vatives were pleased with his avowed purpose of
strengthening the bonds between the colony and the mother country.
Lower Canada was still a province without a constitution; but it must
have some machinery of government. A makeshift for regular government
was provided by a Legislative Council of fourteen persons of importance
appointed by Sir John Colborne. Their agreement to the principles of
union was soon obtained. The province now seemed tranquil and the
governor-general hurried on to Upper Canada. His account of his
journey from Montreal to Kingston--the changes and stoppages, the
varieties of conveyance--illustrates vividly the difficulties of travel
in those days.

At Toronto Thomson found a totally different set of conditions. Here
was a constitution functioning and a legislature in session; but what a
legislature! Split into half a dozen little cliques and factions, it
was {39} trying to work with no cabinet, no opposition, no party
system--an ideal state of things to which some critics of present
conditions would like to return. The office-holders, that is, the
members of the government, took opposite sides in debate. The Assembly
was a house divided and sub-divided against itself. There was a
wide-spread and persistent clamour for 'responsible government,' but no
one knew precisely what was meant by it. Who was to be 'responsible'?
for what? and to whom? How was it possible to make the local
government 'responsible' to the people of the colony without reducing
the governor to a figurehead? If his authority were reduced to a
shadow, what became of the 'prerogative' and British connection? Was
not 'responsible government' simply the prelude to the absolute
separation of the colony from the mother country? Then there was the
question of the Clergy Reserves agitating every colonial breast.
One-seventh of the public domain had been set aside for the support of
a favoured church: a plain case of monopoly and privilege, said some; a
wise provision for the maintenance of religion, said others. And the
shadow of bankruptcy was {40} hanging over the unhappy colony. The
situation was one of the utmost difficulty, calling for an almost
superhuman combination of ability, tact, and firmness. Here, as in
Lower Canada, the governor-general's first effort was to obtain the
consent of the people's representatives to the great change in the
status of the province which the union would involve. He carried his
p