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The lesson which the statesmen in control in Britain learned from the two revolutions, the American and the French, was not the need of making terms with democracy, but the need of nipping democracy in the bud. Elective assemblies were conceded the people of Lower or French-speaking Canada, and Upper Canada, the newer English-speaking settlements to the west, as they had previously been granted to the old colony of Nova Scotia and the Loyalist settlement of New Brunswick, but beyond this British governments would not go. An all-guiding Colonial Office, a governor who really governed, an appointed, and but for the grace of God an hereditary, upper house which could always block the popular assembly, little cliques of a governing caste in control of administration, a church established and endowed to teach the people respect for authority, long barred the advance of self-government. Then the tide of democracy surging through the world, the constitutional campaigns of Baldwin and Papineau and Howe, the bullets of Mackenzie's and Chenier's men, the abandonment by Britain itself of the protectionist ideal of a self-contained empire, forced reform. This is not the place to repeat the familiar story of that early struggle for self-government. Later it will be necessary to consider what were the results of the half-century of British policy and Canadian development, on the political and party situation, the unity of the provinces, the relations of Church and State, the sentiment of French-Canadian nationalism, the evolution of the colonial status, and the other issues which faced Wilfrid Laurier and his fellow-countrymen as they came to manhood.