It is well known to all English readers, that the French of Lower Canada, forming a population of some four hundred thousand people, after a long course of factious and embarrassing legislation; after a species of civil, social, and parliamentary strife for nearly half a century, which was far more withering in its effects upon the prosperity of the country than a good fight in the beginning would have been, finally, in 1837, took up arms against the British government. Shortly afterwards they were joined by the party in Upper Canada which had long made common cause with them, though without common principles, aims, or hopes--the one's pride being indissolubly wedded to institutions which were pregnant with retrogression and decay, the other's chief merit consisting in pretension to raise men from beneath old ruins, instead of bringing old ruins down upon them. Yet both agreed in hating England, and in taking up arms, jointly and severally, to overthrow her institutions. Whatever other lesson England might have learned from the fact, she should at least have learned this--that it was no ordinary feelings of desperation or of difference that made them forego so much to each other, in order to strike an effectual blow at her; and that it could be no ordinary circumstance, if it was even in the nature of things, after they had become partners in the same defeats and humiliations--after they had been made bed-fellows by the same misfortunes--that could disunite them in favour of their common enemy; and not only turn the tide of their hatred against each other, but make the party that became loyal to England kiss the rod that had so severely scourged it. Probably this might have been thought difficult. But where the hostility to England might have been regarded as accidental, rather than of settled and determined principle, it might be urged that the reconciling one or both these parties to the British government, might not have been impossible; or the bringing the one back to loyalty, even at the expense of its having to oppose the other, might still be in the power of wise legislation. This brings us to consider the character and the principles, the prejudices and the predilections, of the two parties. And if the reader will follow us over a little scrap of history, possibly new to him, if we do not happen to differ on the road, we apprehend we shall agree in summing up the general results.