The politics of the Lower Province were more complex. There was a British Reform party, having aims identical with those of their brethren in the west: the overthrow of the despotic Family Compact, full control of revenue by the Assembly, better administration of justice, improved management of Crown lands--all summed up in the demand for responsible government. There was also a French party, greatly more numerous than the other, and seeming to concur with it in many of its opinions. But the real aims of the Frenchmen were wholly at variance with those of the British. They desired to increase the power of the Assembly, because they themselves composed seven-eighths of that body. It was still their hope to establish a French nation on the banks of the St. Lawrence; to preserve old French law and custom; to shut out British immigrants, and possess the soil for their own people. The British Government was bewildered by the complicated strife in which it was constantly importuned to interfere. There were petitions full of grievances; on one occasion there were ninety-two resolutions, which were laid before King and Parliament by the French party, and copiously answered by the British; there were constant and querulous statements of wrongs presented to the Governor. Out of doors a bitter and uncompromising strife raged. The British were denounced as tyrants, usurpers, foreigners. The French were scorned as a subjugated race, and reprobated as ungrateful rebels who had been treated too leniently. The British Government manifested an anxious desire to understand and to heal those pernicious strifes. It decreed Committees of Inquiry; it sent Commissions to investigate on the spot; it appointed conciliatory Governors; it made numerous small concessions, in the vain hope of appeasing the entangled and inexplicable discontents of its distant subjects. The disaffected Frenchmen were ruled, during their unhappy progress towards rebellion, by Louis Joseph Papineau, a man whose years should have brought him wisdom, for he was now in middle-life; ambitious, restless, eloquent, with power to lead his ignorant countrymen at his pleasure, and without prudence to direct his authority to good ends.