Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: April 30, 2025
"Cannot fulfil!" ejaculated the knight, highly offended; "I would have you to know, sir, that Sir Thomas Metcalfe's word is his bond, and that whatsoever he promises he will fulfil in spite of the devil! Body o' me! but for the respect I owe your cloth, I would give you a very different answer, reverend sir.
With a remarkable ignorance of the political conditions of the province too often shown by British statesmen in those days so great a historian and parliamentarian as Lord Macaulay actually wrote on a tablet to Lord Metcalfe's memory: "In Canada, not yet recovered from the calamities of civil war, he reconciled contending factions to each other and to the mother country."
This has been amended under Lord Metcalfe's administration; and it is to be hoped that the office of President of the Board of Works will hereafter be one subjected to severe but not to vexatious scrutiny, and at the same time carefully guarded against political influence, and only rendered tenable with honour by the capacity of the person selected to fill it and of his subordinates.
Metcalfe's policy in the matter had really forced Elgin's hand. Elgin-Grey Correspondence: Elgin to Grey, 14 March, 1849. Elgin-Grey Correspondence: Elgin to Grey, 12 April, 1849. Elgin's letter of 8 October, 1852, criticizing Grey's book. The italics are my own. Elgin kept very closely in touch with the sentiments of the Canadian press, French and English. See his letters passim.
The nicknames and cruel taunts flung at him, in the earlier months, apparently by his own ministers, recoil now on their heads, as the petty insults of unmannerly politicians; indeed, the accusations which they made of simplicity and honesty, simply reinforce the impression of quixotic high-mindedness, which was not the least noble feature in Metcalfe's character.
It was noticed that the rebels of 1837 and 1838 had received no support from the Catholic priesthood; and in a country where the reverence for that ancient form of Christianity was, in spite of Metcalfe's opinion to the contrary, profound, it was unlikely that any anti-religious political movement could make much permanent headway.
It is easy to separate the man from the official, and to praise the former as one of the noblest of early Victorian administrators. But even before Lord Metcalfe's departure at the end of 1845, the inadequacy of his system stood revealed.
Sir Francis Hincks says: "All Sir Charles Metcalfe's correspondence prior to his departure from England is indicative of a feeling that he was going on a forlorn hope expedition," and Hincks adds that such language can be explained only on the assumption that he was sent out for the purpose of overthrowing responsible government.
Indeed Metcalfe's own statement that "he objected to the exclusive distribution of patronage with party views and maintained the principle that office ought, in every instance, to be given to the man best qualified to render efficient service to the State" was actually a challenge to the predominance of the party-cabinet system, which no constitutionalist could have allowed to pass in silence.
The Governors attempted to explain and justify their attitude of alleged religious "exclusiveness" referred to above in Lord Metcalfe's despatch, and to give reasons for the Statutes already mentioned. The following extracts from a long and somewhat laboured letter forwarded by the Governors to Lord Metcalfe on July 15, 1843, are of interest.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking