90 THE ROARING FORTIES 



steadily to follow the lines of race. In the 

 assembly the numerically stronger French easily 

 maintained the ascendancy, but the members of 

 the legislative council were selected by the gov 

 ernors chiefly from the English element. Hence 

 a persistent demand from the assembly that the 

 council should be made elective. On all sub 

 jects of party contest the antagonism between 

 the two houses, with the governor sustaining 

 the council, was intense, and the hostility was 

 but the central point of a far-reaching race 

 conflict. 



In Upper Canada there was no difference of 

 nationalities to fix the lines of the party con 

 flicts. The issues here turned chiefly on the 

 rivalries between the original settlers and the 

 later arrivals, the latter being almost entirely 

 British, with only a small though active ele 

 ment of immigrants from the United States. 

 The Loyalists by whom, at the end of the 

 American Revolution, the colony was practically 

 created, became by their landed wealth, their 

 substantial character, and their political ex 

 perience, as well as by the deliberate recogni 

 tion of the home government, a social and 

 political aristocracy in the province. By the 

 thirties a relatively narrow group of this class 



