in a duel. Wyatt and Thorpe were
suspended by the Lieutenant Governor, Sir Francis Gore, only
to win redress later in England. Willcocks was dismissed
from office and fell fighting on the American side in the
War of 1812.

In Lower Canada the clash was more serious. The French Canadians, who
had not asked for representative government, eventually grasped its
possibilities and found leaders other than those ordained for them. In
the first Assembly there were many seigneurs and aristocrats who
bore names notable for six generations back Taschereau, Duchesnay,
Lothiniere, Rouville, Salaberry. But they soon found their surroundings
uncongenial or failed to be reelected. Writing in 1810 to Lord
Liverpool, Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, the Governor,
Sir James Craig, with a fine patrician scorn thus pictures the Assembly
of his day.

"It really, my Lord, appears to me an absurdity, that the Interests of
certainly not an unimportant Colony, involving in them those also of no
inconsiderable portion of the Commercial concerns of the British Empire,
should be in the hands of six petty shopkeepers, a Blacksmith, a Miller,
and 15 ignorant peasants who form part of our present House; a Doctor
or Apothecary, twelve Canadian Avocats and Notaries, and four so far
respectable people that at least they do not keep shops, together with
ten English members compleat the List: there is not one person coming
under the description of a Canadian Gentleman among them."

And again:

"A Governor cannot obtain among them even that sort of influence that
might arise from personal intercourse. I can have none with Blacksmiths,
Millers, and Shopkeepers; even the Avocats and Notaries who compose so
considerable a portion of the House, are, generally speaking, such as I
can nowhere meet, except during the actual sitting of Parliament, when
I have a day of the week expressly appropriated to the receiving a large
portion of them at dinner."

Leadership under these conditions fell to the "unprincipled Demagogues,"
half-educated lawyers, men "with nothing to lose."

But it was not merely as an aristocrat facing peasants and shopkeepers,
nor as a soldier faced by talkers, but as an Englishman on guard against
Frenchmen that Craig found himself at odds with his Assembly. For nearly
twenty years in this period England was at death grips with France,
end to hate and despise all Frenchmen was part of the hereditary and
c