ABSTRACT
Any such thinking out of a self-consistent colonial policy was hardly to be expected from the Ministry of Sir Robert Peel. The temperament of Peel himself and the tendency of the Conservative party were all in favour of taking problems as they came rather than of spinning theories about them or formulating general principles beforehand. It was not during Stanley’s régime that Stephen’s influence reached its highest point, though it sometimes suited the book of the Colonial Reformers to say so. In some office business—West Indian immigration and correspondence with the New Zealand Company—Stephen had no share. In questions of commercial policy he perhaps did not count for a great deal: and it may be, though there is little evidence one way or the other, that Stanley kept the question of Canadian self-government mainly in his own hands.
