Confederation found support in Britain as
well as a stimulus from the United States. This, however, was not
enough. Confederation would not have come when it did--and that
might have meant it would never have come at all--had not party
and sectional deadlock forced Canadian politicians to seek a
remedy in a wider union.
At first all had gone well with the Union of 1841. It did not
take the politicians long to learn how to use the power that
responsible government put into their hands. After Elgin's day
the Governor General fell back into the role of constitutional
monarch which cabinet control made easy for him. In the forties,
men had spoken of Sydenham and Bagot, Metcalfe and Elgin; in the
fifties, they spoke of Baldwin and La Fontaine, Hincks and
Macdonald and Cartier and Brown, and less and less of the
Governors in whose name these men ruled. Politics then attracted
more of the country's ablest men than it does now, and the party
leaders included many who would have made their mark in any
parliament in the world. Baldwin and La Fontaine, united to the
end, resigned office in 1851, believing that they had played
their part in establishing responsible government and feeling out
of touch with the radical elements of their following who were
demanding further change.
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