The news from Canada is very unsatisfactory ; and the
private accounts are still darker than the published. Lord Elgin steadily perseveres in his course, and the Governor-General has succeeded in becoming the cockshy-general for the ultra " Loyal" party. As the Rebellion-Losses Bill comes to be regarded as an irre- vocable act, the question of "annexation" revives—with threats among some, with alarm among others ; but still it is again talked of.
In another page* we publish a letter with which we have been favoured, written in reply to interrogatories from the colony. Those queries were put by practised politicians in Canada ; they are answered by a politician not less conversant with public af- fairs here. It will be seen that he takes no hopeful view : he holds that English politicians cannot understand the circumstances which made Lord Elgin's technical observance of theoretical decorum a grand mistake in policy. This is true while the question turns, in England, upon technical points ; but it is ra- pidly assuming a more tangible form. It is true that a numerous party in this country would be ready to abandon all our Colonies, and would be willing to begin with Canada. It is true that the papers which the writer of the letter quotes from leading journals * See page 489. in the Whig interest indicate that the Whig Ministers covertly head that Colonial-abandonment party. Bat the country is not yet wholly possessed by the Manchester schtrol ; and, howe'vtir Ministers may count upo'n a general neutrality at present, they would find, as soon as it really name to a question of "dis- membering the empire," that the English people are not in favour of a surrender to which our Ministerial writers are endeavouring to reconcile the country: The West Indies are not in revolt—scarcely "disaffected" in a political sense ; yet they are fermenting with .discontents of such a kind, that the idea of " annexation," at a day not Ito remote bnt that men now in office might live to see it, becomes more familiar to loyal West Indians than would have been thought possible till lately.
In the East we have had our annexation—that of the Punjaub. We believe it to have been an inevitable measure ; though every extension of our Indian territory is an evil.
