In England the
black reaction which had identified all proposals for reform with
treasonable sympathy for bloodstained France was giving way, and
the middle classes were about to triumph in the great franchise
reform of 1832. In the United States, after a generation of
conservatism, Jacksonian democracy was to sweep all before it.
These developments paralleled and in some measure influenced the
movement of events in the British North American provinces. But
this movement had a color of its own. The growth of self-
government in an independent country was one thing; in a colony
owing allegiance to a supreme Parliament overseas, it was quite
another. The task of the provinces--not solved in this period, it
is true, but squarely faced--was to reconcile democracy and
empire.
The people of the Canadas in 1791, and of the provinces by the
sea a little earlier, had been given the right to elect one house
of the legislature. More than this instalment of self-government
the authorities were not prepared to grant. The people, or rather
the property holders among them, might be entrusted to vote taxes
and appropriations, to present grievances, and to take a share in
legislation. They could not, however, be permitted to control the
Government, because, to state an obvious fact, they could not
govern themselves as well as their betters could rule them.
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