in 1851: "For my part I never trouble my head about one of them.
Although the polling-house was just across {56} the street, I never
went near it."[58] In the cities, however, and along the main lines of
communication, the interest must have been keen, and the country
undoubtedly attained its manhood as it struggled towards the solution
of questions like those of the Clergy Reserves, the financing of the
colony, the regulation of trade and immigration, and, above all others,
the definition of responsible government.

Something has already been said of the various political groups in the
colony, for they corresponded roughly to the different strata of
settlement--French, Loyalist, and men of the later immigration. It is
true, as Sydenham and Elgin pointed out, that the British party names
hardly corresponded to local divisions--and that these divisions were
really too petty to deserve the name of parties. Yet it would be
foolish to deny the actual existence of the groups, or to refuse to see
in their turbulence and strife the beginning of national
self-consciousness, and the first stage in a notable political
development.

Most conspicuous among the political forces, because the bond of party
union was for them {57} something deeper than opinion, and must be
called racial, was the French-Canadian group, with the whole weight of
_habitant_ support behind it. From the publication of Lord Durham's
_Report_, through the Sydenham regime, and down till Sir Charles Bagot
surrendered to their claims, the French politicians presented an
unbroken and hostile front to the British community. Colborne had
repressed their risings at the point of the bayonet; a Whig government
had deprived them temporarily of free institutions; Durham--their
friend after his fashion--had bidden them be absorbed into the greater
British community; Sydenham came to enforce what Durham had suggested;
and, with each new check, their pride had grown more stubborn and their
nationalism more intense. Bagot, who understood them and whom they
came to trust, may be allowed to describe their characteristics,
through the troubled first years of union: "On Lord Sydenham's
arrival," he wrote to Stanley, "he found the Lower Province deprived of
a constitution, the legislative functions of the government being
administered by a special council, consisting of a small number of
members nominated by the Crown. A large portion of the people, at
least those of F