scendancy, called by the same name, "the family compact,"
and sustained, against the prevailing sentiment and interest, by the
British Governor, and in each had arisen, or was arising, the same loud
demand for responsible government. Samuel Wilmot in New Brunswick,
Joseph Howe in Nova Scotia, were the best-known spokesmen. There was no
violence, but a growing dislocation. In five Provinces of North America,
therefore, the Colonial Government had broken down or was tottering, and
from exactly the same cause as in Ireland, though under provocation
infinitely less grave. For the moment, however, attention was
concentrated upon the Canadas, where, as a result of the rebellion, the
Constitution of Lower Canada was suspended early in 1838. In the summer
of 1838 Lord Durham, the Radical peer, was sent out by Melbourne's
Ministry as Governor-General, with provisionally despotic powers, and
with instructions to advise upon a new form of government.

Before we come to Durham's proposals, let us pause and examine the state
of home opinion on the Irish and Colonial questions. The people of Great
Britain at large had no opinion at all. They were ignorant both of
Canada and Ireland, and had been engaged, and, indeed, were still
engaged, in a political struggle of their own which absorbed all their
energies. The Chartist movement in 1838 was assuming grave proportions.
The Reform, won in 1832 under the menace of revolution and in the midst
of shocking disorders, was in reality a first step toward the domestic
Home Rule that Ireland and the five Provinces of North America were
clamouring for. Tory statesmen were quite alive to this political fact,
and condemned all the political movements, British, Irish, and Colonial,
indiscriminately and on the same broad anti-democratic grounds. The Duke
of Wellington, who was not a friend of the Reform Act, and had only
adopted Catholic Emancipation in order to avoid civil war in Ireland,
speaking about Canada in the House of Lords on January 18, 1838, coupled
together the United States, British North America, and Ireland as
dismal examples of the folly of concession to popular demands. Pointing
to the results of the Canada Act of 1831, to which I have already
alluded, and which gave the Assemblies control of the provincial
revenue, and with an eye, no doubt, on the tithe war barely at an end in
Ireland, he said: "Let noble lords learn from Canada and our other
dominions in North America what it is