that which we make up, as the childish phrase is, "out of our own heads." Originality in politics, as in every field of art, consists in the use and application of the ideas which we get or are given to us. The greatest proof Sir Robert Peel ever gave of high and genuine statesmanship was in his recognition that the time had come to put into practical legislation the principles which Cobden and Villiers and Bright had been advocating in the House of Commons. Lord John Russell was a born reformer. He had sat at the feet of Fox. He was cradled in the principles of Liberalism. He held faithfully to his creed; he was one of its boldest and keenest champions. He had great advantages over Peel, in the mere fact that he had begun his education in a more enlightened school. But he wanted passion quite as much as Peel did, and remained still farther than Peel below the level of the genuine orator. Russell, as we have said, had not long held the post of leader of the House of Commons when the first Parliament of Queen Victoria assembled. He was still, in a manner, on trial; and even among his friends, perhaps especially among his friends, there were whispers that his confidence in himself was greater than his capacity for leadership.

After the chiefs of Ministry and of Opposition, the most conspicuous figure in the House of Commons was the colossal form of O'Connell, the great Irish agitator, of whom we shall hear a good deal more. Among the foremost orators of the House at that time was O'Connell's impassioned lieutenant, Richard Lalor Sheil. It is curious how little is now remembered of Sheil, whom so many well-qualified authorities declared to be a genuine orator. Lord Beaconsfield, in one of his novels, speaks of Sheil's eloquence in terms of the highest praise, and disparages Canning. It is but a short time since Mr. Gladstone selected Sheil as one of three remarkable illustrations of great success as a speaker, achieved in spite of serious defects of voice and delivery; the other two examples being Dr. Chalmers and Dr. Newman. Mr. Gladstone described Sheil's voice as like nothing but the sound produced by "a tin kettle battered about from place to place," knocking first against one side and then against another. "In anybody else," Mr. Gladstone went on to say, "I would not, if it had been in my choice, like to have lis

tened to that voice; but in him I would not have changed it, for it was part of a most remarkable whole, and nobody ever felt it painful while listening to it. He was a great orator, and an orator of much preparation, I believe, carried even to words, with a very vivid imagination and an enormous power of language, and of strong feeling. There was a peculiar character, a sort of half-wildness in his aspect and delivery; his whole figure, and his delivery, and his voice and his matter, were all in such perfect keeping with one another that they formed a great Parliamentary picture; and although it is now thirty-five years since I heard Mr. Sheil, my recollection of him is just as vivid as if I had been listening to him to-day." This surely is a picture of a great orator, as Mr. Gladstone says Sheil was. Nor is it easy to understand how a man, without being a great orator, could have persuaded two experts of such very different schools as Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Disraeli that he deserved such a name. Yet the after-years have in a curious but unmistak able way denied the claims of Sheil. Perhaps it is because, if he really was an orator, he was that and nothing more, that our practical age, finding no mark left by him on Parliament or politics, has declined to take much account even of his eloquence. His career faded away into second-class ministerial office, and closed at last, somewhat prematurely, in the little court of Florence, where he was sent as the representative of England. He is worth mentioning here, because he had the promise of a splendid reputation; because the charm of his eloquence evidently lingered long in the memories of those to whom it was once familiar, and because his is one of the most brilliant illustrations of that career of Irish agitator, which begins in stormy opposition to English government, and subsides after awhile into meek recognition of its title and adoption of its ministerial uniform. O'Connell we have passed over for the present, because we shall hear of him again; but of Sheil it is not necessary that we should hear any more.

This was evidently a remarkable Parliament, with Russell for the leader of one party, and Peel for the leader of another; with O'Connell and Sheil as independent supporters of the ministry; with Mr. Gladstone still comparatively new to public life, and Mr. Disraeli to address the Commons for

the first time; with Palmerston still unrecognized, and Stanley lately gone over to Conservatism, itself the newest invented thing in politics; with Grote and Bulwer, and Joseph Hume and Charles Buller; and Ward and Villiers, Sir Francis Burdett and Smith O'Brien, and the Radical Alcibiades of Finsbury, "Tom" Duncombe.

CHAPTER III.

CANADA AND LORD DURHAM,

THE first disturbance to the quiet and good promise of the new reign came from Canada. The Parliament which we have described met for the first time on November 20th, 1837, and was to have been adjourned to February 1st, 1838; but the news which began to arrive from Canada was so alarming, that the ministry were compelled to change their purpose and fix the reassembling of the Houses for January 16th. The disturbances in Canada had already broken out into open rebellion.

The condition of Canada was very peculiar. Lower or Eastern Canada was inhabited for the most part by men of French descent, who still kept up in the midst of an active and moving civilization most of the principles and usages which belonged to France before the Revolution. Even to this day, after all the changes, political and social, that have taken place, the traveller from Europe sees in many of the towns of Lower Canada an old-fashioned France, such as he had known otherwise only in books that tell of France before '89. Nor is this only in small sequestered towns and villages which the impulses of modern ways have yet failed to reach. In busy and trading Montreal, with its residents made up of Englishmen, Scotchmen, and Americans, as well as the men of French descent, the visitor is more immediately conscious of the presence of what may be called an oldfashioned Catholicism than he is in Paris, or even indeed in Rome. In Quebec, a city which for picturesqueness and beauty of situation is not equalled by Edinburgh or Florence, the curious interest of the place is further increased,

the novelty of the sensations it produces in the visitor is made more piquant, by the evidences he meets with everywhere, through its quaint and steepy streets and under its antiquated archways, of the existence of a society which has hardly in France survived the Great Revolution. At the opening of Queen Victoria's reign, the undiluted character of this French medievalism was, of course, much more remarkable. It would doubtless have exhibited itself quietly enough if it were absolutely undiluted. Lower Canada would have dozed away in its sleepy picturesqueness, held fast to its ancient ways, and allowed a bustling, giddy world, all alive with commerce and ambition, and desire for novelty and the terribly disturbing thing which unresting people called progress, to rush on its wild path unheeded. But its neighbors and its newer citizens were not disposed to allow Lower Canada thus to rot itself in ease on the decaying wharves of the St. Lawrence and the St. Charles. In the large towns there were active traders from England and other countries, who were by no means content to put up with Old-World ways, and to let the magnificent resources of the place run to waste. Upper Canada, on the other hand, was all new as to its population, and was full of the modern desire for commercial activity. Upper Canada was peopled almost exclusively by inhabitants from Great Britain. Scotch settlers, with all the energy and push of their country; men from the northern province of Ireland, who might be described as virtually Scotch also, came there. The emigrant from the south of Ireland went to the United States because he found there a country more or less hostile to England, and because there the Catholic Church was understood to be flourishing. The Ulsterman went to Canada as the Scotchman did, because he saw the flag of England flying, and the principle of religious establishment which he admired at home still recognized. It is almost needless to say that Englishmen in great numbers were settled there, whose chief desire was to make the colony as far as possible a copy of the institutions of England. When Canada was ceded to England by France, as a consequence of the victories of Wolfe, the population was nearly all in the lower province, and therefore was nearly all of French origin. Since the cession the growth of the population of the other province

had been surprisingly rapid, and had been almost exclusively the growth, as we have seen, of immigration from Great Britain, one or two of the colonizing states of the European continent, and the American Republic itself.

It is easy to see on the very face of things some of the dif ficulties which must arise in the development of such a system. The French of Lower Canada would regard with almost morbid jealousy any legislation which appeared likely to interfere with their ancient ways and to give any advantage or favor to the populations of British descent. The latter would see injustice or feebleness in every measure which did not assist them in developing their more energetic ideas. The home Government, in such a condition of things, often has especial trouble with those whom we may call its own people. Their very loyalty to the institutions of the Old Country impels them to be unreasonable and exacting. It is not easy to make them understand why they should not be at the least encouraged, if not indeed actually enabled, to carry boldly out the Anglicizing policy which they clearly see is to be for the good of the colony in the end. The Government has all the difficulty that the mother of a household has when, with the best intentions and the most conscientious resolve to act impartially, she is called upon to manage her own children and the children of her husband's former marriage. Every word she says, every resolve she is induced to acknowledge, is liable to be regarded with jealousy and dissatisfaction on the one side as well as on the "You are doing everything to favor your own children," the one set cry out. "You ought to do something more for your own children," is the equally querulous remonstrance of the other.

It would have been difficult, therefore, for the home Government, however wise and far-seeing their policy, to make the wheels of any system run smoothly at once in such a colony as Canada. But their policy certainly does not seem to have been either wise or far-seeing. The plan of government adopted looks as if it were especially devised to bring out into sharp relief all the antagonisms that were natural to the existing state of things. By an Act called the Constitution of 1791, Canada was divided into two provinces, the Upper and the Lower. Each province had a separate