Upper
Canada had not known for a generation. The pacificator, however, had
to face two groups of irreconcilables, the Bishop of Toronto with his
extremist following, and the secularizing party resolute to have done
with any form of subsidy to religion. As he himself confessed, he had
little hope of succeeding in the Assembly, but he trusted to his new
popularity, then at its spring tide, and he won. Before the end of
January the question had been settled on a compromise, by a majority of
28 to 20 in the Assembly, and of 14 to 4 in the Council. It was even
more satisfactory to know that out of 22 members of Assembly who were
communicants of the Church of England, only 8 {91} voted in favour of
the _status quo_. There was but one set-back. Legal opinion in
England decided that the local assembly had not powers to change the
original act of 1791; and in the Imperial legislation which this check
made necessary, other influences crept in, and the governor-general
bitterly complained that the monstrous proportion allotted to the
Church of England, and the miserable proportion set apart for other
churches, rendered the Act only less an evil than if the question had
been left unsettled.[21] Still, the settlement retained existing
reserves for religious purposes, ended the creation of fresh reserves,
divided past sales of land between the Churches of England and of
Scotland, and arranged for the distribution of the proceeds of future
sales roughly in proportion to the numbers and importance of all the
churches in Canada. It was not an ideal arrangement, but quiet men
were anxious to clear the obstacle from the way, and through such men
Poulett Thomson worked his will. It is the most striking testimony to
the governor's power of management that, as a politician stated in
1846, three-quarters of the people believed the arrangement unjust and
partial, and acquiesced only because their political head desired it.
But {92} the end was not yet, and the uneasy ambition of the Bishop of
Toronto was in a few years to bring on his head just retribution for
the strife his policy continued to create. Nothing now remained but to
close this, the last parliament of Upper Canada under the old regime,
and the governor, who never suffered from lack of self-appreciative
optimism, wrote home in triumph: "Never was such unanimity. When the
speaker read my speech in the Commons, after the prorogation, they gave
me three cheers, in which even