hospitable, generous, and kind, but at the same time incapable of
understanding colonial conditions and aspirations, ignorant of the
principles and working of representative institutions, and too ready
to apply arbitrary methods to the administration of civil affairs.
Then they have had men who were suddenly drawn from some inconspicuous
position in the parent state, like Sir Francis Bond Head, and allowed
by an apathetic or ignorant colonial office to prove their want of
discretion, tact, and even common sense at a very critical stage of
Canadian affairs. Again there have been governors of the highest rank
in the peerage of England, like the Duke of Richmond, whose
administration was chiefly remarkable for his success in aggravating
national animosities in French Canada, and whose name would now be
quite forgotten were it not for the unhappy circumstances of his
death.[1] Then Canadians have had the good fortune of the presence of
Lord Durham at a time when a most serious state of affairs
imperatively demanded that ripe political knowledge, that cool
judgment, and that capacity to comprehend political grievances which
were confessedly the characteristics of this eminent British
statesman. Happily for Canada he was followed by a keen politician and
an astute economist who, despite his overweening vanity and his
tendency to underrate the ability of "those fellows in the
colonies"--his own words in a letter to England--was well able to
gauge public sentiment accurately and to govern himself accordingly
during his short term of office. Since the confederation of the
provinces there has been a succession of distinguished governors, some
bearing names famous in the history of Great Britain and Ireland, some
bringing to the discharge of their duties a large knowledge of public
business gained in the government of the parent state and her wide
empire, some gifted with a happy faculty of expressing themselves with
ease and elegance, and all equally influenced by an earnest desire to