s by peaceful persuasion. Their leader in public
affairs was Robert Baldwin, whose career and opinions may be more fitly
considered at a later point, and Francis Hincks expounded their views
in his paper _The Examiner_. They were devoted adherents of the
Responsible Government school; that is, they desired to have provincial
cabinets, not simply chosen so that they might not conflict with public
opinion, but imposed upon the governor by public opinion through its
representatives in the House of Assembly. They had for years protested
against the Clergy Reserves monopoly, and although Baldwin seems always
to have favoured the retention of some form of assistance to religion,
the ordinary reformer was vehement for absolute secularization.
Sydenham when he came, refused to admit that the British party names
were anything but misnomers in Canada; and yet Hincks was not singular
among the reformers when he said that he had been in favour of all the
measures advocated by the British progressives--Catholic Emancipation,
the Repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, Abolition of {65} Slavery,
and Parliamentary Reform.[64] Their relation to the French was
curious. Unlike the French, they were usually strong advocates of a
union of the two provinces, and they sympathized neither with
Papineau's doctrinaire republicanism, nor with the sullen negative
hatred of things British which then possessed so many minds in Lower
Canada. But grievances still unredressed created a fellow-feeling with
the French, and from 1839 until 1842 the gradual formation of an
Anglo-French reforming _bloc_, under Baldwin and La Fontaine, was one
of the most notable developments in Canadian political life.

After the Union, as before it, the political life of Canada was
characterized by a readiness to resort to violence, and a lack of
political good manners, which contrasted painfully with the eloquent
phrases and professions of the orators on either side. The earliest
impression which the first governor-general of the Union received of
politics in his province was one of disorder and mismanagement. "You
can form no idea of the manner in which a Colonial Parliament transacts
its business," Poulett Thomson wrote from Toronto, in 1839. "When they
came to their own affairs, {66} and, above all, to the money matters,
there was a scene of confusion and riot of which no one in England can
have any idea. Every man proposes a vote for his own job, and bills