Thus it resulted that, at a very critical time, two provinces of the British Empire, whose conditions were specially critical, were left without a Governor-General, without Lieutenant-Governors, and without a regular Commander of the Forces, while two men, one holding the office of Governor-General of the two Canadas and the other holding the office of Lieutenant-Governor of Lower Canada, were spending their time and drawing their pay in England. We have learnt something in the last hundred years, in regard to colonial administration, and it is now difficult to appreciate a state of public morality which showed so much indifference to the interests of the colonies, so much acquiescence in sinecures, and so much readiness on the part of capable and honourable public officers to take pay without doing the work to which the pay was nominally attached. But the fact that such things took place, affords a very simple explanation of the difficulties which had already arisen and which subsequently arose in the history of European colonization between a mother country and her colonies. Men could put two and two together in those days as in ours. If colonists saw the rulers of the ruling land treating high offices in the colony as a matter of individual profit and public indifference, they could only come to the conclusion that they had better take care of themselves; and if the answer came that governors and lieutenant-governors were paid not by the colony but by the mother country, then the colonists must needs have concluded that they themselves would prefer to find the money and to have the money’s worth. This may well have been in the minds of the members of the elected Assembly in Lower Canada when, at a little later date, in 1810, they passed uninvited a resolution that the province shall pay the cost of the civil government, a resolution of which more was heard in the course of the long constitutional struggle. [Sidenote: External dangers which threatened Canada at the beginning of the nineteenth century.] [Sidenote: Hostility of France to Great Britain.]