=Source.=--Lord Elgin to the Colonial Secretary, Sir George Grey,
18th December, 1854: Elgin's _Letters and Journals_. London, 1872.
As the Imperial Government and Parliament gradually withdraw from
legislative interference, and from the exercise of patronage in
Colonial affairs, the office of Governor tends to become, in the
most emphatic sense of the term, the link which connects the
Mother-country and the Colony, and his influence the means by which
harmony of action between the local and imperial authorities is
to be preserved. It is not, however, in my humble judgment, by
evincing an anxious desire to stretch to the utmost constitutional
principles in his favour, but, on the contrary, by the frank
acceptance of the conditions of the Parliamentary system, that
this influence can be most surely extended and confirmed. Placed
by his position above the strife of parties--holding office by a
tenure less precarious than the ministers who surround him--having
no political interests to serve but that of the community whose
affairs he is appointed to administer--his opinion cannot fail,
when all cause for suspicion and jealousy is removed, to have
great weight in the Colonial Councils, while he is set at liberty
to constitute himself in an especial manner the patron of those
larger and higher interests--such interests, for example, as
those of education, and of moral and material progress in all its
branches--which, unlike the contests of party, unite instead of
dividing the members of the body politic.