There were, of course, marked divergencies of character and less marked divergencies of interest between the French majority and the British minority in Canada.  The French, by comparison, were a backward and conservative race, less well educated and less progressive and energetic both in agriculture and commerce than the British.  On the other hand, subsequent experience showed that, under free constitutional government, British intelligence, wealth, and energy would, here as elsewhere, have preserved their full legitimate influence.  Under a system which throttled French ideas and aspirations, and treated the most harmless popular movements as treasonable machinations, deadlock and anarchy were in the long run inevitable.

The popular demands were much the same as those in Upper Canada:  control of the purse, the independence of the judges, an elective Legislative Council, and a curtailment of the arbitrary powers and privileges of the Executive, which led to gross jobbery, favouritism, and extravagance.  As in Upper Canada, the greatest practical grievance, though it assumed a somewhat different form, was the disposal of the public lands.  Here, too, there were extensive and undeveloped Clergy Reserves for the Episcopalian Church, as well as free grants on a large scale to speculators.  The estates of the Jesuit Order had been confiscated, so that disputes about their disposal were tinged with religious bitterness.  But most of the friction over the land question came from the operations of a chartered land company, which, under the protection of the Government, and with financial and political support from England, dealt with the unsettled land in a manner very unfair and often corrupt, and promoted here, as in Upper Canada and Ireland, absentee ownership.

The popular agitation ran the same course as in Upper Canada, reached its crisis at the same moment, threw into prominence the same types of men, moderate and extreme, and produced the same waste of good human material and distortion of human character, both in the ascendant and the subject classes.  As Sir John Cockburn tells us in his “Political Annals of Canada” (p. 177), some of the most incendiary speakers and writers (in 1836) were “most able and worthy men, who in the subsequent days of tranquillity occupied most prominent and distinguished positions in the public service, revered as loyal, true, and able statesmen by all classes.”  The popular movement was by no means wholly French.  A Scot, John Neilson; an Englishman, Wilfred Nelson; and an Irish journalist, Dr. O’Callaghan, were prominent members of a kind of Radical party; but the ablest and most influential among the agitators, and in every respect more admirable than Mackenzie, was the Frenchman, Louis Papineau, who first became Speaker of the Assembly in 1817, and retained that high position until the verge of the rebellion of 1837.  By no means devoid of superficial faults, but eloquent, honest, accomplished