for
bloodstained France was giving way, and the middle classes were about
to triumph in the great franchise reform of 1832. In the United States,
after a generation of conservatism, Jacksonian democracy was to sweep
all before it. These developments paralleled and in some measure
influenced the movement of events in the British North American
provinces. But this movement had a color of its own. The growth of
self-government in an independent country was one thing; in a colony
owing allegiance to a supreme Parliament overseas, it was quite another.
The task of the provinces--not solved in this period, it is true, but
squarely faced--was to reconcile democracy and empire.

The people of the Canadas in 1791, and of the provinces by the sea
a little earlier, had been given the right to elect one house of
the legislature. More than this instalment of self-government the
authorities were not prepared to grant. The people, or rather the
property holders among them, might be entrusted to vote taxes
and appropriations, to present grievances, and to take a share in
legislation. They could not, however, be permitted to control the
Government, because, to state an obvious fact, they could not govern
themselves as well as their betters could rule them. Besides, if the
people of a colony did govern themselves, what would become of the
rights and interests of the mother country? What would become of the
Empire itself?

What was the use and object of the Empire? In brief, according to the
theory and practice then in force, the end of empire was the profit
which comes from trade; the means was the political subordination of the
colonies to prevent interference with this profit; and the debit entry
set against this profit was the cost of the diplomacy, the armaments,
and the wars required to hold the overseas possessions against other
powers. The policy was still that which had been set forth in the
preamble of the Navigation Act of 1663, ensuring the mother country the
sole right to sell European wares in its colonies: "the maintaining a
greater correspondence and kindness between them [the subjects at home
and those in the plantations] and keeping them in a firmer dependence
upon it [the mother country], and rendering them yet more beneficial and
advantageous unto it in the further Imployment and Encrease of English
Shipping and Seamen, and vent of English Woollen and other Manufactures
and Commodities rendering the Navigation to and