men, Robert Baldwin, with his {72} high principle and solid
character, and Francis Hincks, with his talent for affairs, are figures
of prime importance in this critical stage of the experiment called
responsible government.

But the new province of Canada, as a union of French and English
populations, demanded, as a natural consequence, a union in leadership.
The French-Canadian politician, who in his own province represented
Moderate Reform, was Louis Hippolyte LaFontaine. His grandfather had
been a member of the old Assembly of Lower Canada; his father was a
farmer at Boucherville in Chambly, where Louis Hippolyte was born in
1804. Educated at the college of Montreal, he afterwards studied law
and began to practise in that city. In 1830 he was elected member for
Terrebonne, and soon showed himself in the House to be a thoroughgoing
follower of Papineau and an agitator for radical change. But when
reform passed over into rebellion and an appeal to armed force, he
tried to dissuade his compatriots from their mad enterprise, and also
approached the governor, Lord Gosford, with a proposal to assemble
parliament, in order to prevent further violence. He then went to
England, from {73} motives which do not seem clear. Fearing arrest in
that country for his share in the agitation before the rebellion, he
fled to France. He did not, in fact, return to Canada until May 1838,
when he was caught in the widespread net of arrests and spent several
painful and indignant months in the Montreal jail, demanding release,
but in vain. Incarceration for a political offence is a rare event in
the career of a chief justice and an English baronet, as this prisoner
was to be later. Arrested on suspicion, he was released without trial.
On the tragic collapse of the extremists LaFontaine became the hope of
the moderate men among the French-Canadian politicians. Like the most
of his compatriots, he was strongly opposed to the union of the
Canadas, as threatening the extinction of his nationality; but seeing
no possible alternative to union, he made it his fixed policy to win,
by constitutional methods, whatever could be won for his people. In
appearance he was strikingly like the first Napoleon, the resemblance
being noticed by the old soldiers when he visited the Hotel des
Invalides at Paris. A contemporary cartoon, representing him flinging
money to the habitants, shows the likeness, even to the {74} lock of
hair on the forehead,