industry two thousand five hundred arrivals were registered. They received every year foreign or colonial goods to the value of two million; and they exported to a somewhat larger extent. They built ships, and sold them to England; they sent many cargoes of timber, and much valuable fur; already they produced food beyond their own consumption, and they sent to Europe wheat and flour and oats and salted provisions. They shipped fish and fish oils. They burned down masses of their abundant timber, and having obtained the salts which combustion set free, they manufactured them into pot and pearl ashes, and shipped them to Europe for service in bleaching and other operations. They supplied themselves with sugar from the sap of their maple trees. They brewed much excellent cider and beer; they distilled from rye, potatoes, apples, much whisky which was not excellent.

Quebec and Montreal had grown up into considerable towns, each with a population of nearly forty thousand, the vast majority of whom were French. In the bay where Wolfe's boats stole unobserved and in silence to the shore, there lay now a fleet of merchant-vessels ministering to a large and growing commerce. The lower town which the English guns had destroyed was a bustling, thriving sea-port. Far above, where Montcalm and Wolfe fought, was now a well-built city, bright with towers and spires; with its impregnable Citadel; with its Parliament House, said to be more imposing than that in which the Commons of Great Britain then assembled; with its Palace for the Governor-General, and its aspect and tone of metropolitan dignity; with college and schools; with newspapers and banks, and libraries and charitable societies; with ship-building, manufacturing, and all the busy marketing which beseems one of the great haunts of commerce. Those seventy years of English rule had raised Quebec from the rank of little more than a village to that of an important city; and had seen the valley of the St. Lawrence pass out of the condition of wilderness and become the home of a numerous and prospering population.

CHAPTER XII.

THE CANADIAN REVOLUTION.

HE progress of years did not allay, but, on the contrary, steadily enhanced the fever of political discontent which now pervaded the colonies. The

measure of representation which they enjoyed had seemed, when the Act of Pitt conferred it upon them, fairly satisfactory; but after the close of the great European war political opinion ripened fast, and the freedom which had seemed ample in 1791 was intolerably insufficient forty years later. The colonists perceived that they were living under a despotism. Their Executive and one of their legislative chambers were appointed by the Crown, without regard to the popular wish. Only the Lower Chamber was chosen by the people, and its action was constantly frustrated by the Governor, the aristocratic advisers by whom his policy was guided, and his ally the Council. On their southern border lay the territories of a great nation, whose people enjoyed complete political freedom and appointed all their rulers. The United States had so prospered that their population was now tenfold that of Canada; and their more rapid growth was traced, in the general belief, to the larger freedom of their institutions. In England the engrossing occupation of the people had been, for many years, the extending of their liberties, the rescue of political power from the hands by which it had been irregularly appropriated. The Englishmen of Canada could not remain unmoved by the things

which had come to pass among the Englishmen of America and of England.

1820

When the Canadians of the Upper Province were awakening to a perception of the evils under which they suffered, there arrived among them an adventurous young Scotchman destined to leave deep traces on their political history. A.D. His name was William Lyon Mackenzie. He had already played many parts in various Scotch and English towns, with but indifferent success. In Canada he resumed his quest of a livelihood; but finding nothing at first to meet his requirements, he devoted himself to political reform, and set up a newspaper. His love of reform and his hatred of abuses were genuine and deep; his mind was acute and energetic; but his temperament was too impulsive to permit sufficient consideration of the course which he intended to pursue. The very first number of his paper awakened the sensibilities of all who profited by corruption. He continued his unwelcome diligence in the investigation and exposure of abuses, and in rousing the public mind to demand an enlargement of political privilege.

There were many grounds of difference between the party of Reform and the governing power. Justice, it was said, was impurely administered; the Governor persisted in refusing to yield to the Assembly control over certain important branches of the public revenue, and continued to administer these at his own pleasure. The Governors fell into the hands of the small influential party known as the Family Compact, which filled all public offices with its own adherents. The grievances of which the Assembly complained were debated in a spirit of intense bitterness. On one occasion the Assembly censured the Governor, and was in turn rebuked for its want of courtesy. Mackenzie was five times expelled from the House, and was as often elected. On one occasion the Assembly refused to grant supplies to the Governor, and the Governor avenged himself by rejecting the Bill which members had passed for payment of their own sala

ries. But gradually, with growing enlightenment, all these trivial discontents consolidated into one loud and urgent demand for responsible government. It was perceived that with a Ministry responsible to the Assembly an adequate measure of constitutional liberty would be secured.

respon

The politics of the Lower Province were more complex. There was a British Reform party, having aims identical with those of their brethren in the west: the overthrow of the despotic Family Compact, full control of revenue by the Assembly, better administration of justice, improved management of Crown lands-all summed up in the demand for sible government. There was also a French party, greatly more numerous than the other, and seeming to concur with it in many of its opinions. But the real aims of the Frenchmen were wholly at variance with those of the British. They desired to increase the power of the Assembly, because they themselves composed seven-eighths of that body. It was still their hope to establish a French nation on the banks of the St. Lawrence; to preserve old French law and custom; to shut out British immigrants, and possess the soil for their own people.

The British Government was bewildered by the complicated strife in which it was constantly importuned to interfere. There were petitions full of grievances; on one occasion there were ninety-two resolutions, which were laid before King and Parliament by the French party, and copiously answered by the British; there were constant and querulous statements of wrongs presented to the Governor. Out of doors a bitter and uncompromising strife raged. The British were denounced as tyrants, usurpers, foreigners. The French were scorned as a subjugated race, and reprobated as ungrateful rebels who had been treated too leniently. The British Government manifested an anxious desire to understand and to heal those pernicious strifes. It decreed Committees of Inquiry; it sent Commissions to investigate on

the spot; it appointed conciliatory Governors; it made numerous small concessions, in the vain hope of appeasing the entangled and inexplicable discontents of its distant subjects.

The disaffected Frenchmen were ruled, during their unhappy progress towards rebellion, by Louis Joseph Papineau, a man whose years should have brought him wisdom, for he was now in middle-life; ambitious, restless, eloquent, with power to lead his ignorant countrymen at his pleasure, and without prudence to direct his authority to good ends.

This mischievous person occupied himself in persuading the peasants of the Montreal district to throw off the British yoke and establish themselves as an independent nation. His efforts were not wholly without success. The peasantry began

1837

A. D.

to arm and to drill. The symbols of French dominion, the tri-coloured flag and the eagle, were constantly displayed; the revolutionary songs of France were sung by turbulent mobs in the streets of Montreal. These evidences of inflamed feeling pointed decisively to violence. The Roman Catholic clergy took part with the Government, and sought to hold the excited people to their duty by threatening disturbers of the peace with the extreme penalties of ecclesiastical law. Many persons were restrained by the terrors thus announced, and the dimensions of the rebellious movement were lessened. But no considerations, sacred or secular, sufficed to restrain Papineau and his deluded followers from a series of violent proceedings, which have been dignified by the name of rebellion, but which were really nothing more than serious riots. Bands of armed peasantry ranged the country around Montreal; the well-affected inhabitants sought shelter in the city, and their homesteads were ravaged by the invaders. At several points a few hundred men drew together to withstand the Government forces and were defeated. One such body, unable to abide the conflict which they had provoked, threw down their arms and