that the statesmen of 1791 looked to a nominated executive
and legislative council, an hereditary aristocracy, and an established
church, to keep the colony in hand. British legislation fostered and
supported a ruling class in the colonies, and in turn this class was to
support British connection and British control. How this policy, half
avowed and half unconscious, worked out in each of the provinces must
now be recorded.

In Upper Canada party struggles did not take shape until well after the
War of 1812. At the founding of the colony the people had been very much
of one temper and one condition. In time, however, divergences appeared
and gradually hardened into political divisions. A governing class, or
rather clique, was the first to become differentiated. Its emergence
was slower than in New Brunswick, for instance, since Upper Canada had
received few of the Loyalists who were distinguished by social position
or political experience. In time a group was formed by the accident of
occupation, early settlement, residence in the little town of York,
the capital after 1794, the holding of office, or by some advantage in
wealth or education or capacity which in time became cumulative. The
group came to be known as the Family Compact. There had been, in fact,
no intermarriage among its members beyond what was natural in a small
and isolated community, but the phrase had a certain appositeness.
They were closely linked by loyalty to Church and King, by enmity to
republics and republicans, by the memory of the sacrifice and peril they
or their fathers had shared, and by the conviction that the province
owed them the best living it could bestow. This living they succeeded
in collecting. "The bench, the magistracy, the high officials of the
established church, and a great part of the legal profession," declared
Lord Durham in 1839, "are filled by the adherents of this party; by
grant or purchase they have acquired nearly the whole of the waste lands
of the province; they are all powerful in the chartered banks, and till
lately shared among themselves almost exclusively all offices of trust
and profit." Fortunately the last absurdity of creating Dukes of Toronto
and Barons of Niagara Falls was never carried through, or rather was
postponed a full century; but this touch was scarcely needed to give the
clique its cachet. The ten-year governorship of Sir Peregrine Maitland
(1818-28), a most punctilious person, gave the finish