ce in the ranks of the Reformers became marked.
One party, looking upon the United States as the utmost achievement
in democracy, proposed to follow its example in making the upper house
elective and thus to give the people control of both branches of the
Legislature. Another group, of whom Robert Baldwin was the chief, saw
that this change would not suffice. In the States the Executive was also
elected by the people. Here, where the Governor would doubtless continue
to be appointed by the Crown, some other means must be found to give
the people full control. Baldwin found it in the British Cabinet system,
which gave real power to ministers having the confidence of a majority
in Parliament. The Governor would remain, but he would be only a
figurehead, a constitutional monarch acting, like the King, only on
the advice of his constitutional advisers. Responsible government
was Baldwin's one and absorbing idea, and his persistence led to its
ultimate adoption, along with a proposal for an elective Council, in
the Reform party's programme in 1834. Delay in affecting this reform,
Baldwin told the Governor a year later, was "the great and all absorbing
grievance before which all others sank into insignificance." The remedy
could be applied "without in the least entrenching upon the just and
necessary prerogatives of the Crown, which I consider, when administered
by the Lieutenant. Governor through the medium of a provincial ministry
responsible to the provincial parliament, to be an essential part of the
constitution of the province." In brief, Baldwin insisted that Simcoe's
rhetorical outburst in 1791, when he declared that Upper Canada was
"a perfect Image and Transcript of the British Government and
Constitution," should be made effective in practice.

The course of the conflict between the Compact and the Reformers cannot
be followed in detail. It had elements of tragedy, as when Gourlay was
hounded into prison, where he was broken in health and shattered in
mind, and then exiled from the province for criticism of the Government
which was certainly no more severe than now appears every day in
Opposition newspapers. The conflict had elements of the ludicrous, too,
as when Captain Matthews was ordered by his military superiors to return
to England because in the unrestrained festivities of New Year's Eve he
had called on a strolling troupe to play Yankee Doodle and had shouted
to the company, "Hats off"; or when Governor Mai