It ended speedily,in the good way;Canada got a Godfrey's-cordial Constitution;and for the moment all was varnished into some kind of feasibility again.A most poor feasibility;momentary,lasting,like to be of profit to Canada!For this year,the Canadian most constitutional Parliament,such a congeries of persons as one can imagine,decides that the aforesaid flame of rebellion shall only be forgotten as per bargain,but that--the loyal population,who flung their lives upon it and quenched it in the nick of time,shall pay the rebels their damages!Of this,I believe,on sadly conclusive evidence,there is doubt whatever.Such,when you wash off the constitutional pigments,is the Death's-head that discloses itself.I can only say,if all the Parliaments in the world were to vote that such a thing was just,I should feel painfully constrained to answer,at my peril,"by the Eternal,never!"And I would recommend any British Gover who might come across that Business,there or here,to overhaul it again.What the meaning of a Gover,if he is to overhaul and control such things,may be,I can conjecture.
A Canadian Lumber-log may as well be made Gover.He might have some cast-metal hand or shoulder-crank (a thing easily contrivable in Birmingham)for signing his name to Acts of the Colonial Parliament;he would be a "native of the country"too,with popularity on that score if on other;--he is your man,if you really want a Log Gover!--I perceive therefore that,besides choosing Parliaments never so well,the New Colonial Office will have aher thing to do:
Contrive to send out a new kind of Govers to the Colonies.
This will be the mainspring of the business;without this the business will go at all.An experienced,wise and valiant British man,to represent the Imperial Interest;he,with such a speaking or silent Collective Wisdom as he can gather round him in the Colony,will evidently be the condition of all good between the Mother Country and it.If you can find such a man,your point is gained;if you can,lost.By him and his Collective Wisdom all manner of true relations,mutual interests and duties such as they do exist in fact between Mother Country and Colony,can be gradually developed into practical methods and results;and all manner of true and le successes,and veracities in the way of governing,be won.Choose well your Gover;--from this or that poor section of the Aristocracy,military,naval,or red-tapist;wherever there are born kings of men,you had better seek them out,and breed them to this work.
All sections of the British Population will be open to you:and,on the whole,you must succeed in finding a man fit .And having found him,I would farther recommend you to keep him some time!It would be a great improvement to end this present adism of Colonial Govers.Give your Gover due power;and let him k withal that he is wedded to his enterprise,and having once well learned it,shall continue with it;that it is a Canadian Lumber-log you want there,to tumble upon the vertexes and sign its name by a Birmingham shoulder-crank,but a Gover of Men;who,you mean,shall fairly gird himself to his enterprise,and fail with it and conquer with it,and as it were live and die with it:he will have much to learn;and having once learned it,will stay,and turn his kledge to account.
From this kind of Gover,were you once in the way of finding him with moderate certainty,from him and his Collective Wisdom,all good whatsoever might be anticipated.And surely,were the Colonies once enfranchised from red-tape,and the poor Mother Country once enfranchised from it;were our idle Seventy-fours all busy carrying out streams of British Industrials,and those Scoundrel Regiments all working,under divine drill-sergeants,at the grand Atlantic and Pacific Junction Railway,--poor Britain and her poor Colonies might find that they had true relations to each other:that the Imperial Mother and her constitutionally obedient Daughters were a red-tape fiction,provoking bitter mockery as at present,but a blessed God's-Fact destined to fill half the world with its fruits one day!
But undoubtedly our grand primary concern is the Home Office,and its Irish Giant named of Despair.When the Home Office begins dealing with this Irish Giant,which it is vitally urgent for us the Home Office should straightway do,it will find its duties enlarged to a most unexpected extent,and,as it were,altered from top to bottom.A changed time when the question is,What to do with three millions of paupers (come upon you for food,since you have work for them)increasing at a frightful rate per day?Home Office,Parliament,King,Constitution will find that they have ,if they will continue in this world long,got a quite immense new question and continually recurring set of questions.That huge question of the Irish Giant with his Scotch and English Giant-Progeny advancing open-mouthed upon us,will,as I calculate,change from top to bottom the Home Office only but all manner of Offices and Institutions whatsoever,and gradually the structure of Society itself.Iperceive,it will make us a new Society,if we are to continue a Society at all.For the alternative is ,Stay where we are,or change?But Change,with new wise effort fit for the new time,to true and wider ler National Life;or Change,by indolent folding of the arms,as we are doing,in horrible anarchies and convulsions to Dissolution,to National Death,or Suspended-animation?Suspended-animation itself is a frightful possibility for Britain:this Anarchy whither all Europe has preceded us,where all Europe is weltering,would suit us as ill as any!The question for the British Nation is:Can we work our course pacifically,on firm land,into the New Era;or must it be,for us too,as for all the others,through black abysses of Anarchy,hardly escaping,if we do with all our struggles escape,the jaws of eternal Death?