must have presented a steady and dull monotony—the jail and court-house, three or four churches, a varying number of mean-looking stores including a liberal proportion of taverns, and the irregular rows of private houses.

If lack of efficient public spirit, and social monotony, marked the towns, the settlers in the bush were hardly likely to show a vigorous communal spirit. They had their common life, building, clearing, harvesting in local "bees," primitive assemblies in which work, drinking, and recreation welded the primitive community together, and the "grog-boss" became for a time the centre of society.[24] But the average day of the farmer was solitary, and, except where politics meant bridges, roads, and material gifts, his outlook was limited by the physical strain of his daily life, and work and sleep followed too closely on each other's track to leave time for other things. M'Taggart has a quaint picture of a squatter, which must have been typical of much within the colony in 1839. He found the settler, Peter Armstrong, "in a snug little cabin, with a wife, two children, some good sleek grey cats, and a very respectable-looking dog. He had but few wants, his health was aye good; there was spring water plenty just aside him, and enough to make a good fire in winter, while with what he caught, shot, gathered and grew in the yard, he lived well enough." His relation to the state, secular and ecclesiastical, is best gauged by his admission that when it came to marriage, he and his wife—Scottish like himself—"just took ane anither's word on't."[25] Crime, on the whole, considering the elements out of which the community had been formed, was surprisingly little in evidence.[26] In certain regions it had a natural fertility. Wherever the white trader met the Indian, or rival fur-traders strove in competition, the contact between the vices of the two communities bred disorder, and Canadian trading success was too often marked by the indiscriminate ruin of the Indians through drink and disease.[27] At Bytown, where the lumberers gathered to vary their labours in the bush with dissipation, the community "was under the control of a very dangerous class of roughs, who drank, gambled, and fought continually, and were the terror of all well-disposed citizens."[28] Drunkenness seems to have been a very prevalent vice, probably because whisky was so cheaply produced; and where self-restraint was weak, and vast numbers of the poorest classes from Britain formed the basis of society, drunkenness was accompanied by bestial violence, or even death, in sudden and dreadful forms.[29] But it was the verdict of a Scottish clergyman, who played his part in pioneer work round Perth, that "considering the mixture of worthless persons, which our population formerly contained, it was astonishing how few crimes had been committed."

Three powerful influences helped to shape the young Canadian community and to give it some appearance of unity—education, religion, and politics. It now becomes necessary to examine these factors in Canadian existence in the years prior to, and immediately after, the visit of Durham to the colony. In religion and education, however, our analysis must concern Upper and British Canada rather than the French region. In the latter the existence and dominance of the Catholic church greatly simplified matters. Thanks to the eighteenth century agreements with the French, Roman Catholicism had been established on very favourable terms in Lower Canada, and dominated that region to the exclusion of practically all other forms of religious life. As has already been shown, the church controlled not only religion but education. If the women of the Lower Province were better educated than the men, it was because the convent schools provided adequately for female education. If higher education was furnished in superabundance, again the church was the prime agent, as it was also in the comparative neglect of the rank and file; and comment was made by Durham's commissioners on the fact that the priesthood resented anything which weakened its control over the schools. This Catholic domination had a very notable influence in politics, for, after the first outbursts of nationality were over, the Catholic laity in politics proved themselves a steadily conservative force. La Fontaine, the first great French leader who knew how to co-operate with the British Canadians, was only by accident a progressive, and escaped from politics when the growth of Upper Canada radicalism began to draw him into dangerous religious questions.[30] But in the Upper Province, education and religion did not show this stationary and consistent character, and played no little part in preparing for and accentuating the political agitation.

Education had a history rather of good intentions than of brilliant achievement. At different times in the earlier nineteenth century, schemes for district grammar schools and general common schools were prepared, and sums of money, unhappily not in increasing amounts, were voted for educational purposes. But, apart from the doubtful enthusiasm of the legislators, the education of the British settlers was hampered by an absence of suitable teachers, and the difficulty of letting children, who were often the only farm assistants at hand, attend school for any length of time. According to good evidence, half of the true school population never saw the schools, and the other half could give only seven months in the year to their training.[31]

In most country districts, the settlers had to trust to luck both for teachers and for schoolhouses, and beginnings which promised better things too often ended in blank failure. There is both humour and romance in these early struggles after education. In Ekfried, by the Thames, in Western Canada, there had been no school, till the arrival of an honest Scot, Robert Campbell, and the backwardness of the season in 1842, gave the settlement a schoolmaster, and the new settler some ready money. "I get a dollar and a half, a quarter per scholar," he wrote to his friends in Scotland, "and seeing that the wheat did little, I am glad I did engage, for we got plenty of provisions."[32] In Perth, a more ambitious start