The party in Upper Canada which had opposed the government step by step, until it ended with rebellion in conjunction with the French, was composed of vastly different materials from these its allies. And it is somewhat singular, but it is nevertheless a fact, that this party, both as to its strength, and the true causes of its hostility to England, has never been very thoroughly understood even in the Canadas. The principle of under-rating enemies was always applied to it by its opponents in the province. The pernicious habit of looking upon men with too much contempt to take the measure of their strength, is as bad in politics as it is in a physical struggle. But the party known as the government party in Upper Canada, was generally far too self-important and too great to calculate how many dark-looking clouds it takes to make a storm. The government of England too, never very clear-sighted in colonial affairs, and with its Argus eye as directed to Canadian prospects always suffering from some defect of vision, or looking through very distorting media, was not very likely to catch the height and cut of each individual in a colonial multitude, which it scarcely ever saw even in gross; while the Governors who "did the monarch" in the province, did not generally betray much taste for sitting down by the farmer's fireside, and eating apple-sauce and sauerkraut at his table, where there neither was, nor could have been, recognised a distinction between the master and the man,--between the lord of the castle and the cook in the kitchen. Yet such were the places where governors and rulers might have seen at work the elements of democracy; might have witnessed the process of education to the levelling system. An education which, with the vast facilities for independence in America, irrespective of situation or institutions--men never get over; and in which they might have traced the natural growth of feelings and principles, that must, in the very nature of things, be in a state of continual warfare with the customs, the pride, and the love of distinction, which are the inalienable offspring of the monarchy, the aristocracy, and the social system of England. Yet here they never penetrated either to count the voters or the children. They felt--they were obliged to feel--that the great wheel of the government, which was the majority in parliament, often performed extraordinary revolutions the wrong way. But they knew not how or wherefore. They never went where they might have studied, and could have understood, the difficulty; where, to make a long story short, in order to get at what they missed, and to understand what they did not, the reader has possibly anticipated the necessity of accompanying us.