With the Clergy Reserve dispute, the region of politics has been reached; and, after all, politics furnished the most powerful influence in the young Canadian community. But politics must be taken less in the constitutional sense, as has been the custom with Canadian writers, and more in the social and human sense. It is important also to note the broad stretches of Canadian existence {55} into which they hardly intruded. Political questions found few exponents among the pioneers as they cleared the forests, or gathered lumber for the British market, or pushed far to the west and north in pursuit of furs. Even the Rebellion, when news of it reached Strickland and his fellow-settlers in the Peterborough country, came to them less as part of a prolonged struggle in which they all were taking part, than as an abnormal incident, to be ended outright by loyal strength. They hardly seem to have thought that any liberties of theirs were really endangered. When Mackenzie himself complained that instead of entering Toronto with four or five thousand men, he found himself at the head of a poor two hundred, he does not seem to have realized that, even had his fellow-conspirators not mismanaged things, it would still have been difficult to keep hard-working settlers keyed up to the pitch of revolutionary and abstract doctrines.[57] There must have been many settlers of the temper of the humble Scottish janitor in Queen's College, Kingston, who wrote, in the midst of the struggle of parties in 1851: "For my part I never trouble my head about one of them. Although the polling-house was just across {56} the street, I never went near it."[58] In the cities, however, and along the main lines of communication, the interest must have been keen, and the country undoubtedly attained its manhood as it struggled towards the solution of questions like those of the Clergy Reserves, the financing of the colony, the regulation of trade and immigration, and, above all others, the definition of responsible government. Something has already been said of the various political groups in the colony, for they corresponded roughly to the different strata of settlement--French, Loyalist, and men of the later immigration. It is true, as Sydenham and Elgin pointed out, that the British party names hardly corresponded to local divisions--and that these divisions were really too petty to deserve the name of parties. Yet it would be foolish to deny the actual existence of the groups, or to refuse to see in their turbulence and strife the beginning of national self-consciousness, and the first stage in a notable political development.