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Colourless these pages may be, but they are not barren. They recall an epoch which, in spite of failures, was on the whole fruitful, in which the patriot's eye may follow with legitimate pride the calm, powerful and salutary influence of free institutions. [9]

The tasks of government and the scope and organization of parties had been greatly modified by the union of Upper and Lower Canada in 1841. The Union Act brought together two communities of deeply varying ways and traditions, communities which for fifty years had had their separate governments and their local parties. The mere union of the two provinces would have made it necessary to shift the bases of political activity, but union further brought in its train responsible government, and responsible government involved as an essential condition the existence of political parties more definite and coherent than had hitherto existed in the Canadas.

The insistence of the Reformers of Upper Canada and the Patriotes of Lower Canada, through years of struggle, upon a greater share in their own governing, and the shock of the rebellion of 1837, had compelled British statesmen to recognize at last that concessions must be made. Under Durham's guidance, they had come to see that the concession should take the form which Robert Baldwin, the leader of the Upper Canada Reformers, had long demanded—the grant, in some measure, of responsible government. Responsible government meant in essence that the administration of the country should be entrusted to the leaders of the dominant party in parliament, rather than, as in the past, to the governor and the bureaucrats whom he appointed. But how could such freedom, even with the restrictions with which in early years the concession was hedged about, be granted to a colony like Lower Canada, where the majority would inevitably be composed of French-Canadians? English statesmen could bring themselves, with difficulty, to admit the need of self-government for the colonists of English speech and traditions in Upper Canada, but to propose the same policy for a colony alien in blood and tongue and sympathy appeared to them beyond discussion. Only by uniting the provinces, to assure an English-speaking majority, could the experiment be risked. Nor was the Union only negatively directed against French-Canadian aspirations. Its framers hoped to make Union a positive means of anglicizing French Canada, of bringing the habitant to realize the folly of isolation in a continent of English speech. How they fared in this endeavor will be noted later.