Once the first tasks of hewing and hauling and planting were done, the new settlers called for the organization of local governments.They were quite as determined as their late foes to have a voice in their own governing, even though they yielded ultimate obedience to rulers overseas.
In the provinces by the sea a measure of self-government was at once established.New Brunswick received, without question, a constitution on the Nova Scotia model, with a Lieutenant Governor, an Executive Council appointed to advise him, which served also as the upper house of the legislature, and an elective Assembly.Of the twenty-six members of the first Assembly, twenty-three were Loyalists.With a population so much at one, and with the tasks of road making and school building and tax collecting insistent and absorbing, no party strife divided the province for many years.In Nova Scotia, too, the Loyalists were in the majority.There, however, the earlier settlers soon joined with some of the newcomers to form an opposition.The island of St.John, renamed Prince Edward Island in 1798, had been made a separate Government and had received an Assembly in 1773.Its one absorbing question was the tenure of land.On a single day in 1767 the British authorities had granted the whole island by lottery to army and navy officers and country gentlemen, on condition of the payment of small quitrents.The quitrents were rarely paid, and the tenants of the absentee landlords kept up an agitation for reform which was unceasing but which was not to be successful for a hundred years.In all three Maritime Provinces political and party controversy was little known for a generation after the Revolution.
It was more difficult to decide what form of government should be set up in Canada, now that tens of thousands of English-speaking settiers dwelt beside the old Canadians.Carleton, now Lord Dorchester, had returned as Governor in 1786, after eight years'
absence.He was still averse to granting an Assembly so long as the French subjects were in the majority: they did not want it, he insisted, and could not use it.But the Loyalist settlers, not to be put off, joined with the English merchants of Montreal and Quebec in demanding an Assembly and relief from the old French laws.Carleton himself was compelled to admit the force of the conclusion of William Grenville, Secretary of State for the Home Department, then in control of the remnants of the colonial empire, and son of that George Grenville who, as Prime Minister, had introduced the American Stamp Act of 1765: "I am persuaded that it is a point of true Policy to make these Concessions at a time when they may be received as a matter of favour, and when it is in Our own power to regulate and direct the manner of applying them, rather than to wait till they shall be extorted from us by a necessity which shall neither leave us any discretion in the form nor any merit in the substance of what We give."Accordingly, in 1791, the British Parliament passed the Constitutional Act dividing Canada into two provinces separated by the Ottawa River, Lower or French-speaking Canada and Upper or English-speaking Canada, and granting each an elective Assembly.
Thus far the tide of democracy had risen, but thus far only.Few in high places had learned the full lesson of the American Revolution.The majority believed that the old colonies had been lost because they had not been kept under a sufficiently tight rein; that democracy had been allowed too great headway; that the remaining colonies, therefore, should be brought under stricter administrative control; and that care should be taken to build up forces to counteract the democracy which grew so rank and swift in frontier soil.This conservative tendency was strengthened by the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789.* The rulers of England had witnessed two revolutions, and the lesson they drew from both was that it was best to smother democracy in the cradle.
* It will be remembered that in the debate on the Constitutional Act the conflicting views of Burke and Fox on the French Revolution led to the dramatic break in their lifelong friendship.
