As early as 1870 he wrote to Skelton: "Gladstone and Co.

deliberately intend to shake off the Colonies.
They are privately using their command of the situation to make the separation inevitable."* I do not know what this means.

Lord Dufferin has left it on record that after his appointment to Canada in 1872 Lowe came up to him at the club, and said, "Now, you ought to make it your business to get rid of the Dominion." But Lowe was in the habit of saying paradoxical things, and it was Disraeli, not Gladstone, who spoke of the Colonies as millstones round our necks.
Cardwell, the Secretary for War, withdrew British troops from Canada and New Zealand, holding that the self-governing Colonies should be responsible for their own defence.

That wise policy fostered union rather than separation, by providing that the working classes at home should not be taxed for the benefit of their colonial fellow- subjects.

Lord Carnarvon himself had passed in 1867 the Bill which federated Canada and which his Liberal predecessor had drawn.