All these questions arise in the case of Ireland itself, and the parallel in each case is interesting.  In Canada they were determined for the space of half a century by the Constitutional Act of 1791, passed at the period when Grattan’s unreformed Parliament was hastening to its fall, and Wolfe Tone was founding his Society of United Irishmen.  Let us take in turn the three questions posed above.

1.  The British minority in Lower Canada, supported by a corresponding school in England, were strong for an undisguised British ascendancy, without any recognition of the French.  They urged, what was true, that the French were unaccustomed to representative government, and implied, what was neither true nor politic, that they could not, and ought not to, be educated to it.  If there was to be an Assembly at all, it should, they claimed, be wholly British and Protestant, or, in the alternative, the Protestant minority only should be represented at Westminster.  In other words, they wished either for the pre-Union Irish system or for the post-Union Irish system, both of them, as time was just beginning to prove, equally disastrous to the interests of Ireland.  We are not surprised to find these ideas supported by the Irishman Burke, in whom horror of the French Revolution had destroyed the last particle of Liberalism.  If Pitt lacked “Imperial imagination,” he knew more than most of his contemporaries about the elementary principles of governing white men.  It was only a few years before that he had urged upon his Irish Viceroy, Rutland, a reform of the Irish Parliament which might have united the races and averted all the disasters to come, and in this very year (1791) he was pressing forward the Catholic franchise in Ireland.  The French in Canada must, he said, be represented in a popular Assembly equally with the British, and on the broadest possible franchise, and they were.

2.  The next question was that of the union or separation of Upper and Lower Canada.  Here, and from the same underlying motive, the British minority in Lower Canada were for the Union, partly on commercial grounds, but mainly as a step in the direction of overcoming French influence.  Upper Canada, wholly British, was, on the whole, neutral.  Pitt, on high principle, again took correct ground.  He did not, indeed, foresee that separation, for geographical reasons, would cause certain inconveniences; but he did understand—­and experience in both Provinces ultimately proved him right—­that it was absolutely hopeless to try and avert social and racial discord by artificially swamping the French element.  He declared, then, for the separation of the two Canadas into two distinct Provinces.  Note the beginnings of another, though a distant, analogy with the relations of Ireland and Great Britain, distant because the French at this time largely outnumbered the British of both Provinces, and in after-years maintained something very near a numerical equality.  But the same underlying principle