generally crude and undefined, and living in a country where the whole construction of society and habits of feeling were decidedly republican, the term tory, when adopted by them, was certainly a misnomer.  However, hated by, and hating as cordially, the republican party in the United States, they by no means unreasonably considered that their losses and their attachment to British institutions, gave them an almost exclusive claim to the favour of the local government in Canada.  Thus the name of U.E. (United Empire) Loyalist or Tory came to be considered an indispensable qualification for every office in the colony.

This was all well enough so long as there was no other party in the country.  But gradually a number of other American settlers flowed into Canada from the United States, who had no claim to the title of tories or loyalists, but who in their feelings and habits were probably not much more republican than their predecessors.  These were of course regarded with peculiar jealousy by the older or loyalist settlers from the same country.  It seemed to them as if a swarm of locusts had come to devour their patrimony.  This will account for the violence of party feeling which lately prevailed in Canada.

There is nothing like a slight infusion of self-interest to give point and pungency to party feeling.  The British immigrants, who afterwards flowed into this colony in greater numbers, of course brought with them their own particular political predilections.  They found what was called toryism and high churchism in the ascendant, and self-interest or prejudice induced most of the more early settlers of this description to fall in with the more powerful and favoured party; while influenced by the representations of the old loyalist party they shunned the other American settlers as republicans.  In the meantime, however, the descendants of the original loyalists were becoming numerous, while the government became unable to satisfy them all according to their own estimation of their merits; and as high churchism was, unfortunately for the peace of society, associated with toryism, every shade of religious dissent as well as political difference of opinion generally added to the numbers and power of the reform party, which was now beginning to be known in the colony.  Strange to say, the great bulk of the present reform party is composed of the descendants of these U.E.  Loyalists, while many of our most ultra tories are the descendants of republican settlers from the United States.

As may be supposed, thirty years of increasing emigration from the mother-country has greatly strengthened the reform party, and they now considerably out-number the conservatives.  While the mass of the people held tory, or, I should rather call them, conservative principles, our government seemed to work as well as any representative government may be supposed to work without the necessary check of a constitutional opposition.