The political exclusiveness of the Family Compact did not rouse resentment half as deep as did their religious, or at least denominational, pretensions. The refusal of the Compact to permit Methodist ministers to perform the marriage ceremony was not soon forgotten. There were scores of settlements where no clergyman of the Established Church of England or of Scotland resided, and marriages here had been of necessity performed by other ministers. A bill passed the Assembly in 1824 legalizing such marriages in the past and giving the required authority for the future; and when it was rejected by the Legislative Council, resentment flamed high. An attempt of Strachan to indict the loyalty of practically all but the Anglican clergy intensified this feeling; and the critics went on to call in question the claims of his Church to establishment and landed endowment.
The land question was the most serious that faced the province. The administration of those in power was condemned on three distinct counts. The granting of land to individuals had been lavish; it had been lax; and it had been marked by gross favoritism. By 1824, when the population was only 150,000, some 11,000,000 acres had been granted; ninety years later, when the population was 2,700,000, the total amount of improved land was only 13,000,000 acres. Moreover the attempt to use vast areas of the Crown Lands to endow solely the Anglican Church roused bitter jealousies. Yet even these grievances paled in actual hardship beside the results of holding the vast waste areas unimproved. What with Crown Reserves, Clergy Reserves, grants to those who had served the state, and holdings picked up by speculators from soldiers or poorer Loyalists for a few pounds or a few gallons of whisky, millions of acres were held untenanted and unimproved, waiting for a rise in value as a consequence of the toil of settlers on neighboring farms. Not one-tenth of the lands granted were occupied by the persons to whom they had been assigned. The province had given away almost all its vast heritage, and more than nine-tenths of it was still in wilderness. These speculative holdings made immensely more difficult every common neighborhood task. At best the machinery and the money for building roads, bridges, and schools were scanty, but with these unimproved reserves thrust in between the scattered shacks, the task was disheartening. "The reserve of two-sevenths of the land for the Crown and clergy," declared the township of Sandwich in 1817, "must for a long time keep the country a wilderness, a harbour for wolves, a hindrance to a compact and good neighborhood."
A further source of discontent developed in the disabilities affecting recent American settlers. A court decision in 1824 held that no one who had resided in the United States after 1783 could possess or transmit British citizenship, with which went the right to inherit real estate. This decision bore heavily upon thousands of "late Loyalists" and more recent incomers. Under the instructions of the Colonial Office, a remedial bill was introduced in the Legislative Council in 1827, but it was a grudging, halfway measure which the Assembly refused to accept. After several sessions of quarreling, the Assembly had its way; but in the meantime the men affected had been driven into permanent and active opposition.
The leaders of the movement of resistance which now began to gather force included all sorts and conditions of men. The fiercest and most aggressive were two Scotchmen, Robert Gourlay and William Lyon Mackenzie. Gourlay, one of those restless and indispensable cranks who make the world turn round, active, obstinate, imprudent, uncompromisingly devoted to the common good as he saw it, came to Canada in 1817 on settlement and colonization bent. Innocent inquiries which he sent broadcast as to the condition of the province gave the settlers an opportunity for voicing their pent-up discontent, and soon Gourlay was launched upon the sea of politics. Mackenzie, who came to Canada three years later, was a born agitator, fearless, untiring, a good hater, master of avitriolic vocabulary, and absolutely unpurchasable. He found his vein in weekly journalism, and for nearly forty years was the stormy petrel of Canadian politics. From England there came, among others, Dr. John Rolph, shrewd and politic, and Captain John Matthews, a half-pay artillery officer. Peter Perry, downright and rugged and of a homely eloquence, represented the Loyalists of the Bay of Quinte, which was the center of Canadian Methodism. Among the newer comers from the United States, the foremost were Barnabas Bidwell, who had been Attorney General of Massachusetts but had fled to Canada in 1810 when accused of misappropriating public money, and his son, Marshall Spring Bidwell, one of the ablest and most single-minded men who ever entered Canadian public life. From Ireland came Dr. William Warren Baldwin, whose son Robert, born in Canada, was less surpassingly able than the younger Bidwell but equally moderate and equally beyond suspicion of faction or self-seeking.
How were these men to bring about the reform which they desired? Their first aim was obviously to secure a majority in the Assembly, and by the election of 1828 they attained this first object. But the limits of the power of the Assembly they soon discovered. Without definite leadership, with no control over the Administration, and with even legislative power divided, it could effect little. It was in part disappointment at the failure of the Assembly that accounted for the defeat of the Reformers in 1830, though four years later this verdict was again reversed. Clearly the form of government itself should be changed. But in what way? Here a divergence in the ranks of the Reformers became marked. One party, looking upon the United States as the utmost achievement in democracy, proposed to follow its example in making the upper house elective and thus to give the people control of both branches of the Legislature. Another group, of whom Robert Baldwin was the chief, saw that this change would not suffice. In the States the Executive was also elected by the people. Here, where the Governor would doubtless continue to be appointed by the Crown, some other means must be found to give the people full control. Baldwin found it in the British Cabinet system, which gave real power to ministers having the confidence of a majority in Parliament. The Governor would remain, but he would be only a figurehead, a constitutional monarch acting, like the King, only on the advice of his constitutional advisers. Responsible government was Baldwin's one and absorbing idea, and his persistence led to its ultimate adoption, along with a proposal for an elective Council, in the Reform party's programme in 1834. Delay in affecting this reform, Baldwin told the Governor a year later, was "the great and all absorbing grievance before which all others sank into insignificance." The remedy could be applied "without in the least entrenching upon the just and necessary prerogatives of the Crown, which I consider, when administered by the Lieutenant. Governor through the medium of a provincial ministry responsible to the provincial parliament, to be an essential part of the constitution of the province." In brief, Baldwin insisted that Simcoe's rhetorical outburst in 1791, when he declared that Upper Canada was "a perfect Image and Transcript of the British Government and Constitution," should be made effective in practice.
The course of the conflict between the Compact and the Reformers cannot be followed in detail. It had elements of tragedy, as when Gourlay was hounded into prison, where he was broken in health and shattered in mind, and then exiled from the province for criticism of the Government which was certainly no more severe than now appears every day in Opposition newspapers. The conflict had elements of the ludicrous, too, as when Captain Matthews was ordered by his military superiors to return to England because in the unrestrained festivities of New Year's Eve he had called on a strolling troupe to play Yankee Doodle and had shouted to the company, "Hats off"; or when Governor Maitland overturned fourteen feet of the Brock Monument to remove a copy of Mackenzie's journal, the "Colonial Advocate", which had inadvertently been included in the corner stone.
The weapons of the Reformers were the platform, the press, and investigations and reports by parliamentary committees. The Compact hit back in its own way. Every critic was denounced as a traitor. Offending editors were put in the pillory. Mackenzie was five times expelled from the House, only to be returned five times by his stubborn supporters. Matters were at a deadlock, and it became clear either that the British Parliament, which alone could amend the Constitution, must intervene or else that the Reformers would be driven to desperate paths. But before matters came to this pass, an acute crisis had arisen in Lower Canada which had its effect on all the provinces.
In Lower Canada, the conflict which had been smoldering before the war had since then burst into flame. The issues of this conflict were more clearcut than in any of the other provinces. A coherent opposition had formed earlier, and from beginning to end it dominated the Assembly. The governing forces were outwardly much the same as in Upper Canada—a Lieutenant Governor responsible to the Colonial Office, an Executive Council appointed by the Crown but coming to have the independent power of a well-entrenched bureaucracy, and a Legislative Council nominated by the Crown and, until nearly the end of the period, composed chiefly of the same men who served in the Executive. The little clique in control had much less popular backing than the Family Compact of Upper Canada and were of lower caliber. Robert Christie, an English-speaking member of the Assembly, who may be counted an unprejudiced witness since he was four times expelled by the majority in that house, refers to the real rulers of the province as "a few rapacious, overbearing, and irresponsible officials, without stake or other connexion in the country than their interests." At their head stood Jonathan Sewell, a Massachusetts Loyalist who had come to Lower Canada by way of New Brunswick in 1789, and who for over forty years as Attorney General, Chief Justice, or member of Executive and Legislative Councils, was the power behind the throne.
The opposition to the bureaucrats at first included both English and French elements, but the English minority were pulled in contrary ways. Their antecedents were not such as to lead them to accept meekly either the political or the social pretensions of the "Chateau Clique"; the American settlers in the Eastern Townships, and the Scotch and American merchants who were building up Quebec and Montreal, had called for self-government, not government from above. Yet their racial and religious prejudices were strong and made them unwilling to accept in place of the bureaucrats the dominance of an unprogressive habitant majority. The first leader of the opposition which developed in the Assembly after the War of 1812 was James Stuart, the son of the leading Anglican clergyman of his day, but he soon fell away and became a mainstay of the bureaucracy. His brother Andrew, however, kept up for many years longer a more disinterested fight. Another Scot, John Neilson, editor of the Quebec "Gazette", was until 1833 foremost among the assailants of the bureaucracy. But steadily, as the extreme nationalist claims of the French-speaking majority provoked reprisals and as the conviction grew upon the minority that they would never be anything but a minority,* most of them accepted clique rule as a lesser evil than "rule by priest and demagogue."
* The natural increase of the French-Canadian race under
British rule is one of the most extraordinary phenomena in
social history. The following figures illustrate the rate of
that increase: the number was 16,417 in 1706; 69,810 in
1765; 479,288 in 1825; 697,084 in 1844. The population of
Canada East or Lower Canada in 1844 was made up as follows:
French Canadians, 524,244; English Canadians. 85,660;
English, 11,895; Irish, 43,982; Scotch, 13,393; Americans,
11,946; born in other countries, 1329; place of birth not
specified, 4635.