Patronage and Politics in the Victorian Empire: The Personal Gove ...

of justices and local officials and supervisors of public works. By then, too, local elites were conscious of provincial identities that distinguished them from other Maritimes and the distant Canadas. Their politics “revolved, for the most part around the local distribution of government largesse rather than the development of a coherent political ideology at the centre and its implementation on the periphery.” ⁴By the 1860s, when the politics of confederation and railways were imposed on parochial local issues, it would become tempting for a lieutenant-governor under instruction from the imperial power to seek out local political brokers to press those issues to a conclusion. Such initiatives from above would encounter the weakness of the colonial province's means to effect ends, even to enforce its own statutes, in a structure where the crown's representative might influence, but not command, except perhaps in matters of defence. His relations with senior politicians, rather than with the richer professional elite, who stayed out of political office, therefore, were of critical importance for Gordon's early career and the wider policies of the imperial power in North America. None of that imperial influence from above through the governor acting as broker could be exercised directly, or without the advice of his ministers. The Canadian provinces had long passed beyond that stage of tutelage. But imperial financial underwriting of railways and defence spoke a language settler elites readily understood and could be used through colonial politicians in the 1860s and 1870s to establish necessary clientage relations by bargaining and working for a consensus to meet imperial and colonial aims for railways and confederation. ⁵

Provincial lieutenant-governors in British North America, therefore, must be seen as official intermediaries in the name of the crown and not as executives empowered to manage directly the politics and government of their territories. Well before Gordon's tenure of office the structure of politics at the level of the executive council and the assembly derived from the concession of responsible government to the leaders of an elected majority in an electoral system with a very wide male franchise and a rudimentary party adherence of conservatives and liberal reformers. The limits of power and authority on both sides, headed by the imperial