French Canadians dwelt with emphasis on the feet that their province had a population of 630,000 souls, or 160,000 more than Upper Canada, and nevertheless received only the same number of representatives.  French Canada had been quite free from the financial embarrassment which had brought Upper Canada to the verge of bankruptcy before the union; in fact the former had actually a considerable surplus when its old constitution was revoked on the outbreak of the rebellion.  It was, consequently, with some reason, considered an act of injustice to make the people of French Canada pay the debts of a province whose revenue had not for years met its liabilities.  Then, to add to these decided grievances, there was a proscription of the French language, which was naturally resented as a flagrant insult to the race which first settled the valley of the St. Lawrence, and as the first blow levelled against the special institutions so dear to French Canadians and guaranteed by the Treaty of Paris and the Quebec Act.  Mr. LaFontaine, whose name will frequently occur in the following chapters of this book, declared, when he presented himself at the first election under the Union Act, that “it was an act of injustice and despotism”; but, as we shall soon see, he became a prime minister under the very act he first condemned.  Like the majority of his compatriots, he eventually found in its provisions protection for the rights of the people, and became perfectly satisfied with a system of government which enabled them to obtain their proper position in the public councils and restore their language to its legitimate place in the legislature.

But without the complete grant of responsible government it would never have been possible to give to French Canadians their legitimate influence in the administration and legislation of the country, or to reconcile the differences which had grown up between the two nationalities before the union and seemed likely to be perpetuated by the conditions of the Union Act just stated.  Lord Durham touched the weakest spot in the old constitutional system of the Canadian provinces when he said that it was not “possible to secure harmony in any other way than by administering the government on those principles which have been found perfectly efficacious in Great Britain.”  He would not “impair a single prerogative of the crown”; on the contrary he believed “that the interests of the people of these provinces require the protection of prerogatives which have not hitherto been exercised.”  But he recognized the fact as a constitutional statesman that “the crown must, on the other hand, submit to the necessary consequences of representative institutions; and if it has to carry on the government in unison with a representative body, it must consent to carry it on by means of those in whom that representative body has confidence.”  He found it impossible “to understand how any English statesman could have ever imagined that representative and irresponsible