were set apart in each township, under the name of “Clergy Reserves” for the Episcopalian Church.  Since the majority of the incoming settlers were Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists, or Roman Catholics, many of them from the Protestant and Catholic parts of Ireland, some from America, some even from Germany, these conditions caused intense irritation, checking both the development of the country and the growth of solid character among the colonists.  Absentee ownership was a grave economic evil, though happily it was not complicated and embittered by a vicious system of tenure.  Education suffered severely through the diversion of the income from public lands to private purposes.

The ascendancy was maintained on lines familiar in Ireland—­through the mutual dependence of the colonial minority and the Home Government acting through its Governor.  A few leading Episcopalian families from among the United Empire Loyalists, installed at Toronto, with the support of a succession of High Tory Lieutenant-Governors, monopolized the Executive Council, the Legislative Council, the Bench, the Bar, and all offices of profit, denying a Canadian career to the vast majority of Upper Canadians, just as Irishmen were excluded from an Irish career.  For a long time the Assembly itself, which retained its original Constitution long after the influx of immigrants had rendered necessary its enlargement on a new electoral basis, was a subject of monopoly also.  Even when enlarged in 1821 it was helpless against the nominated Council and Executive, backed by Downing Street.  The oligarchy came to be known by the name of the “family compact,” and, as the reader will observe, it bore a close resemblance in form to the “undertaker” system in Ireland before the Union, and to the monopoly of patronage obtained by certain families, notably the Beresfords.

While the Colony was still small, the system worked tolerably well; but from the second decade of the nineteenth century onwards, when the population grew from 150,000 to 250,000 in 1832, and to 500,000 a few years later, and the Episcopalians sank into a numerical minority as low as a quarter, troubles of the Irish type became proportionately acute.  The Colony was in reality perfectly content with its position under the Crown, and in the war with America in 1812 all classes and creeds united to repel invasion with enthusiasm.  One of the prominent leaders was an Irishman, James Fitzgibbon, and a poor Irish private, James O’Hara, won fame by refusing to surrender at the capture of Toronto Fort.  As usual, however, a fictitious standard of “loyalty,” which, in fact, meant privilege, was set up, obscuring those questions of good government which were the only real matters at issue in Canada, as in Ireland.  There were Republican immigrants of many denominations from America, Radicals of Cobbett’s school from England and Scotland, tenants of a democratic turn from Ulster, and a growing stream of Catholic cottiers flying from the “clearances” and tithe war in other Irish Provinces.  All these classes of men made excellent settlers, and only wanted fair and equal treatment to make them perfectly peaceable citizens.  To the official oligarchy, however, even their moderate leaders came to be viewed as rebels, and were often subjected to imprisonment or to banishment.