by a large majority, and received the crown’s assent through Lord Elgin on the 25th April, 1849.  A large crowd immediately assembled around the parliament house—­formerly the St. Anne Market House—­and insulted the governor-general by opprobrious epithets, and by throwing missiles at him as he drove away to Monklands, his residence in the country.  The government and members of the legislature appear to have been unconscious of the danger to which they were exposed until a great crowd rushed into the building, which was immediately destroyed by fire with its fine collection of books and archives.  A few days later, when the assembly, then temporarily housed in the hall of Bonsecours Market, attempted to present an address to Lord Elgin, he was in imminent danger of his life while on his way to the government house—­then the old Chateau de Ramesay in Notre-Dame Street—­and the consequences might have been most serious had he not evaded the mob on his return to Monklands.  This disgraceful affair was a remarkable illustration not simply of the violence of faction, but largely of the discontent then so prevalent in Montreal and other industrial centres, on account of the commercial policy of Great Britain, which seriously crippled colonial trade and was the main cause of the creation of a small party which actually advocated for a short time annexation to the United States as preferable to the existing state of things.  The result was the removal of the seat of government from Montreal, and the establishment of a nomadic system of government by which the legislature met alternately at Toronto and Quebec every five years until Ottawa was chosen by the Queen as a permanent political capital.  Lord Elgin felt his position keenly, and offered his resignation to the imperial government, but they refused to entertain it, and his course as a constitutional governor under such trying circumstances was approved by parliament.

The material condition of the provinces—­especially of Upper Canada, which now became the first in population and wealth—­kept pace with the rapid progress of the people in self-government.  The population of the five provinces had increased from about 1,500,000, in 1841, to about 3,200,000 when the census was taken in 1861 The greatest increase had been in the province of Upper Canada, chiefly in consequence of the large immigration which flowed into the country from Ireland, where the potato rot had caused wide-spread destitution and misery.  The population of this province had now reached 1,396,091, or nearly 300,000 more than the population of Lower Canada—­an increase which, as I shall show in the next chapter, had important effects on the political conditions of the two provinces.  The eastern or maritime provinces received but a small part of the yearly immigration from Europe, and even that was balanced by an exodus to the United States.  Montreal had a population of 100,000, or double that of Quebec, and was now recognised as the commercial