he American
continent. Education flourished not at all among {16} the rank and
file. Arthur Buller found the majority of those whom he met either not
able to write, or able to write little more than their names.[10] The
women, he said, were the active, bustling portion of the _habitants_,
thanks to the admirable and yet inexpensive training to be had in the
nunneries. As for the men, they farmed and lived as their fathers had
done before them. They cleared their land, or tilled it where it had
been cleared, and thought little of improvement or change. M'Taggart,
whose work on the Rideau Canal, made him an expert in Canadian labour,
much preferred French Canadians to the Irish as labourers, and thought
them "kind, tender-hearted, very social, no way very ambitious, nor
industrious, rarely speculative."[11] To the Canadian commonwealth,
the French population furnished a few really admirable statesmen; a
dominant and loyal church; some groups of professional men,
disappointed and discontented sons of humble parents, too proud to sink
to the level of their uninstructed youth, and without the opportunity
of rising higher; and a great mass of men who hewed wood and drew
water, not for a master, but for themselves, {17} submissive to the
church, and well-disposed, but ignorant, and at the mercy of any clever
demagogue who might raise the cry of nationalism. Still, when
nationality remained unchallenged, the French-Canadians were at least
what, till recently, they remained, the most purely conservative
element in Canada.

The second element, in point of stability and importance, in the
Canadian population was that of the United Empire Loyalists, the
remnants of a former British supremacy in the United States. They had
proved their steadfastness and courage by their refusal to accept the
rules of the new republic; and their arrival in Canada gave that
country an aristocracy of Anglo-Saxon origin to counterbalance that of
the seigneurs on the Lower St. Lawrence. The men had in many cases
been trained to arms in the revolutionary war, and they served a second
and perhaps a harder apprenticeship in the Canadian forests. They had
formed the centre of resistance to American attacks in the war of 1812.
Their sons and grandsons had once more exhibited the hereditary loyalty
of the group, in resisting the rebels of 1837-38; and Metcalfe, who was
their best friend among the governors of the United Provinces, justly
{18} looke