claims to hold office.

If the creation of a Liberal-Conservative party {305} was a direct
result of the grant of autonomy, so also was the policy which led to
Confederation. It is no part of the present volume to trace the growth
of the idea of Confederation, or to determine who the actual fathers of
Confederation were. The connection between Autonomy and Confederation
in the province of Canada was that the former made the latter
inevitable.

Earlier chapters have dealt with the French Canadian problem, and the
difficulty of combining French _nationalite_ with the Anglo-Saxon
elements of the West. In one sense, Elgin's regime saw nationalism
lose all its awkward features. Papineau's return to public life in
1848, and the revolutionary stir of that year had left Lower Canada
untouched, save in the negligible section represented by the _Rouges_.
The inclusion of La Fontaine and his friends in the ministry had proved
the _bona fides_ of the governor, and the French, being, as Elgin said,
"quiet sort of people," stood fast by their friend. "Candour compels
me to state," he wrote after a year of annexationist agitation, "that
the conduct of the Anglo-Saxon portion of our M.P.Ps contrasts most
unfavourably with that of the Gallican.... The French have been
rescued from the false position into which they {306} have been driven,
and in which they must perforce have remained, so long as they believed
that it was the object of the British government, as avowed by Lord
Sydenham and others, to break them down, and to ensure to the British
race, not by trusting to the natural course of events, but by dint of
management and state craft, predominance in the province."[9]

But while French nationalism had assumed a perfectly normal phase, the
operations of autonomy after 1847 made steadily towards the creation of
a new nationalist difficulty. That difficulty had two phases.

In the first place, while the Union of Upper and Lower Canada had been
based on the assumption that from it a single nationality with common
ideals and objects would emerge, experience proved that both the French
and the British sections remained aggressively true to their own ways;
and the independence bred by self-government only quickened the sense
of racial distinction. Now there were questions, such as that of the
Clergy Reserves, which chiefly concerned the British section; and
others, like the settlement of the seigniorial tenure, of purely
Fre