To meet the evils which he deemed so great and emphasized so strongly, Craig proposed that the existing constitution should be either cancelled or suspended. His view, as expressed in a letter to Ryland written in November, 1810,[225] was that it should be suspended during the continuance of the war with France and for five years afterwards, and that in this interval the former government by means of a governor and a nominated Legislative Council should be revived. He argued that representative institutions had been prematurely granted, before French Canadians were prepared for them; that they had been demanded by the English section of the inhabitants, not the French; and that at the time the best informed Canadians had been opposed to the change. In the alternative, he discussed the reunion of the two provinces, so as to leaven the Assembly with a larger number of British members, though he did not advocate this course; and the re-casting of the electoral divisions in Lower Canada, so as to give more adequate representation to those parts of the province, such as the Eastern Townships, where the English-speaking element could hold its own. In any case he pointed out the necessity of enacting a property qualification for the members of the Assembly, no such qualification being required under the Act of 1791, although that Act prescribed a qualification for the voters who elected the members. Craig went on to urge, as Milnes had urged before him, that the Royal supremacy should be exercised over the Roman Catholic priesthood, additional salary being given to the bishop, in consideration of holding his position under the Crown, and the curés being given freehold in their livings under appointment from the Crown. There was a further point. The Sulpician seminary at Montreal was possessed of large estates, and Craig considered this clerical body to be dangerous in view of the fact that it consisted largely of French emigrant priests. He proposed therefore that the Crown should resume the greater part of the lands. [Sidenote: Craig’s views not accepted by the Imperial Government.] Ryland soon found that the ministry were not prepared to face Parliament with any proposals for a constitutional change in Canada, and that they were more inclined to what he called ‘the namby-pamby system of conciliation’.[226] They thought that it had been a mistake in the first instance to divide Canada into two provinces, but the only step which they now took was to procure a somewhat superfluous opinion from the Attorney-General to the effect that the Imperial Parliament could alter the constitution of the provinces, or could reunite them with one Council and Assembly; and a rather less self-evident opinion that the governor could not redistribute the electoral divisions of Lower Canada without being authorized to do so by an Act either of the Imperial or of the Colonial Legislature. [Sidenote: Critical condition of England at the time of Ryland’s mission.]