al rather than a party threat.

{60}

In the Upper Province, the party in possession, the so-called Family
Compact group, posed as the only friends of Britain. They had never
possessed more than an accidental majority in the Lower House, and,
since Durham's rule, it seemed likely that their old supremacy in the
Executive and Legislative Councils had come to an end. Yet as their
power receded, their language became the more peremptory, and their
contempt for other groups the more bitter. One of the most respectable
of the group, J. S. Cartwright, frankly confessed that he thought his
fellow-colonists unfit for any extension of self-government "in a
country where almost universal suffrage prevails, where the great mass
of the people are uneducated, and where there is but little of that
salutary influence which hereditary rank and great wealth exercise in
Great Britain."[60] Their position had an apparent but unreal
strength, because they knew that the older type of Colonial official,
the entire British Conservative party, and the Church of England, at
home and abroad, supported them. As late as July, 1839, Arthur, the
representative of the Crown in Upper Canada, could write thus to his
government concerning more than half the {61} population under his
authority: "There is a considerable section of persons who are disloyal
to the core; reform is on their lips, but separation is in their
hearts. These people having for the last two or three years made a
'responsible government' their watch-word, are now extravagantly elated
because the Earl of Durham has recommended that measure. They regard
it as an unerring means to get rid of all British connection, while the
Earl of Durham, on the contrary, has recommended it as a measure for
cementing the existing bond of union with the mother country."[61]

Their programme was precise and consistent. The influence of a too
democratic franchise was to be modified by a Conservative upper house,
and an executive council, chosen not in accordance with popular wishes,
but from the class--their own--which had so long been dominant in the
executive. The British connection depended, in their view, on the
permanent alliance between their group and whatsoever representative
the British crown might send to Canada. French Canadian feeling they
were prepared to repress as a thing rebellious and un-English, and the
{62} friends of the French in Upper Canada they regarded very much as a