The French Canadians, who formed the chief element in the new government, were even at this time a peculiar people. Planted in the days of the old French monarchy, and cut off by conquest from the parent state long before the Revolution of 1789, their little community remained for many years like a fragment or boulder of a distinct formation--an island enshrining the picturesque institutions of the _ancien régime_, in the midst of an ever-encroaching sea of British nineteenth-century enterprise. The English, it has been truly said, emigrate, but do not colonise. No concourse of atoms could be more fortuitous than the gathering of 'traders, sailors, deserters from the army, outcasts, convicts, slaves, democrats, and fanatics,' who have been the first, and sometimes the only ingredients of society in our so-called colonies. French Canada, on the contrary, was an organism complete in itself, a little model of medieval France, with its recognised gradations of ranks, ecclesiastical and social. It may, indeed, be doubted whether the highest forms of social life are best propagated by this method: whether the freer system, which 'sows itself on every wind,' does not produce the larger, and, in the long run, the more beneficent results. But if reason acquiesces in the ultimate triumph of that busy, pushing energy which distinguishes the British settler, there is something very attractive to the imagination in the picture presented by the peaceful community of French _habitans_, living under the gentle and congenial control of their _coûtumes de Paris_, with their priests and their seigneurs, their frugal, industrious habits, their amiable dispositions and simple pleasures, and their almost exaggerated reverence for order and authority. Politically speaking, they formed a most valuable element in Canadian society. At one time, indeed, the restless anarchical spirit of the settlers around them, acting on the sentiment of French nationality, instigated them to the rebellion of 1837; but, as a rule, their social sympathies were stronger than their national antipathies; and gratitude to the Government which secured to them the enjoyment of their cherished institutions kept them true to England on more than one occasion when her own sons threatened to fall away from her. By the legislative union of 1840 the barriers which had separated the British and French communities were, to a great extent, broken down; and the various elements in each began gradually to seek out and to combine with those which were congenial to them in the other. But there were many cross currents and thwarting influences; and there was great danger, as Lord Elgin felt, lest they should form false combinations, on partial views of local or personal interest, instead of uniting on broad principles of social and political agreement.