of the crown, and to be called at its will to the executive and legislative councils.  Under these circumstances they were, with some reason, believed to be more or less under the influence of the governor-general; and particular judges consequently fell at times under the ban of the assembly, and were attacked on the most frivolous grounds.  The assembly passed a bill providing for the independence of the judiciary, but it had to be reserved because it was not in accordance with the conditions considered necessary by the crown for the protection of the bench.

The governor-general also in his message promised reforms of the judicial and legal systems, the disposal of the funds arising from the Jesuits’ estates by the legislature, and, in fact, nearly all the reforms which had been demanded by the house for years.  Yet when the government asked at the same time for a permanent civil list, the message was simply referred to a committee of the whole house which never reported.  Until this time the efforts of the assembly to obtain complete control of the public revenues and expenditures had a justification in the fact that it is a recognised English principle that the elected house should impose the taxes and vote the supplies; but their action on this occasion, when the imperial government made most important concessions, giving them full control over the public funds, simply on condition that they should follow the English system of voting the salaries of the judiciary and civil list, showed that the majority were earned away by a purely factious spirit.  During the progress of these controversies, Mr. Louis Joseph Papineau, a brilliant but an unsafe leader, had become the recognised chief of the French Canadian majority, who for years elected him speaker of the assembly.  In the absence of responsible government, there was witnessed in those times the extraordinary spectacle—­only now-a-days seen in the American congress—­of the speaker, who should be above all political antagonisms, acting as the leader of an arrogant majority, and urging them to continue in their hostility to the government.  It was Mr. Papineau who first brought the governor-general directly into the arena of political conflict by violent personal attacks; and indeed he went so far in the case of Lord Dalhousie, a fair-minded man anxious to act moderately within the limits of the constitution, that the latter felt compelled by a sense of dignity to refuse the confirmation of the great agitator as speaker in 1827.  The majority in the assembly vehemently asserted their right to elect their speaker independently of the governor, whose confirmation was a mere matter of form, and not of statutory right; and the only course at last open to Lord Dalhousie was to prorogue the legislature.  Mr. Papineau was re-elected speaker at the next session, when Lord Dalhousie had gone to England and Sir James Kempt was administrator.