Swept on by this great initial success, Poulett Thomson determined if possible to settle the Clergy Reserve trouble out of hand. As has been shown above, this ecclesiastical difficulty affected the whole life of the community; and its settlement would mean peace, such as Upper Canada had not known for a generation. The pacificator, however, had to face two groups of irreconcilables, the Bishop of Toronto with his extremist following, and the secularizing party resolute to have done with any form of subsidy to religion. As he himself confessed, he had little hope of succeeding in the Assembly, but he trusted to his new popularity, then at its spring tide, and he won. Before the end of January the question had been settled on a compromise, by a majority of 28 to 20 in the Assembly, and of 14 to 4 in the Council. It was even more satisfactory to know that out of 22 members of Assembly who were communicants of the Church of England, only 8 {91} voted in favour of the _status quo_. There was but one set-back. Legal opinion in England decided that the local assembly had not powers to change the original act of 1791; and in the Imperial legislation which this check made necessary, other influences crept in, and the governor-general bitterly complained that the monstrous proportion allotted to the Church of England, and the miserable proportion set apart for other churches, rendered the Act only less an evil than if the question had been left unsettled.[21] Still, the settlement retained existing reserves for religious purposes, ended the creation of fresh reserves, divided past sales of land between the Churches of England and of Scotland, and arranged for the distribution of the proceeds of future sales roughly in proportion to the numbers and importance of all the churches in Canada. It was not an ideal arrangement, but quiet men were anxious to clear the obstacle from the way, and through such men Poulett Thomson worked his will. It is the most striking testimony to the governor's power of management that, as a politician stated in 1846, three-quarters of the people believed the arrangement unjust and partial, and acquiesced only because their political head desired it. But {92} the end was not yet, and the uneasy ambition of the Bishop of Toronto was in a few years to bring on his head just retribution for the strife his policy continued to create. Nothing now remained but to close this, the last parliament of Upper Canada under the old regime, and the governor, who never suffered from lack of self-appreciative optimism, wrote home in triumph: "Never was such unanimity. When the speaker read my speech in the Commons, after the prorogation, they gave me three cheers, in which even the ultras joined."[22] It was perhaps the last remnant of this pardonable exultation which swept him over the 360 miles between Toronto and Montreal in thirty-six hours, breaking all records for long-distance sleighing in the province.