ce
of Quebec, where the constitutional friction was embittered by a racial
conflict, the executive body being British, while the great majority of
the assembly was French; and the conflict was producing a very
dangerous alienation between the two peoples. The French colonists had
quite forgotten the gratitude they had once felt for the maintenance of
their religion and of their social organisation, and there was a strong
party among them who were bent upon open revolt, and hoped to be able
to establish a little isolated French community upon the St. Lawrence.
This party of hotheads got the upper hand, and their agitation
culminated in the rebellion of Papineau in 1837. In the other colonies,
and especially in Upper Canada, the conditions were almost equally
ominous; when Papineau revolted in Quebec, William Mackenzie led a
sympathetic rising in Ontario. The situation was quite as alarming as
the situation in the American colonies had been in 1775. It is true
that the risings were easily put down. But mere repression formed no
solution, any more than a British victory in 1775 would have formed a
solution of the American question.

Realising this, the Whig government sent out Lord Durham, one of their
own number, to report on the whole situation. Durham was one of the
most advanced Liberals in Britain, a convinced believer in the virtues
of self-government, and he took out with him two of the ablest
advocates of scientific colonisation, Edward Gibbon Wakefield and
Charles Buller. Durham's administrative work was not a success: his
high-handed deportation of some of the rebel leaders was strongly
condemned, and he was very quickly recalled. But he had had time to
study and understand the situation, and he presented a masterly Report
on Canada, which is one of the classics in the history of British
imperialism. His explanation of the unhappy condition of Canadian
politics was not (as some were tempted to say) that the colonists had
been given too much liberty, but that they had not been given enough.
They must be made to feel their responsibility for the working of the
laws which they adopted, and for the welfare of the whole community. As
for the conflict of races, its only cure was that both should be made
to feel their common responsibility for the destinies of the community
in which both must remain partners.

Lord Durham's recommendations were fully carried into effect, partly in
the Canada Act of 1840, but more espe