Again, in spite of the great change in French opinion wrought by Elgin's acceptance of French ministers, there was a little band of French extremists, the _Rouges_, entirely disaffected towards England. At their head, at first, was Papineau. Papineau's predilections, according to one who knew him well, were avowedly democratic and republican,[35] and his years in Europe, at the time when revolution was in the air, had not served to moderate his opinions. The election address with which he once more entered public life, at the end of 1847, betrays everywhere hatred of the British government, a decided inclination for things American, and a strong dash of European revolutionary sentiment, revealed in declamations over _patriotes_ and _oppresseurs_.[36] Round him gathered a little band {332} of anti-clericals and ultra-radicals, as strongly drawn to the United States as they were repelled by Britain. Even after Papineau had reduced himself to public insignificance, the group remained, and in 1865 Cartier, the true representative of French-Canadian feeling, spoke of the _Institut Canadien_ of Montreal as an advocate, not of confederation, but of annexation.[37] After the years of famine in Ireland, there was more than a possibility that, in Canada, as in the United States, the main body of Irish immigrants would be hostile to Britain, and Elgin watched with anxious eyes for symptoms of a rising, sympathetic with that in Ireland, and fostered by Irish-American hatred of England. Throughout the province the Irish community was large and often organized--in 1866 D'Arcy M'Gee counted thirty counties in which the Irish-Catholic votes ranged from a third to a fifth of the whole constituency.[38] Now while, {333} in 1866, M'Gee spoke with boldness of the loyalty of his countrymen, it is undoubtedly true that, in 1848 and 1849, there were hostile spirits, and an army of Irish patriots across the border, only too willing to precipitate hostilities. For the rest, there were Americans in the province who still thought their former country the perfect state, and who did not hesitate to use British liberty to promote republican ends; there were radicals and grumblers of half a hundred shades and colours, who connected their sufferings with the errors of British rule, and who spoke loosely of annexation as a kind of general remedy for all their public ills. For it cannot be too distinctly asserted that, from that day to this, there has always been a section of discontented triflers to whom annexation, a word often on their lips, means nothing more than their fashion of damning a government too strong for them to assail by rational processes.