cument drawn up by a Committee of the Assembly in 1835. The
huge unsettled Clergy Reserves and Crown Lands were the worst concrete
abuse, and matters had just then been aggravated by the sudden
establishment of scores of sinecure rectories. Jobbery,
maladministration, and the dependence of the judges on the Executive
were other complaints; but the main assault was made quite rightly on
the form of the Colonial Government, which rendered peaceful reform of
any abuse as impossible as in Ireland, and the cardinal claim was that
the Executive should act, not under the dictation of Downing Street, of
an irresponsible Governor, or of a narrow colonial oligarchy, but in
accordance with popular opinion. Mackenzie's rebellion of 1837 was a no
more formidable affair than the similar efforts in Ireland made under
incomparably greater provocation by Emmett in 1803 and Smith O'Brien in
1848, and was as easily suppressed; but, unlike the Irish outbreaks, and
in conjunction with a revolt arising in the same year and from similar
causes in the adjoining Province of Lower Canada, it led to a complete
change of system.

In Lower Canada the same preposterous system of government was
aggravated by the presence of the two races, French and English. Yet
there was nothing inherently dangerous or unwholesome about this
situation. The French, like the Catholics in Ireland, never showed the
smallest tendency towards religious intolerance, nor were they less
loyal at heart than the Radicals of Upper Canada or the Tories of either
Province. They took the same energetic part in repelling the American
invasion of 1812, and produced at least one remarkable leader in the
person of Colonel Salaberry, who commanded the French-Canadian
Voltigeurs. Like their co-religionists in Ireland, they were
temperamentally averse to Republicanism in any shape, whether on the
American model over the border or on the model of revolutionary France,
where Republicanism since 1793 was anti-Catholic and the result of
miseries and oppressions as bad as those in Ireland; whence, moreover,
many priests and nobles fled from persecution to Lower Canada. As in
eighteenth-century Ireland, we find that the Roman Catholic clergy, the
_seigneurs_ or aristocrats, and the _habitants_ or peasants, were of a
Conservative cast, throwing their weight, often even against their own
interests, into the scale of the established Government, while the
lawyers and journalists alone produced det