ermined agitators. The racial
cleavage, moreover, as in Ireland, was artificially accentuated by the
political system. There was in reality a strong community of interest
between the British lower class and the French lower class against the
tyranny of an official clique, and to the end a substantial number of
Englishmen worked with the French for reform; but with the failure of
their efforts came that inevitable tightening of the bonds of race, even
against interest, which we have seen operating with such lamentable
effect in Ireland. And, as in Ireland, we find the best instincts of
the people withered and perverted into rebellion by "Fitzgibbonism," the
policy of distrust and coercion.

The British official ascendancy, supreme from the first, became
extraordinarily rigid. The Executive Council and Legislative Council
were almost entirely British, the Assembly overwhelmingly French. There
were no regular heads of departments, so that the Governor had no
skilled advice, much less responsible advice. The Councils blocked all
legislation they disliked, and for more than forty years, by means of
unrestricted control over a large part of the provincial revenues, were
able to defy the Assembly. It will be observed that, although Ireland
never had anything worth calling an Assembly, her structure both before
and after the Union was essentially the same, in that Irish public
opinion, whether voiced by the Volunteers against the unreformed
Parliament or after the Union by the Nationalist party at Westminster,
was powerless. The existence of a popular Assembly in Canada only made
the anomalies more obvious.

There were, of course, marked divergencies of character and less marked
divergencies of interest between the French majority and the British
minority in Canada. The French, by comparison, were a backward and
conservative race, less well educated and less progressive and energetic
both in agriculture and commerce than the British. On the other hand,
subsequent experience showed that, under free constitutional government,
British intelligence, wealth, and energy would, here as elsewhere, have
preserved their full legitimate influence. Under a system which
throttled French ideas and aspirations, and treated the most harmless
popular movements as treasonable machinations, deadlock and anarchy were
in the long run inevitable.

The popular demands were much the same as those in Upper Canada: control
of the purse, the independe