What seems to have first roused Papineau to anger was a proposal to unite Upper and Lower Canada in 1822. Financial difficulties had arisen between the two provinces; and advantage was taken of this fact to introduce a Union Bill into the House of Commons at Westminster, couched in terms very unfavourable to the French Canadians. There is little doubt that the real objects of the bill was the extinction of the Lower-Canadian Assembly and the subordination of the French to the English element in the colony. At any rate, the French Canadians saw in the bill a menace to their national existence. Two agents were promptly appointed to go over to London to oppose it. One of them was Papineau; the other was John Neilson, the capable Scottish editor of the Quebec _Gazette_. The two men made a very favourable impression; they enlisted on their side the leaders of the Whig party in the Commons; and they succeeded in having the bill well and duly shelved. Their mission resulted not only in the defeat of the bill; it also showed {27} them clearly that a deep-laid plot had menaced the rights and liberties of the French-Canadian people; and their anger was roused against what Neilson described as 'the handful of _intrigants_' who had planned that _coup d'etat_. On returning to Canada Papineau gave vent to his discontent in an extraordinary attack upon Lord Dalhousie, who had become governor of Canada in 1819. Dalhousie was an English nobleman of the best type. His tastes were liberal. He was instrumental in founding the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec; and he showed his desire for pleasant relations between the two races in Canada by the erection of the joint monument to Wolfe and Montcalm in the city of Quebec, in the governor's garden. His administration, however, had been marred by one or two financial irregularities. Owing to the refusal of the Assembly to vote a permanent civil list, Dalhousie had been forced to expend public moneys without authority from the legislature; and his receiver-general, Caldwell, had been guilty of defalcations to the amount of L100,000. Papineau attacked Dalhousie as if he had been personally responsible for these defalcations. The speech, we are told by the chronicler Bibaud, recalled in its violence the {28} philippics of Demosthenes and the orations against Catiline of Cicero. The upshot of this attack was that all relations between Dalhousie and Papineau were broken off. Apart altogether from the political controversy, Dalhousie felt that he could have no intercourse with a man who had publicly insulted him. Consequently, when Papineau was elected to the speakership of the Assembly in 1827, Dalhousie refused to recognize him as speaker; and when the Assembly refused to reconsider his election, Dalhousie promptly dissolved it.