Chapter VI

Chronology, or once at variance with her sister History, bids us interrupt the narrative of New Zealand colonization and turn to that remarkable episode in Wakefield's life, his mission to Canada in 1838 as, together with Charles Buller, the confidential adviser of Lord Durham. It is an episode brilliant indeed as regards its momentous consequences to the Empire, but obscure as concerns Wakefield's personal share in it. To the public eye the mission for a while appeared a failure; and yet a real victory was won—the victory of a few ideas which arose silently in the minds of at most three persons, and shaped a State paper which shaped the destinies of the British Colonial Empire. The actual authorship of the Durham Report may perhaps in some degree admit of elucidation, but the origination of the ideas which gave it birth can never be accurately determined. Durham, Charles Buller, Wakefield had in common the attribute of magna-page 159nimity. None of them ever sought to deprive a colleague of a particle of merited honour. As, however, Wakefield's ostensible share in the transactions of Durham's Canadian mission was of necessity much less conspicuous than Durham's or Buller's, it is but redressing the balance to point out that he avowedly stood in the position of instructor to the other two, who in colonial affairs were proud to be accounted his disciples. This needs to be borne in mind, for the indications of his direct agency are of the slightest. It is also to be remembered that whatever may have been his share in inspiring that Magna Charta of the colonies, the Durham Report, this was not the work that he was sent out to accomplish; he was rather expected to apply the Wakefield system to the Crown lands. In truth, the scope of the Durham mission became greatly enlarged, and while it for a while seemed a failure as concerned the minor objects which it was despatched to effect, it was preparing the greatest of successes in a higher sphere. Durham, Buller, Wakefield might all be compared to Saul, the son of Kish; hunting the strayed asses of Canadian disaffection, they found the kingdom of Responsible Government.

It will be necessary to preface the story of Lord Durham's mission and its results with a brief account of the occurrences which had rendered it indispensable.

The reason which led the Government to select Lord Durham for what O'Connell might have called the 'Head-Pacificatorship' of the Canadas was correctly stated by the Quarterly Review. 'They did not know what else to do with him.' It was equally dangerous to take him into the Cabinet, or to leave him out. Within, he would have been an imperious and uncomfortable colleague; without, he was very likely to put himself at the head of the more advanced section of the Liberal party, which, though entirely unable to form a government, was quite capable of upsetting one. Ministers, therefore, justly reasoned that, from a party point of view, nothing but good could come of Lord Durham's appointment to Canada. If he succeeded, the credit would largely redound to the Government, and the thorough settlement of the contingent problems would be a matter of sufficient magnitude to detain him abroad for several years. If he failed, he would return discredited and harmless. Canada was simply a tub thrown to a whale.

It may well be doubted whether, with the exception of Lord John Russell, any of the Ministers thought Lord Durham the fittest man to be entrusted with the government of Canada at such a crisis. And yet, granted one essential condition, he really was so. He had the stainless character, the high spirit, the page 163courage, the disinterestedness, the patriotism, the imperial instinct, the industry necessary for a great Governor-General. His defects were incapacity for the management of men, and inexperience in administrative business. His haughtiness and sensitiveness disqualified him for the arts which the most highminded politicians find indispensable in self-governed communities, and the delicacy of his health had hitherto debarred him from laborious office. These were defects which able counsellors might do much to remedy. Good advice was the one thing needful, and the general success of Durham's measures proves that he knew where to find and how to receive it. The one error in administration he committed was, as we shall see, in nowise discreditable to him, but arose from a generous confidence that the public good would for once be allowed to prevail over legal technicalities.

The men in whom Durham's confidence was chiefly reposed were Charles Buller and Edward Gibbon Wakefield. To the appointment of Buller as his chief secretary no objection could possibly be made; his character was rated even more highly than his ability. The son of an Indian judge, he had in his youth enjoyed the instructions of a very exceptional tutor, Thomas Carlyle; and, as a brilliant young Cantab, had qualified for a legislator by becoming an 'Apostle.' Elected to Parliament at an early age, he had distinguished himself by the page 164liberality of his sentiments, the effectiveness of his oratory, and the geniality of his humour. He had already rendered a great public service as chairman of the Public Record Commission. He had studied colonial questions under Wakefield's guidance, and the strength and durability of the attachment with which the latter inspired him are among the soundest guarantees of his own worth.

Wakefield, of course, was far from standing in the same position; it had not yet been thought expedient that his name should appear on the board of the New Zealand Company; and Durham must have been well aware that his employment in any capacity would expose the Canadian administration to damaging attacks. The advantage, nevertheless, outweighed the objection, and Durham courageously acted as he deemed right in the public interest. Wakefield remained intimately associated with him throughout his mission, and we have Durham's own word that he would have been appointed Commissioner of Crown Lands but for the interposition of the alarmed Ministers at home. No such vindication can be offered for another appointment which created more scandal than could have been occasioned by the bestowal of any office upon Wakefield, and could not be justified on the ground of the indispensableness of the recipient. Mr (afterwards Sir) Thomas Turton, under-secretary and legal adviser, appears to have been an able lawyer, but possessed no such page 165monopoly of legal knowledge as could render it necessary to search the bar of England for the one barrister who had been divorced by the House of Lords on the ground of incestuous adultery. The causes of this unfortunate step will be most fitly investigated by Lord Durham's biographer. Two have been assigned—one the chivalrous but (in a public matter) reprehensible generosity which led Durham, having once rashly named Turton, to stand by an unfortunate friend and former schoolfellow; the other, a blunder of the Treasury's which led him to think that the nomination could not be retracted. As so often happens, the defensible appointment was prevented, and the indefensible retained.

Durham should have been doubly cautious, for he knew that he was leaving in his rear a bitter, unscrupulous and most formidable enemy. Lord Brougham had never forgiven his brilliant oratorical campaign in the autumn of 1834, when in speech after speech he castigated the erratic Chancellor veering to the Tories. Brougham now had his absent adversary at a terrible disadvantage, and no consideration of candour or patriotism could mitigate his virulence. His animosity towards the Ministry who had ostracised him was even more intense than his animosity towards Durham, and he revelled in his ability, now to wound them through Durham's side, now to salve their hurts with the gall of his con-page 166temptuous patronage. The attitude of this distinguished personage towards the Melbourne Ministry for several years was precisely that of a cat to a mouse. Seldom indeed can it have happened that a public man neither trusted nor respected by anybody, without a single avowed follower in the country, should make so conspicuous a figure before the world, and exercise such real influence upon the course of affairs. The secret was the nice balance of the contending political parties. The moment that a strong Government appeared which neither feared nor needed him, Brougham sank into insignificance.

The Government bill for suspending the Canadian constitution and granting extraordinary powers to a Lord High Commissioner was introduced into the Commons on 16th January, and passed the Lords on 6th February, after having been 'greatly mauled and worried' by Sir Robert Peel in the Lower House, and by Lord Brougham in the Upper. The Duke of Wellington might easily have thrown it out, but, as ever with him, patriotism prevailed over party spirit. During the debate in the Commons, the note of responsible government for the colony, the ultimate solution of the problem, was sounded by Mr Warburton, but mainly on the ground that such a concession must produce absolute separation, the consummation desired by the speaker. The act provided for the suspension of the constitution of Lower Canada until November 1840, and for the interim page 167appointment of a special legislative council by the Governor under the authority of the Crown. The Governor's powers were imperfectly defined, and it was to be foreseen that any attempt on his part to exercise them vigorously would lead to attacks from the Opposition which a feeble Government, dependent upon an exiguous Irish and Scotch majority, was not likely to resist.

Durham, however, nothing daunted, sailed on 24th April, and arrived at Quebec on 29th May, accompanied by Buller and other members of his suite. Wakefield appears to have arrived somewhat later. Lord Glenelg, the Colonial Secretary, had believed that he was already on his way to Canada by 4th May. The statement is made in a private letter from Glenelg to Durham, requesting that Wakefield 'may have no regular appointment under the Crown. You may well believe that it is not with any wish to injure Mr Wakefield that we make this request. He is a clever man, and may, I have no doubt, be very usefully employed, and of course there could be no objection to his employment unofficially. We cannot help feeling, however, that to give him an official station in the province might produce much dissatisfaction and embarrassment.' This would not seem to have been apprehended from any question as to private character, but from the antipathy of the French Canadians to Wakefield's views on colonization, as afterwards expressed by Roebuck in a letter to the page 168Spectator. 'One of the chief disputes between the Executive and the House of Assembly had risen respecting the management of the waste lands of the country, and the application of the funds derived from them. Respecting this matter, Mr Wakefield had made himself exceedingly busy in England—had proposed a new theory and proposed to withdraw the lands from the surveillance of the people of the colonies altogether, and to convert the funds into the means of deporting the pauper population of England and Ireland.' Roebuck adds that Wakefield was employed in making a report upon the waste lands of the colony, no doubt the basis of the elaborate paper on the same subject by Charles Buller in Appendix B to the Durham Report. Glenelg's remonstrances with Durham on Wakefield's anticipated appointment were reinforced by a letter which, a few days after Durham's arrival in Canada, he received from Lord Melbourne, referring, as would appear, to Turton's appointment also. To this, as regarded Wakefield, he replied as follows¹:—

'June 15, 1838.—As for Mr Wakefield, your letter arrived before him, and I have therefore been able, without compromising my own character and independence, to comply with your desire. He holds no employment or official situation whatever, nor

¹ We are obliged to Mr Stuart J. Reid for the communication of Lord Glenelg's letter, and of Durham's replies to him and Melbourne. Melbourne's own letter seems not to be forthcoming.

page 169will his name appear before the public at all. "Oh, no! we never mention him; his name is never heard." Really, if it were not very inconvenient, all this would be very ludicrous. But I am placed in a very painful situation. I am called to perform an almost superhuman task. You provide me with no, or most inadequate, means from yourselves, and you then interfere with the arrangements I make to supply myself with the best talent I can find.'

On the same day Durham thus replied to Lord Glenelg:—

'I had intended to have named Mr Wakefield a Commissioner of Inquiry into the Crown Lands, Emigration, etc., but in consequence of your letter have given up all thought of it, and Mr Wakefield will hold no official situation of any kind under me or the Government.'

Wakefield, nevertheless, remained in Canada, and continued to render efficient service during the entire period of Lord Durham's mission. The ostensible Chief Commissioner of Crown Lands, Charles Buller, was discharging the more onerous duties of Chief Secretary, and was, moreover, Wakefield's alter ego in matters of land and emigration. If, however, Wakefield received any remuneration, it must have come out of Durham's own pocket.

Durham's first act had been to dismiss the Executive Council he found, and to instal one chiefly composed of his own immediate followers, a step fully page 170justifiable on the ground assigned, that, under the existing exceptional circumstances, 'the administration of affairs should be completely independent of and unassociated with all parties and persons in the province.' Wakefield, of course, was not a member of this council, nor had it been intended that he should be; but he was undoubtedly consulted on all important occasions. Within a few weeks of his arrival, Durham had initiated several important and healing reforms, three of which, a land commission, a registry of titles, and the commutation of feudal tenures, lay within Wakefield's especial sphere.

There is a book in New Zealand given to Wakefield by Lord Durham, with an inscription testifying that he had never erred except when he rejected Wakefield's advice. If, then, Durham considered his famous Ordinance of 28th June an error, it was promulgated in opposition to the advice of Wakefield, but it is quite probable that neither regarded it in that light. In one point of view, the Ordinance ruined Durham's mission by providing his antagonists at home with a point of attack, and cowing his feeble friends. From the standpoint of reason it was wise and right. The question at issue bore no relation to the high matters of policy which Durham had been sent to Canada to determine. It simply regarded the fate of the captured rebels whom he found awaiting trial. Their offence was notorious, but was virtue in the eyes of the majority of their countrymen. An page 171ordinary French Canadian jury would have acquitted them forthwith; to obtain justice, recourse must have been had to the odious method of a packed tribunal. The prisoners themselves had fully expected this course to be resorted to, and were unspeakably relieved to find that Lord Durham proposed to send them out of the country without trial. They gladly accepted what they rightly considered an act of signal clemency, and, if only the British Parliament had not been sitting, all would have been well. But the legality of Durham's Ordinance banishing the prisoners—though much might be said on its behalf even on that ground—was not altogether so clear as its expediency, and one detail was obviously ultra vires— their exile to Bermuda, where Durham had no jurisdiction to send them, and the Governor none to detain them. A strong Government would have immediately cured the irregularity by a short Act of Parliament, and even a weak Government might have seen that it was better to resign on such a question than to allow its course to be dictated by its enemies. Not so Lord Melbourne's administration, which, disallowing Durham's Ordinance, was compelled to pass an indemnity bill, forced upon it with every circumstance of humiliation by Lord Brougham, who, as was said at the time, 'determined on involving in one common misfortune and disgrace the Ministers and their Governor-General, not only accomplished the fall of Lord Durham, but page 172so contrived that all the odium of the transaction should attach to the Ministers themselves,' On 9th August, Melbourne announced the disallowance of the Ordinance. Durham's first intimation of it was from the columns of an American newspaper. Buller saw from the expression of his face that he had received a violent shock. The official despatches arrived a few days later, and on 25th September he sent in his resignation. On 9th October he issued a proclamation, certainly ill-judged, which gave the Government an excuse for summoning him home. He escaped this mortification by having already left the colony without having been recalled, or having obtained the Royal consent, an act undoubtedly liable to grave criticism, and of which more would have been heard if the despatch dispensing with his services had not already been upon its way. He quitted Quebec on 1st November, and two days later an insurrection exploded, which was suppressed without difficulty by his provisional successor, General Colborne. The despatch announcing his immediate return was brought to England by his aide-de-camp, Captain Dillon, who, accompanied by Wakefield, sailed from New York on 25th October. Rough weather compelled them to transfer themselves to a fishing boat off the coast of Ireland, and they experienced some peril in getting to land.

Durham's return interrupted several important measures in the preparation of which it found him page 173engaged, which, as they were doubtless agreeable to the recommendations of his Report, must have given him a high place among colonial legislators. Apart from these and the memorable Report itself, the chief fruit of his meteoric administration was the evidence it yielded that an English Governor could be popular in Canada. He went on steadily rising in popularity throughout the whole of his rule, and enjoyed the full sympathy of public opinion in his conflict with the Ministry at home. Three thousand of the most respectable inhabitants of Ouebec attended him to the place of embarkation, and his popularity in Upper Canada was even greater. It must be a question how far he had gone out to the country with any definite views respecting the French Canadian grievances. Wakefield, in a remarkable letter to the Spectator, published on 24th November in reply to letters from Roebuck, the salaried agent of the French Canadians, says that he for his own part had been a strong Canadian sympathiser, but, as a result of an extensive acquaintance with the leading men among them, had been led to change his views. This is important, as it leads to the recommendation for the union of the British North America provinces as a means of controlling the French element by the English, which is one of the most important features of the Durham Report. A journey to Saratoga, undertaken without Lord Durham's knowledge, in the vain hope of meeting the exiled Canadian leader, Papineau, and men-page 174tioned in this letter, is the only vestige of Wakefield's political activity during Durham's mission. Thomas Slingsby Duncombe, who kept a diary of his visit to Lord Durham, mentions him repeatedly, but only as an amateur in mesmerism.¹

'He has been thwarted, but he has not failed. He has shown how Canada ought to be governed; and if anything can allay her dissensions, and again attach her to the mother country, this will. He has at the page 176critical moment taken the initiative of a healing policy. He has disposed of the great immediate embarrassment—the political offenders. He has shown to the well intentioned of both sides an honourable basis on which they may accommodate their differences. He has detached from the unreasonable of one party their chief support—the sympathy of the United States, and it is reserved for him to detach from the unreasonable of the other the sympathy of the people of England. He comes home master of the details of those abuses which he has recognised as the original causes of the disaffection; prepared to expose these as they have never before been exposed, and to submit to Parliament, after the most comprehensive inquiry which has ever taken place, the system on which the North American colonies may be preserved and well governed hereafter.'

This promise and vow of his political sponsor Durham amply redeemed by his famous Report of the following year, which has become the accepted exposition of the principles which should guide the mother country in her dealings with her colonies. The effect of the document was enhanced by the sensational method of its publication. While Ministers were still hesitating what to do with it, the most important portion appeared (8th February) in the Times. With the same decision which he afterwards showed in anticipating the probable resolution of Ministers to stop the pioneer vessel of the New page 177Zealand Company, Wakefield precipitated the Report into print to save it from mutilation. According to the testimony of Sir Richard Hanson, afterwards Chief-Justice of South Australia, then one of Durham's secretaries, adduced by Henry Reeve in his edition of the Greville Memoirs, his motive was jealousy for the integrity of the portion which he had himself written, respecting which Durham seemed inclined to make concessions. In this case he must have acted without Durham's sanction, and this agrees best with Durham's language in the House of Lords. According to a tradition in the Wakefield family, however, the sanction was given, and when Durham seemed disposed to recall it he was answered, 'My lord, it has gone already.' In any case, there can be no question that Wakefield rendered a great service to the country. The Report must eventually have crept into light as originally written, for two thousand copies had been privately printed, but it must have lost much of its effect if it had been mutilated or delayed. Hanson took it to the Times. The best justification for the step will be found in the words of Lord Melbourne: 'He did not think the noble earl had any right to conclude that his Report in full would be laid before Parliament, but Government had now no discretion in the case.'

That this statement, now a commonplace, should then have been thought alarming, indicates most forcibly the progress of political enlightenment since that day, and the extent of the national obligations to Durham and his coadjutors. The prevalent theory of the day—inconsistent with contentment or good government in Canada or any colony out of its infancy— was fairly enough indicated by the Quarterly Review in an article whose waspishness and italics bespeak the pen of Croker: 'The fundamental error is this, they forget that Canada is a province—a colony. They measure it by a scale of doctrines which are applicable only to a national and independent sovereignty.' The idea in the writer's mind manifestly is that a colonist is from the nature of the case inferior to a citizen of the mother country: that a colony may have a legislative assembly to play with, but must not have a responsible ministry to work with. Responsible government, aye or no, that was the question. The Quarterly Reviewer had no doubt as to the momentous character of the decision about to be taken. 'If this rank and infectious Report does not receive page 182the high, marked and energetic discountenance and indignation of the Imperial Crown and Parliament, British America is lost.' A magnificent contribution to the literature of unfulfilled prophecy! which nevertheless represented the views of the bulk of the Tory party, though probably not those of its most intelligent leaders. To the restraining influence of Peel and Wellington, and to Lord John Russell's advocacy of Durham's views in the Cabinet, must be ascribed the absence of any great party contest on the subject in the session of 1839. A mighty catastrophe had been expected. Durham, another Samson, was to have buried himself in the ruins of the Ministry, but the session left them both erect. The doctrines of the Report, meanwhile, were gradually filtering into men's minds, and Parliament had scarcely risen ere Lord John Russell's instructions to the new Governor, Poulett Thomson, afterwards Lord Sydenham, made tentative approaches to the principles of responsible government. Durham and his advisers had outrun their age by thirty years in proposing the union of all the North American colonies, but the union of Upper and Lower Canada (now Ontario and Quebec) was achieved in 1840 by the adroitness of Poulett Thomson, who had departed primed for his task by numerous interviews with Durham. Lower Canada was not then in the enjoyment of representative institutions, and Upper Canada was wisely being allowed more representatives page 183than its share, a concession which would not have been necessary if Durham's plan of fusing all the North American colonies had been adhered to. Much friction remained to be overcome, but a succession of able and prudent Governors-General have so cemented the relations between the mother country and the colony that while the desire, whether for absolute independence or for absorption into the United States, has almost died out on the one side, the unworthy craving to abdicate our North American Empire is even nearer extinction on the other. The new constitution was signed by the Oueen on 23d July 1840, five days before the death of Durham, almost whose last words were: 'The Canadians will one day do justice to my memory.' He could not foresee how far beyond Canada would extend the influence of his Report, 'the most valuable document in the English language on the subject of colonial policy' (Egerton); how it would mould the relations of the mother country with colonies yet uncreated; and how the last days of his ablest counsellor would be devoted to battling for responsible government on the other side of the world.

Wakefield twice returned to Canada, and for brief intervals actively participated in its politics. He was there from December 1841 to the winter of 1842, and again from September 1843 to January 1844. He says in the Art of Colonization that he had ex-page 184pectations of obtaining a permanent position in the colony, but does not state what it would have been. His visits seem to have had some connection with the affairs of a land company, and also with canal and railway legislation, and it was probably with a view of furthering these projects that in November 1842, 'having taken a very active part in promoting that change' [the admission of the French Canadians to a share in the administration] 'under Sir Charles Bagot' [Lord Sydenham's successor] 'I was elected a member of the Assembly by an important county of Lower Canada,' i.e., Beauharnois, through which the canal was to be run. The majority was 737, entirely made up of the votes of three French Canadian parishes. Colonial politicians are not always regardful of social amenities, and at the time of Wakefield's election his opponents made the freest use of the bygone unfortunate circumstances in his life. He read all the attacks, and tossed them one after the other across the room to his secretary, Charles Allom, afterwards an officer in the Indian army, with the remark, 'Send that to your mother.' During both visits he acted as correspondent to the Colonial Gazette, and his letters will be found full of interest. In 1843 he took a conspicuous part in Canadian politics as a Member of Parliament, and one more important, though unacknowledged, as the secret adviser of Sir Charles Metcalfe, the Governor-General. In December 1843 he moved an amend-page 185ment of portentous length, and supported it by a speech which Mr Dent, the diligent and judicious Canadian historian of this period, calls 'argumentative and able.' From the summary he gives it would appear well entitled to this character, although of Wakefield's oratory he remarks: 'Asa public speaker he appealed to the reason rather than to the imagination, and there was little of the ad captandum orator about him. He was better calculated to impress educated men than the public at large, and by consequence was not well fitted for the labours of an electoral campaign, although he possessed many rare qualifications for a legislator.' It harmonises with this account that those who have heard Wakefield speak in public recollect his 'dallying with his golden chain,' like the chancellor in Tennyson's 'Sleeping Beauty.' 'Though not much accustomed to speaking in public,' says one who had heard him in New Zealand, 'his language was powerful and impressive; though never fluent, he was never tedious; and when roused by passion he displayed latent powers which early cultivation and exercise might have raised to those of a commanding orator.'

Fisher's Colonial Magazine for July 1844 contained forty-five octavo pages of excruciatingly small print, entitled 'Sir Charles Metcalfe in Canada,' and attributed in the general preface to 'an eminent public character,' but Wakefield's authorship is patent in every line. About half of it is occupied with the ephemeral affairs of Sir Charles Metcalfe's administration, the rest is a magnificent essay on Responsible Government, attacking the fallacies which then prevailed as to the right of the mother country to keep her colonies in leading strings, expounding the principles of the British Constitution itself, and showing with what ease and safety they admit of application to the colonies. The special evils of the denial of representative institutions to colonies under the sway of a Governor and an official clique are vigorously exposed; nominated councils and civil lists independent of popular control come in for their share of censure; and the scheme of giving the colonies direct representation in the Imperial legislature is discussed and rejected. The superiority of the English system to republican democracy is asserted, and the argument involves a most acute examination of the inevitable, and therefore incurable, defects of the constitution of the United page 188States. Though there is no direct reference to Ireland, the impossibility of any system of Home Rule, short of an absolute legislative separation, is pointed out by anticipation. The soundest rules for permanently attaching the colonies to the mother country are laid down; and towards the conclusion, the local affairs of Canada disposed of, the author's imperial instinct finds expression in a prevision of the probable future relations between Britain and her colonial empire:—

'True it is, that the wide continents we are colonising promise at some distant day to maintain communities too powerful for the precise colonial relation, even as I have been describing it, to continue for ever to subsist between them and the people of these islands. But that period is distant, though inevitable. All we can certainly know is that it will come; that at some future time our colonies, powerful as the parent state or more so, must either, through mismanagement, have become independent states more likely to be its enemies than its hearty friends, or else through a wise foresight have been kept closely bound to it—confederacy in some shape by degrees taking the place of the old bond of union—the British nation continuing still united so far as perpetual peace, mutual good understanding, freedom of commerce and identity of foreign policy can unite it—these islands still its metropolis, though their people be no longer the admitted holders of its whole imperial power. All we can do is to take care of the present page 189and near future. The future that is far off will take good care of itself. For this age and the next it is enough to know that colonies, built up by our own people, and gifted with our own free institutions, must be bound alike by the natural feelings and the commercial wants of their people, to ourselves and our policy, no less than to our trade; that neither the one tie nor the other need we, nor yet if we are wise shall we, ever let go or loosen.'

In another remarkable passage Wakefield refutes by anticipation the groundless objection to his system, so frequently brought forward since his death, of its having been contrived in the interest of an oligarchic plutocracy, and designed to stereotype the social inequalities which prevailed in the parent country. He was, indeed, desirous that all classes, the higher as well as the lower, should have their share of the opportunities for expansion afforded by our colonial empire; he wished for a large infusion of refinement and culture to keep colonial life, public and private, at a high level; he believed, and time has justified him, that the colonies could be withheld from setting up as independent republics, and welcomed every influence tending to retain them within the imperial system; but he never believed that all the institution and all the class distinctions of Great Britain and Ireland could be replanted at the Antipodes. After enumerating some of the more obvious causes which render it 'impossible to establish in a dependency the page 190literal and exact transcript of the political institutions of an independent state,' he continues:—

'It is clear enough, then, that in attempting to give to our colonies political institutions essentially modelled upon our own, it is idle to think of their adopting all our aristocratic peculiarities, be they ever so cherished and venerable, whether in Church or State. In the one or two of our most recently planted settlements' [South Australia and New Zealand] 'where pains have been taken in the first instance to transplant an organised society of rich and poor, landholders, merchants, tradesmen, artisans and labourers all together, and to have them carry at once with them from home into the wilderness their church and schoolhouse, a state of things promises to grow up more like our own than is to be found in our older colonial possessions. But no such marked inequalities of rank as prevail at home can by any chance be made a lasting feature of the social state, even in colonies so founded. As to hereditary rank, with here and there perhaps a solitary exception, it is a thing not to be thought of. The political franchise, too, must be more extended, and representation more clearly apportioned to population than with us. And as regards privileged church-establishments, every colony had need be allowed altogether its own way. If it wants them, they are easily to be had. If not, it will be worse than folly to try to force it to put up with them.'

Some six months before the publication of this essay Wakefield had been recalled from the pleasant occupation of exercising irresponsible government in Canada as the secret counsellor of Sir Charles Metcalfe by an event at once distressing to his private affections and sinister for the interests of the New Zealand Company—the death of his brother Arthur in the massacre of Wairau in the preceding June. There was then no direct communication between New Zealand and America, and the ship that brought the heavy news had left the spot of the globe which then held Wakefield far behind her, as she ploughed the second great ocean on her path towards London, where the tidings took ship again, and overtook him after making more than half the circuit of the globe. He immediately returned to England, which he reached in a state of the deepest depression. His personal fascination, so potent with all, was most deeply felt by children and the young. Mrs Storr, then little Miss Allom, who, in her own words, would have been glad of an opportunity of dying for him, remembers him as he sat lost in gloom at the end of the drawing-room in Hart Street, Bloomsbury. She nestled against him trying to sooth him, and her mother called her away. 'Let her be,' answered Wakefield, 'let her be!'