ther be granted the rights of numerical majority or
be exasperated into destructive agitation.

It is not altogether easy to describe the community or chain of
communities created out of these diverse elements. Distance, climatic
difficulties, and racial misunderstandings weakened the sense of unity
in the colony; and the chief centres of population were still too young
and unformed to present to the visitor the characteristics of a
finished civilization.

Everywhere, but more especially in the west, the town population showed
remarkable increases. Montreal, which had, in 1790, an estimated
population of 18,000, had almost trebled that number by 1844; in the
same interval, Quebec increased from 14,000 to nearly 36,000. In the
Upper Province, immigration and natural increase produced an even more
remarkable expansion. In the twenty-two years between 1824 and 1846,
Toronto grew from a village of 1,600 inhabitants to be a flourishing
provincial capital of 21,000. In the census of 1848, the population of
Hamilton was returned as 9,889; that of Kingston as 8,416; Bytown, the
future capital, had 6,275 inhabitants; while a score of villages such
as London, Belleville, {25} Brockville, and Cobourg had populations
varying from one to four thousand.[18]

Social graces and conveniences had, however, hardly kept pace with the
increase in numbers. The French region was, for better or worse,
homogeneous, and Quebec formed a social centre of some distinction,
wherein the critical M'Taggart noted less vanity and conceit than was
to be met with in the country.[19] But further west, British observers
were usually something less than laudatory. The municipal franchise in
the cities of Lower Canada, being confined to the possessors of real
estate, shut out from civic management the more enterprising trading
classes, with the natural result that mismanagement and inefficiency
everywhere prevailed. In Quebec there was no public lighting, the
community bought unwholesome water from carters who took it from the
St. Lawrence, and the gaol--a grim but useful test of the civilization
of the place--not merely afforded direct communication between the
prisoners and the street, but was so ill ordered that, according to a
clerical authority, "they who happily are {26} pronounced innocent by
law may consider it a providential deliverance if they escape in the
meantime the effects of evil communication and example."[20] While
Montreal had