of the Methodists and Baptists in the United
States after the Revolution, however, made its mark on the neighboring
country. The first Methodist class meetings in Upper Canada, held in
the United Empire Loyalist settlement on the Bay of Quinte in 1791,
were organized by itinerant preachers from the United States; and in the
western part of the province pioneer Baptist evangelists from the same
country reached the scattered settlers neglected by the older churches.

Nor was it in religion alone that diversity grew. Simcoe had set up a
generous land policy which brought in many "late Loyalists," American
settlers whose devotion to monarchical principles would not always bear
close inquiry. The fantastic experiment of planting in the heart of
the woods of Upper Canada a group of French nobles driven out by
the Revolution left no trace; but Mennonites, Quakers, and Scottish
Highlanders contributed diverse and permanent factors to the life of the
province. Colonel Thomas Talbot of Malahide, "a fierce little Irishman
who hated Scotchmen and women, turned teetotallers out of his house,
and built the only good road in the province," made the beginnings
of settlement midway on Lake Erie. A shrewd Massachusetts merchant,
Philemon Wright, with his comrades, their families, servants, horses,
oxen, and 10,000 pounds, sledded from Boston to Montreal in the winter
of 1800, and thence a hundred miles beyond, to found the town of Hull
and establish a great lumbering industry in the Ottawa Valley.

These differences of origin and ways of thought had not yet been
reflected in political life. Party strife in Upper Canada began with
a factional fight which took place in 1805-07 between a group of Irish
officeholders and a Scotch clique who held the reins of government.
Weekes, an Irish-American barrister, Thorpe, a puisne judge, Wyatt,
the surveyor general, and Willcocks, a United Irishman who had become
sheriff of one of the four Upper Canada districts, began to question the
right to rule of "the Scotch pedlars" or "the Shopkeeper Aristocracy,"
as Thorpe called those merchants who, for the lack of other leaders,
had developed an influence with the governors or ruled in their frequent
absence. But the insurgents were backed by only a small minority in the
Assembly, and when the four leaders disappeared from the stage,* this
curtain raiser to the serious political drama which was to follow came
quickly to its end.

* Weekes was slain