Turning to Lower Canada, we find that the financial position of the province was very different from that of Upper Canada.  The public accounts showed an annual surplus, and the financial difficulties of the province were caused entirely by the disputes between the executive and the assembly which would not vote the necessary supplies.  The timber trade had grown to large proportions and constituted the principal export to Great Britain from Quebec, which presented a scene of much activity in the summer.  Montreal was already showing its great advantages as a headquarters of commerce on account of its natural relations to the West and the United States.  Quebec and Montreal had each about 35,000 inhabitants.  Travellers admitted that Montreal, on account of the solidity of its buildings, generally of stone, compared most favourably with many of the finest and oldest towns in the United States.  The Parish Church of Notre Dame was the largest ecclesiastical edifice in America, and notable for its simple grandeur.  With its ancient walls girdling the heights first seen by Jacques Cartier, with its numerous churches and convents, illustrating the power and wealth of the Romish religion, with its rugged, erratic streets creeping through hewn rock, with its picturesque crowd of red-coated soldiers of England mingling with priests and sisters in sombre attire, or with the habitants in etoffe du pays,—­the old city of Quebec, whose history went back to the beginning of the seventeenth century, was certainly a piece of mediaevalism transported from northern France.  The plain stone buildings of 1837 still remain in all their evidences of sombre antiquity.  None of the religious or government edifices were distinguished for architectural beauty—­except perhaps the English cathedral—­but represented solidity and convenience, while harmonising with the rocks amid which they had risen.

The parliament of Lower Canada still met in the Bishop’s Palace, which was in want of repair.  The old Chateau St. Louis had been destroyed by fire in 1834, and a terrace bearing the name of Durham was in course of construction over its ruins.  It now gives one of the most picturesque views in the world on a summer evening as the descending sun lights up the dark green of the western hills, or brightens the tin spires and roofs of the churches and convents, or lingers amid the masts of the ships moored in the river or in the coves, filled with great rafts of timber.

As in the days of French rule, the environs of Quebec and Montreal, and the north side of the St. Lawrence between these two towns, presented French Canadian life in its most picturesque and favourable aspect.  These settlements on the river formed one continuous village, with tinned spires rising every few miles amid poplars, maples and elms.  While the homes of the seigniors and of a few professional men were more commodious and comfortable than in the days of French rule, while the churches and presbyteries illustrated the increasing prosperity of the dominant religion, the surroundings of the habitants gave evidences of their want of energy and enterprise.  But crime was rare in the rural districts and intemperance was not so prevalent as in parts of the west.