so many provincial autocrats, brought constantly into
conflict with the popular body, and unable to conceive any system of
government possible that did not place the province directly under the
control of the imperial authorities, to whom appeals must be made in the
most trivial cases of doubt or difficulty. The representative of the
crown brooked no interference on the part of the assembly with what he
considered his prerogatives and rights, and as a rule threw himself into
the arms of the council, composed of the official oligarchy. In the
course of time, the whole effort of the Liberal or Reform party, which
gathered strength after 1815, was directed against the power of the
legislative council. We hear nothing in the assemblies or the literature
of the period under review in advocacy of the system of parliamentary or
responsible government which was then in existence in the parent state
and which we now enjoy in British North America. In fact, it was not
until the beginning of the fourth decade of the nineteenth century that
the Liberal politicians of Nova Scotia, like those of Upper Canada,
recognised that the real remedy for existing political grievances was to
be found in the harmonious operation of the three branches of the
legislature. Even then we look in vain for an enunciation of this
essential principle of representative government in the speeches or
writings of a single French Canadian from 1791 until 1838, when the
constitution of Lower Canada was suspended as a result of rebellion.

During the twenty years of which I am writing the government of Canada
had much reason for anxiety on account of the unsatisfactory state of
the relations between Great Britain and the United States, and of the
attempts of French emissaries after the outbreak of the revolution in
France to stir up sedition in Lower Canada. One of the causes of the war
of 1812-15 was undoubtedly the irritation that was caused by the
retention of the western posts by Great Britain despite the stipulation
in the definitive treaty of peace to give them up "with all convenient
speed." This policy of delay was largely influenced by the fact that the
new republic had failed to take effective measures for the restitution
of the estates of the Loyalists or for the payment of debts due to
British creditors; but in addition there was probably still, as in 1763
and 1774, a desire to control the fur-trade and the Indians of the west,
who claimed that the l