'PATRIOTES' OF '37

PREFATORY NOTE

The manuscript for this little book, written by me in French, was handed over for translation to Mr Stewart Wallace. The result as here presented is therefore a joint product. Mr Wallace, himself a writer of ability and a student of Canadian history, naturally made a very free translation of my work and introduced some ideas of his own. He insists, however, that the work is mine; and, with this acknowledgment of his part in it, I can do no less than acquiesce, at the same time expressing my pleasure at having had as collaborator a young writer of such good insight. And it is surely appropriate that an English Canadian and a French Canadian should join in a narrative of the political war between the two races which forms the subject of this book.

A. D. DECELLES.

OTTAWA, 1915.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

CHAPTER I

CANADIANS, OLD AND NEW

The conquest of Canada by British arms in the Seven Years' War gave rise to a situation in the colony which was fraught with tragic possibilities. It placed the French inhabitants under the sway of an alien race—a race of another language, of another religion, of other laws, and which differed from them profoundly in temperament and political outlook. Elsewhere—in Ireland, in Poland, and in the Balkans—such conquests have been followed by centuries of bitter racial warfare. In Canada, however, for a hundred and fifty years French Canadians and English Canadians have, on the whole, dwelt together in peace and amity. Only on the one occasion, of which the story is to be told in these pages, has there been anything resembling civil war between the two races; and this unhappy outbreak was neither widespread nor prolonged. The record is one which Canadians, whether they be English or French, have reason to view with satisfaction.

It does not appear that the Canadians of 1760 felt any profound regret at the change from French to British rule. So corrupt and oppressive had been the administration of Bigot, in the last days of the Old Regime, that the rough-and-ready rule of the British army officers doubtless seemed benignant in comparison. Comparatively few Canadians left the country, although they were afforded facilities for so doing. One evidence of good feeling between the victors and the vanquished is found in the marriages which were celebrated between Canadian women and some of the disbanded Highland soldiers. Traces of these unions are found at the present day, in the province of Quebec, in a few Scottish names of habitants who cannot speak English.

When the American colonies broke out in revolution in 1775, the Continental Congress thought to induce the French Canadians to join hands with them. But the conciliatory policy of the successive governors Murray and Carleton, and the concessions granted by the Quebec Act of the year before, had borne fruit; and when the American leaders Arnold and Montgomery invaded Canada, the great majority of the habitants remained at least passively loyal. A few hundred of them may have joined the invaders, but a much larger number enlisted under Carleton. The clergy, the seigneurs, and the professional classes—lawyers and physicians and notaries—remained firm in their allegiance to Great Britain; while the mass of the people resisted the eloquent appeals of Congress, represented by its emissaries Franklin, Chase, and Carroll, and even those of the distinguished Frenchmen, Lafayette and Count d'Estaing, who strongly urged them to join the rebels. Nor should it be forgotten that at the siege of Quebec by Arnold the Canadian officers Colonel Dupré and Captains Dambourgès, Dumas, and Marcoux, with many others, were among Carleton's most trusted and efficient aides in driving back the invading Americans. True, in 1781, Sir Frederick Haldimand, then governor of Canada, wrote that although the clergy had been firmly loyal in 1775 and had exerted their powerful influence in favour of Great Britain, they had since then changed their opinions and were no longer to be relied upon. But it must be borne in mind that Haldimand ruled the province in the manner of a soldier. His high-handed orders caused dissatisfaction, which he probably mistook for a want of loyalty among the clergy. No more devoted subject of Great Britain lived at the time in Lower Canada than Mgr Briand, the bishop of Quebec; and the priests shaped their conduct after that of their superior. At any rate, the danger which Haldimand feared did not take form; and the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789 made it more unlikely than ever.

The French Revolution profoundly affected the attitude of the French Canadians toward France. Canada was the child of the ancien régime. Within her borders the ideas of Voltaire and Rousseau had found no shelter. Canada had nothing in common with the anti-clerical and republican tendencies of the Revolution. That movement created a gap between France and Canada which has not been bridged to this day. In the Napoleonic wars the sympathies of Canada were almost wholly with Great Britain. When news arrived of the defeat of the French fleet at Trafalgar, a Te Deum was sung in the Catholic cathedral at Quebec; and, in a sermon preached on that occasion, a future bishop of the French-Canadian Church enunciated the principle that 'all events which tend to broaden the gap separating us from France should be welcome.'

It was during the War of 1812-14, however, that the most striking manifestation of French-Canadian loyalty to the British crown appeared. In that war, in which Canada was repeatedly invaded by American armies, French-Canadian militiamen under French-Canadian officers fought shoulder to shoulder with their English-speaking fellow-countrymen on several stricken fields of battle; and in one engagement, fought at Châteauguay in the French province of Lower Canada, the day was won for British arms by the heroic prowess of Major de Salaberry and his French-Canadian soldiers. The history of the war with the United States provides indelible testimony to the loyalty of French Canada.

A quarter of a century passed. Once again the crack of muskets was heard on Canadian soil. This time, however, there was no foreign invader to repel. The two races which had fought side by side in 1812 were now arrayed against each other. French-Canadian veterans of Châteauguay were on one side, and English-Canadian veterans of Chrystler's Farm on the other. Some real fighting took place. Before peace was restored, the fowling-pieces of the French-Canadian rebels had repulsed a force of British regulars at the village of St Denis, and brisk skirmishes had taken place at the villages of St Charles and St Eustache. How this unhappy interlude came to pass, in a century and a half of British rule in Canada, it is the object of this book to explain.

CHAPTER II

THE RIGHTS OF THE DEFEATED

The British did not treat the French inhabitants of Canada as a conquered people; not as other countries won by conquest have been treated by their victorious invaders. The terms of the Capitulation of Montreal in 1760 assured the Canadians of their property and civil rights, and guaranteed to them 'the free exercise of their religion.' The Quebec Act of 1774 granted them the whole of the French civil law, to the almost complete exclusion of the English common law, and virtually established in Canada the Church of the vanquished through legal enforcement of the obligation resting upon Catholics to pay tithes. And when it became necessary in 1791 to divide Canada into two provinces, Upper Canada and Lower Canada, one predominantly English and the other predominantly French, the two provinces were granted precisely equal political rights. Out of this arose an odd situation. All French Canadians were Roman Catholics, and Roman Catholics were at this time debarred from sitting in the House of Commons at Westminster. Yet they were given the right of sitting as members in the Canadian representative Assemblies created by the Act of 1791. The Catholics of Canada thus received privileges denied to their co-religionists in Great Britain.

There can be no doubt that it was the conciliatory policy of the British government which kept the clergy, the seigneurs, and the great body of French Canadians loyal to the British crown during the war in 1775 and in 1812. It is certain, too, that these generous measures strengthened the position of the French race in Canada, made Canadians more jealous of their national identity, and led them to press for still wider liberties. It is an axiom of human nature that the more one gets, the more one wants. And so the concessions granted merely whetted the Canadian appetite for more.

This disposition became immediately apparent with the calling of the first parliament of Lower Canada in 1792. Before this there had been no specific definition of the exact status of the French language in Canada, and the question arose as to its use in the Assembly as a medium of debate. As the Quebec Act of 1774 had restored the French laws, it was inferred that the use of the French language had been authorized, since otherwise these laws would have no natural medium of interpretation. That this was the inference to be drawn from the constitution became evident, for the British government had made no objection to the use of French in the law-courts. It should be borne in mind that at this period the English in Canada were few in number, and that all of them lived in the cities. The French members in the Assembly, representing, as they did, nearly the whole population, did not hesitate to press for the official recognition of their language on a parity with English.

The question first came up in connection with the election of a speaker. The French-Canadian members, being in a majority of thirty-four to sixteen, proposed Jean Antoine Panet. This motion was opposed by the English members, together with a few of the French members, who nominated an Englishman. They pointed out that the transactions between the speaker and the king's representative in the colony should be 'in the language of the empire to which we have the happiness to belong.' 'I think it is but decent,' said Louis Panet, brother of Jean Antoine, 'that the speaker on whom we fix our choice, be one who can express himself in English when he addresses himself to the representative of our sovereign.' Yet the majority of the French members stuck to their motion and elected their speaker. When he was sworn into office, he declared to the governor that 'he could only express himself in the primitive language of his native country.' Nevertheless, he understood English well enough to conduct the business of the House. And it should not be forgotten that all the sixteen English members, out of the fifty composing the Assembly, owed their election to French-Canadian voters.

Almost immediately the question came up again in the debate on the use of the French language in the publication of official documents. The English members pointed out that English was the language of the sovereign, and they contended that the exclusive official use of the English language would more quickly assimilate the French Canadians—would render them more loyal. To these arguments the French Canadians replied with ringing eloquence.

'Remember,' said Chartier de Lotbinière, 'the year 1775. Those Canadians, who spoke nothing but French, showed their attachment to their sovereign in a manner not at all equivocal. They helped to defend this province. This city, these walls, this chamber in which I have the honour to speak, were saved partly through their zeal and their courage. You saw them join with faithful subjects of His Majesty and repulse attacks which people who spoke very good English made on this city. It is not, you see, uniformity of language which makes peoples more faithful or more united.'

'Is it not ridiculous,' exclaimed Pierre Bédard, whose name will appear later in these pages, 'to wish to make a people's loyalty consist in its tongue?'

The outcome of the debate, as might have been expected, was to place the French language on a level with the English language in the records and publications of the Assembly, and French became, to all intents and purposes, the language of debate. The number of English-speaking members steadily decreased. In the year 1800 Sir Robert Milnes wrote home that there were 'but one or two English members in the House of Assembly who venture to speak in the language of the mother country, from the certainty of not being understood by a great majority of the House.'

It must not be imagined, however, that in these early debates there was any of that rancour and animosity which later characterized the proceedings of the Assembly of Lower Canada. 'The remains of the old French politeness, and a laudable deference to their fellow subjects, kept up decorum in the proceedings of the majority,' testified a political annalist of that time. Even as late as 1807, it appears that 'party spirit had not yet extended its effects to destroy social intercourse and good neighbourhood.' It was not until the régime of Sir James Craig that racial bitterness really began.

CHAPTER III

'THE REIGN OF TERROR'

During the session of 1805 the Assembly was confronted with the apparently innocent problem of building prisons. Yet out of the debate on this subject sprang the most serious racial conflict which had yet occurred in the province. There were two ways proposed for raising the necessary money. One, advocated by the English members, was to levy a direct tax on land; the other, proposed by the French members, was to impose extra customs duties. The English proposal was opposed by the French, for the simple reason that the interests of the French were in the main agrarian; and the French proposal was opposed by the English, because the interests of the English were on the whole commercial. The English pointed out that, as merchants, they had borne the brunt of such taxation as had already been imposed, and that it was the turn of the French farmers to bear their share. The French, on the other hand, pointed out, with some justice, that indirect taxation was borne, not only by the importer, but also partly by the consumer, and that indirect taxation was therefore more equitable than a tax on the land-owners alone. There was, moreover, another consideration. 'The Habitants,' writes the political annalist already quoted, 'consider themselves sufficiently taxed by the French law of the land, in being obliged to pay rents and other feudal burthens to the Seigneur, and tythes to the Priest; and if you were to ask any of them to contribute two bushels of Wheat, or two Dollars, for the support of Government, he would give you the equivocal French sign of inability or unwillingness, by shrugging up his shoulders.'

As usual, the French-Canadian majority carried their point. Thereupon, the indignation of the English minority flared forth in a very emphatic manner. They accused the French Canadians of foisting upon them the whole burden of taxation, and they declared that an end must be put to French-Canadian domination over English Canadians. 'This province,' asserted the Quebec Mercury, 'is already too French for a British colony.... Whether we be in peace or at war, it is essential that we should make every effort, by every means available, to oppose the growth of the French and their influence.'

The answer of the French Canadians to this language was the establishment in 1806 of a newspaper, Le Canadien, in which the point of view of the majority in the House might be presented. The official editor of the paper was Jean Antoine Bouthillier, but the conspicuous figure on the staff was Pierre Bédard, one of the members of the House of Assembly. The tone of the paper was generally moderate, though militant. Its policy was essentially to defend the French against the ceaseless aspersions of the Mercury and other enemies. It never attacked the British government, but only the provincial authorities. Its motto, 'Notre langue, nos institutions et nos lois,' went far to explain its views and objects.

No serious trouble resulted, however, from the policy of Le Canadien until after the arrival of Sir James Craig in Canada, and the inauguration of what some historians have named 'the Reign of Terror.' Sir James Craig, who became governor of Canada in 1807, was a distinguished soldier. He had seen service in the American Revolutionary War, in South Africa, and in India. He was, however, inexperienced in civil government and apt to carry his ideas of military discipline into the conduct of civil affairs. Moreover, he was prejudiced against the inhabitants and had doubts of their loyalty. In Canada he surrounded himself with such men as Herman W. Ryland, the governor's secretary, and John Sewell, the attorney-general, men who were actually in favour of repressing the French Canadians and of crushing the power of their Church. 'I have long since laid it down as a principle (which in my judgment no Governor of this Province ought to lose sight of for a moment),' wrote Ryland in 1804, 'by every possible means which prudence can suggest, gradually to undermine the authority and influence of the Roman Catholic Priest.' 'The Province must be converted into an English Colony,' declared Sewell, 'or it will ultimately be lost to England.' The opinion these men held of the French Canadians was most uncomplimentary. 'In the ministerial dictionary,' complained Le Canadien, 'a bad fellow, anti-ministerialist, democrat, sans culotte, and damned Canadian, mean the same thing.'

Surrounded by such advisers, it is not surprising that Sir James Craig soon took umbrage at the language and policy of Le Canadien. At first he made his displeasure felt in a somewhat roundabout way. In the summer of 1808 he dismissed from the militia five officers who were reputed to have a connection with that newspaper, on the ground that they were helping a 'seditious and defamatory journal.' One of these officers was Colonel Panet, who had fought in the defence of Quebec in 1775 and had been speaker of the House of Assembly since 1792; another was Pierre Bédard. This action did not, however, curb the temper of the paper; and a year or more later Craig went further. In May 1810 he took the extreme step of suppressing Le Canadien, and arresting the printer and three of the proprietors, Taschereau, Blanchet, and Bédard. The ostensible pretext for this measure was the publication in the paper of some notes of a somewhat academic character with regard to the conflict which had arisen between the governor and the House of Assembly in Jamaica; the real reason, of course, went deeper.

Craig afterwards asserted that the arrest of Bédard and his associates was 'a measure of precaution, not of punishment.' There is no doubt that he actually feared a rising of the French Canadians. To his mind a rebellion was imminent. The event showed that his suspicions were ill-founded; but in justice to him it must be remembered that he was governor of Canada at a dangerous time, when Napoleon was at the zenith of his power and when agents of this arch-enemy of England were supposed to be active in Canada. Moreover, the blame for Craig's action during this period must be partly borne by the 'Bureaucrats' who surrounded him. There is no absolute proof, but there is at least a presumption, that some of these men actually wished to precipitate a disturbance, in order that the constitution of Lower Canada might be suspended and a new order of things inaugurated.

Soon after Bédard's arrest his friends applied for a writ of habeas corpus; but, owing to the opposition of Craig, this was refused. In July two of Bédard's companions were released, on the ground of ill health. They both, however, expressed regret at the tone which Le Canadien had adopted. In August the printer was discharged. Bédard himself declined to accept his release until he had been brought to trial and acquitted of the charge preferred against him. Craig, however, did not dare to bring him to trial, for no jury would have convicted him. Ultimately, since Bédard refused to leave the prison, he was ejected at the point of the bayonet. The situation was full of humour. Bédard was an excellent mathematician, and was in the habit of whiling away the hours of his imprisonment by solving mathematical problems. When the guard came to turn him out, he was in the midst of a geometrical problem. 'At least,' he begged, 'let me finish my problem.' The request was granted; an hour later the problem was solved, and Bédard was thrust forth from the jail.

Sir James Craig was a man of good heart and of the best intentions; but his course throughout this episode was most unfortunate. Not only did he fail to suppress the opposition to his government, but he did much to embitter the relations between the two races. Craig himself seems to have realized, even before he left Canada, that his policy had been a mistake; for he is reported on good authority to have said 'that he had been basely deceived, and that if it had been given to him to begin his administration over again, he would have acted differently.' It is significant, too, that Craig's successor, Sir George Prevost, completely reversed his policy. He laid himself out to conciliate the French Canadians in every way possible; and he made amends to Bédard for the injustice which he had suffered by restoring him to his rank in the militia and by making him a judge. As a result, the bitterness of racial feeling abated; and when the War of 1812 broke out, there proved to be less disloyalty in Lower Canada than in Upper Canada. But, as the events of Craig's administration had clearly shown, a good deal of combustible and dangerous material lay about.

CHAPTER IV

THE RISE OF PAPINEAU

In the year 1812 a young man took his seat in the House of Assembly for Lower Canada who was destined to play a conspicuous part in the history of the province during the next quarter of a century. His name was Louis Joseph Papineau. He was at that time only twenty-six years of age, but already his tall, well-built form, his fine features and commanding presence, marked him out as a born leader of men. He possessed an eloquence which, commonplace as it now appears on the printed page, apparently exerted a profound influence upon his contemporaries. 'Never within the memory of teacher or student,' wrote his college friend Aubert de Gaspé, 'had a voice so eloquent filled the halls of the seminary of Quebec.' In the Assembly his rise to prominence was meteoric; only three years after his entrance he was elected speaker on the resignation of the veteran J. A. Panet, who had held the office at different times since 1792. Papineau retained the speakership, with but one brief period of intermission, until the outbreak of rebellion twenty-two years later; and it was from the speaker's chair that he guided throughout this period the counsels of the Patriote party.

When Papineau entered public life the political situation in Lower Canada was beginning to be complicated. The French-Canadian members of the Assembly, having taken great pains to acquaint themselves with the law and custom of the British constitution, had awakened to the fact that they were not enjoying the position or the power which the members of the House of Commons in England were enjoying. In the first place, the measures which they passed were being continually thrown out by the upper chamber, the Legislative Council, and they were powerless to prevent it; and in the second place, they had no control of the government, for the governor and his Executive Council were appointed by and responsible to the Colonial Office alone. The members of the two councils were in the main of English birth, and they constituted a local oligarchy—known as the 'Bureaucrats' or the 'Château Clique'—which held the reins of government. They were as a rule able to snap their fingers at the majority in the Assembly.

In England the remedy for a similar state of affairs had been found to lie in the control of the purse exercised by the House of Commons. In order to bring the Executive to its will, it was only necessary for that House to threaten the withholding of supplies. In Lower Canada, however, such a remedy was at first impossible, for the simple reason that the House of Assembly did not vote all the supplies necessary for carrying on the government. In other words, the expenditure far exceeded the revenue; and the deficiency had to be met out of the Imperial exchequer. Under these circumstances it was impossible for the Lower Canada Assembly to attempt to exercise the full power of the purse. In 1810, it is true, the Assembly had passed a resolution avowing its ability and willingness to vote 'the necessary sums for defraying the Civil Expenses of the Government of the Province.' But Sir James Craig had declined on a technicality to forward the resolution to the Houses of Parliament at Westminster, realizing fully that if the offer were accepted, the Assembly would be able to exert complete power over the Executive. 'The new Trojan horse' was not to gain admission to the walls through him.

Later, however, in 1818, during the administration of Sir John Coape Sherbrooke, the offer of the Assembly was accepted by the Imperial government. Sherbrooke was an apostle of conciliation. It was he who gave the Catholic bishop of Quebec a seat in the Executive Council; and he also recommended that the speaker of the House of Assembly should be included in the Council—a recommendation which was a preliminary move in the direction of responsible government. Through Sherbrooke's instrumentality the British government now decided to allow the Lower-Canadian legislature to vote the entire revenue of the province, apart from the casual and territorial dues of the Crown and certain duties levied by Act of the Imperial parliament. Sherbrooke's intention was that the legislature should vote out of this revenue a permanent civil list to be continued during the lifetime of the sovereign. Unfortunately, however, the Assembly did not fall in with this view. It insisted, instead, on treating the civil list as an annual affair, and voting the salaries of the officials, from the governor downwards, for only one year. Since this would have made every government officer completely dependent upon the pleasure of the House of Assembly, the Legislative Council promptly threw out the budget. Thus commenced a struggle which was destined to last for many years. The Assembly refused to see that its action was really an encroachment upon the sphere of the Executive; and the Executive refused to place itself at the mercy of the Assembly. The result was deadlock. During session after session the supplies were not voted. The Executive, with its control of the royal revenue, was able by one means or another to carry on the government; but the relations between the 'Bureaucrats' and the Patriotes became rapidly more bitter.

Papineau's attitude toward the government during this period was in harmony with that of his compatriots. It was indeed one of his characteristics, as the historian Christie has pointed out, that he seemed always 'to move with the masses rather than to lead them.' In 1812 he fought side by side with the British. As late as 1820 he publicly expressed his great admiration for the constitution of 1791 and the blessings of British rule. But in the struggles over the budget he took up ground strongly opposed to the government; and, when the question became acute, he threw restraint to the winds, and played the part of a dangerous agitator.

What seems to have first roused Papineau to anger was a proposal to unite Upper and Lower Canada in 1822. Financial difficulties had arisen between the two provinces; and advantage was taken of this fact to introduce a Union Bill into the House of Commons at Westminster, couched in terms very unfavourable to the French Canadians. There is little doubt that the real objects of the bill was the extinction of the Lower-Canadian Assembly and the subordination of the French to the English element in the colony. At any rate, the French Canadians saw in the bill a menace to their national existence. Two agents were promptly appointed to go over to London to oppose it. One of them was Papineau; the other was John Neilson, the capable Scottish editor of the Quebec Gazette. The two men made a very favourable impression; they enlisted on their side the leaders of the Whig party in the Commons; and they succeeded in having the bill well and duly shelved. Their mission resulted not only in the defeat of the bill; it also showed them clearly that a deep-laid plot had menaced the rights and liberties of the French-Canadian people; and their anger was roused against what Neilson described as 'the handful of intrigants' who had planned that coup d'état.

On returning to Canada Papineau gave vent to his discontent in an extraordinary attack upon Lord Dalhousie, who had become governor of Canada in 1819. Dalhousie was an English nobleman of the best type. His tastes were liberal. He was instrumental in founding the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec; and he showed his desire for pleasant relations between the two races in Canada by the erection of the joint monument to Wolfe and Montcalm in the city of Quebec, in the governor's garden. His administration, however, had been marred by one or two financial irregularities. Owing to the refusal of the Assembly to vote a permanent civil list, Dalhousie had been forced to expend public moneys without authority from the legislature; and his receiver-general, Caldwell, had been guilty of defalcations to the amount of £100,000. Papineau attacked Dalhousie as if he had been personally responsible for these defalcations. The speech, we are told by the chronicler Bibaud, recalled in its violence the philippics of Demosthenes and the orations against Catiline of Cicero.

The upshot of this attack was that all relations between Dalhousie and Papineau were broken off. Apart altogether from the political controversy, Dalhousie felt that he could have no intercourse with a man who had publicly insulted him. Consequently, when Papineau was elected to the speakership of the Assembly in 1827, Dalhousie refused to recognize him as speaker; and when the Assembly refused to reconsider his election, Dalhousie promptly dissolved it.

It would be tedious to describe in detail the political events of these years; and it is enough to say that by 1827 affairs in the province had come to such an impasse, partly owing to the financial quarrel, and partly owing to the personal war between Papineau and Dalhousie, that it was decided by the Patriotes to send another deputation to England to ask for the redress of grievances and for the removal of Dalhousie. The members of the deputation were John Neilson and two French Canadians, Augustin Cuvillier and Denis B. Viger. Papineau was an interested party and did not go. The deputation proved no less successful than that which had crossed the Atlantic in 1822. The delegates succeeded in obtaining Lord Dalhousie's recall, and they were enabled to place their case before a special committee of the House of Commons. The committee made a report very favourable to the Patriote cause; recommended that 'the French-Canadians should not in any way be disturbed in the exercise and enjoyment of their religion, their laws, or their privileges'; and expressed the opinion that 'the true interests of the provinces would be best promoted by placing the collection and expenditure of all public revenues under the control of the House of Assembly.' The report was not actually adopted by the House of Commons, but it lent a very welcome support to the contentions of Papineau and his friends.

At last, in 1830, the British government made a serious and well-meant attempt to settle, once and for all, the financial difficulty. Lord Goderich, who was at that time at the Colonial Office, instructed Lord Aylmer, who had become governor of Canada in 1830, to resign to the Assembly the control of the entire revenue of the province, with the single exception of the casual and territorial revenue of the Crown, if the Assembly would grant in exchange a civil list of £19,000, voted for the lifetime of the king. This offer was a compromise which should have proved acceptable to both sides. But Papineau and his friends determined not to yield an inch of ground; and in the session of 1831 they succeeded in defeating the motion for the adoption of Lord Goderich's proposal. That this was a mistake even the historian Garneau, who cannot be accused of hostility toward the Patriotes, has admitted.

Throughout this period Papineau's course was often unreasonable. He complained that the French Canadians had no voice in the executive government, and that all the government offices were given to the English; yet when he was offered a seat in the Executive Council in 1822 he declined it; and when Dominique Mondelet, one of the members of the Assembly, accepted a seat in the Executive Council in 1832, he was hounded from the Assembly by Papineau and his friends as a traitor. As Sir George Cartier pointed out many years later, Mondelet's inclusion in the Executive Council was really a step in the direction of responsible government. It is difficult, also, to approve Papineau's attitude toward such governors as Dalhousie and Aylmer, both of whom were disposed to be friendly. Papineau's attitude threw them into the arms of the 'Château Clique.' The truth is that Papineau was too unbending, too intransigeant, to make a good political leader. As was seen clearly in his attitude toward the financial proposals of Lord Goderich in 1830, he possessed none of that spirit of compromise which lies at the heart of English constitutional development.

On the other hand, it must be remembered that Papineau and his friends received much provocation. The attitude of the governing class toward them was overbearing and sometimes insolent. They were regarded as members of an inferior race. And they would have been hardly human if they had not bitterly resented the conspiracy against their liberties embodied in the abortive Union Bill of 1822. There were real abuses to be remedied. Grave financial irregularities had been detected in the executive government; sinecurists, living in England, drew pay for services which they did not perform; gross favouritism existed in appointments to office under the Crown; and so many office-holders held seats in the Legislative Council that the Council was actually under the thumb of the executive government. Yet when the Assembly strove to remedy these grievances, its efforts were repeatedly blocked by the Legislative Council; and even when appeal was made to the Colonial Office, removal of the abuses was slow in coming. Last, but not least, the Assembly felt that it did not possess an adequate control over the expenditure of the moneys for the voting of which it was primarily responsible.