obstruction
eventually gives way. But this idea of a tie of confidence between the
Governors and the governed was exactly what was lacking.

The Executive Council in each Province was also chosen by the British
Governor or Lieutenant-Governor, generally a military man, from persons
representing either his own purely British policy or the ideas of a
privileged colonial minority, and without regard to the wishes or
opinions of the Colonial Assembly, just as the Executive officers in
Ireland, both before and after the Union, were chosen out of
corresponding elements by the Lord-Lieutenant or Chief Secretary, acting
under the orders of the British Government, and without any regard to
the wishes or opinions of the majority of Irishmen. Behind all, in
remote Downing Street stood the British Government, in the shape of the
Colonial Office for Canada and the Irish Office for Ireland, both
working in dense ignorance of the real needs of the countries for which
they were responsible, and permeated with prejudice and pedantry. To
complete the parallel, there was now a foreign Power in the close
neighbourhood of each dependency, the United States in the case of
Canada, France in the case of Ireland, both of them Republican Powers,
and both able and willing to take advantage of disaffection in the
dependencies in order to further a quarrel with the Mother Country. We
have seen the results in Ireland. Let us now observe the results in
Canada, taking especial care to notice that an ascendancy Government
gives rise to the same type of evil in a uni-racial as in a bi-racial
community.

Let us glance first at what happened in Upper Canada, which was
uni-racial, that is, composed of settlers from the United Kingdom
(including Ireland) and America. Here the original settlers, the "United
Empire Loyalists" from America, formed from the first, and maintained
for half a century, an ascendancy of wealth and religion over the
incoming settlers, who soon constituted the majority of the population.
As in Ireland, though in a degree small by comparison, there was a land
question and a religious question, closely related to one another.
Happily, it was not a case of robbery, but of simple monopoly.
Excessively large grants of land, nine-tenths of which remained
uncultivated, were obtained by the original settlers, most of whom were
Episcopalian in faith, and, under the Act of 1791, further tracts of
enormous extent, which for the most part lay w