classes of Irishmen,
whose antagonism at home, artificially provoked and fomented by the bad
form of government under which they lived, so often made Ireland itself
a very hell on earth. I want to dwell on this point in order to avoid
confusion when I speak of the bi-racial conditions of Lower Canada and
Ireland respectively.

To return to the question of Government. The American Colonies were
lost. Here in Canada was an opportunity for a new Imperial policy,
better calculated to retain the affections of the colonists. Three
distinct problems were involved:

1. Was French or Lower Canada, with its small minority of British, to be
given representative Government at all?

2. If so, was it to be left as a separate unit, or was it to be
amalgamated in a Union with its neighbour, Upper Canada?

3. Whichever course was taken, what was to be the relation between the
Home Government and Canada?

All these questions arise in the case of Ireland itself, and the
parallel in each case is interesting. In Canada they were determined for
the space of half a century by the Constitutional Act of 1791, passed at
the period when Grattan's unreformed Parliament was hastening to its
fall, and Wolfe Tone was founding his Society of United Irishmen. Let us
take in turn the three questions posed above.

1. The British minority in Lower Canada, supported by a corresponding
school in England, were strong for an undisguised British ascendancy,
without any recognition of the French. They urged, what was true, that
the French were unaccustomed to representative government, and implied,
what was neither true nor politic, that they could not, and ought not
to, be educated to it. If there was to be an Assembly at all, it should,
they claimed, be wholly British and Protestant, or, in the alternative,
the Protestant minority only should be represented at Westminster. In
other words, they wished either for the pre-Union Irish system or for
the post-Union Irish system, both of them, as time was just beginning to
prove, equally disastrous to the interests of Ireland. We are not
surprised to find these ideas supported by the Irishman Burke, in whom
horror of the French Revolution had destroyed the last particle of
Liberalism. If Pitt lacked "Imperial imagination," he knew more than
most of his contemporaries about the elementary principles of governing
white men. It was only a few years before that he had urged upon his
Irish Viceroy, Rutland, a refo