In one aspect the struggle for self-government in British North America was simply a local manifestation of a world-wide movement which found more notable expression in other lands. After a troubled dawn, democracy was coming to its own. In England the black reaction which had identified all proposals for reform with treasonable sympathy for bloodstained France was giving way, and the middle classes were about to triumph in the great franchise reform of 1832. In the United States, after a generation of conservatism, Jacksonian democracy was to sweep all before it. These developments paralleled and in some measure influenced the movement of events in the British North American provinces. But this movement had a color of its own. The growth of self-government in an independent country was one thing; in a colony owing allegiance to a supreme Parliament overseas, it was quite another. The task of the provinces--not solved in this period, it is true, but squarely faced--was to reconcile democracy and empire. The people of the Canadas in 1791, and of the provinces by the sea a little earlier, had been given the right to elect one house of the legislature. More than this instalment of self-government the authorities were not prepared to grant. The people, or rather the property holders among them, might be entrusted to vote taxes and appropriations, to present grievances, and to take a share in legislation. They could not, however, be permitted to control the Government, because, to state an obvious fact, they could not govern themselves as well as their betters could rule them. Besides, if the people of a colony did govern themselves, what would become of the rights and interests of the mother country? What would become of the Empire itself?