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Lord Elgin assumed the governor-generalship of Canada on January 30th, 1847, and gave place to Sir Edmund Head on December 19th, 1854. The address which he received from the Canadian legislature on the eve of his departure gave full expression to the golden opinions which he had succeeded in winning from the Canadian people during his able administration of nearly eight years.
The governor-generalship of Lord Metcalfe is almost the clearest illustration in the nineteenth century of the weakness of the doctrinaire in practical politics. Unfortunately, the doctrine which Metcalfe had strenuously enforced was backed by the highest of imperial authorities, and sanctioned by monarchy itself.
He has all the social position and dignity of a Khedive, without the trouble or responsibility of having to govern. Unfortunately, soon after General Gordon relinquished the Governor-Generalship of the Soudan, the Khedive, in spite of Gordon's protest, appointed to the post about as bad a man as he could possibly have selected.
If it appeared that he had spoken truly, the captain could be turned out of the house without noising the matter abroad, and they could easily account to the Porkenhams for his disappearance, by saying that he had been appointed, through the Court influence of his family, to the governor-generalship of Sierra Leone, of Saugur Point, or any other of those salubrious climates which enchant Europeans so much, that when they once get there, they can hardly ever prevail upon themselves to come back again.
All the Soudanese are potential Mahdis, just as all the Egyptians are potential Arabis. The movement is not religious, but an outbreak of despair. Three times over I warned the late Khedive that it would be impossible to govern the Soudan on the old system, after my appointment to the Governor-Generalship.
Leicester was in the Netherlands with an English army, fighting indecisively, losing Sir Philip Sidney and angering Elizabeth by accepting the governor-generalship without her leave and against her diplomacy, which, now as ever, was opposed to any definite avowal that could possibly be helped.
That ministers and opposition should occasionally change places struck him not merely as constitutional, but as the most conservative convention in the constitution; and in answer to the older school to whom a change of ministers at the dictation of a majority in the Assembly meant the degradation of the governor-generalship, he hoped "to establish a moral influence in the province, which will go far to compensate for the loss of power consequent on the surrender of patronage to an executive responsible to the local parliament."
The Irish continued to furnish great representative men to Canada. The first governor, Guy Carleton, was Irish, and his subsequent governor-generalship as Lord Dorchester did much to make Canada loyal to Great Britain. Probably the most popular and influential of Canada's governors-general was Lord Dufferin, another Irishman.
She had not accepted the offer, but she had deliberated on the subject, and certainly she had never expressed a doubt whether or not the offer had been legally made. By the States, too, that governor-generalship had been conferred upon the Earl, which had been so thankfully and eagerly accepted.
The envoys in England, the Nassau family Hohenlo, the prominent members of the States, such as the shrewd, plausible Menin, the "honest and painful" Falk, and the chancellor of Gelderland "that very great, wise, old man Leoninus," as Leicester called him, were all desirous that he should assume an absolute governor-generalship over the whole country.
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