In the discussion of these transactions, Peel, as we have seen, had alluded to the affairs of Canada, which had been of a still more serious complexion; since there the discontent of the colonists in the Lower Province had developed into armed insurrection.  We have seen that, from the first moment after the country had passed into our possession, there had been almost constant dissensions between the old French colonists and the English immigrants who crossed over both from England and from the colonies on the southern side of the St. Lawrence in the early part of the reign of George III.  The desire of terminating these divisions, which had their root in a difference of religion as well as of race, the French settlers being Roman Catholics, had been one of the chief motives which had led Pitt in 1791 to divide the country into two provinces.[253] And for many years the scheme was fairly successful; but, toward the end of the reign of George IV., the political excitement caused by the agitation in England of the question of Catholic Emancipation, and subsequently of Reform, spread across the Atlantic to the Canadas; and the French portion of the colonists, who almost monopolized the representation in Lower Canada, began to urge the adoption of changes utterly inconsistent with the existing constitution of the colony.  In the hope of compelling the compliance of the home government with their demands, in 1832 and the following years they refused to vote the necessary supplies; and, gaining courage, as it were, from the contemplation of their own violence, and under the guidance of a leader of French extraction, a M. Papineau, who scarcely concealed his hope of effecting the complete severance of the Lower Province from the British dominion, they proceeded to put forth farther demands, which they regarded as plausible from the apparent resemblance of the changes which they required to the system of the English constitution, but which, to use the words in which Sir Robert Peel described them, would have established “a French republic.”  The most important of them were that the Upper or Legislative Council should, like the Assembly, be rendered elective, instead of, as had hitherto been the case, being nominated by the crown.  And another asked that the Executive Council should be made responsible to the Assembly, in the same manner as in England the ministers of the crown were responsible to Parliament.  As it was at once shown that the ministry at home had no intention of granting these demands, Papineau collected a band of malcontents in arms, with whom he took possession of one or two small towns, and ventured even to measure his strength with the Commander-in-chief of the province, Sir John Colborne, one of the most distinguished of Wellington’s comrades and pupils.  His force was utterly routed, and he himself fled across the frontier to New York.  A similar outbreak, excited in the Upper Province by a newspaper editor, was crushed with equal ease and rapidity.[254] And the next year,