Get ebook downloads in full at ebookmeta.

com

AI Assisted Testing MEAP V01 Mark Winteringham

https://ebookmeta.com/product/ai-assisted-testing-
meap-v01-mark-winteringham/

OR CLICK BUTTON

DOWNLOAD NOW

Explore and download more ebook at https://ebookmeta.com

 Recommended digital products (PDF, EPUB, MOBI) that
you can download immediately if you are interested.

Learn AI-Assisted Python Programming (MEAP V01) Leo Porter

https://ebookmeta.com/product/learn-ai-assisted-python-programming-
meap-v01-leo-porter/

ebookmeta.com

Testing Web APIs 1st Edition Mark Winteringham

https://ebookmeta.com/product/testing-web-apis-1st-edition-mark-
winteringham/

ebookmeta.com

The AI-Powered Developer (MEAP V01) Nathan B. Crocker

https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-ai-powered-developer-
meap-v01-nathan-b-crocker/

ebookmeta.com

Philosophy by Women 22 Philosophers Reflect on Philosophy

and Its Value 1st Edition Elly Vintiadis (Editor)

https://ebookmeta.com/product/philosophy-by-women-22-philosophers-
reflect-on-philosophy-and-its-value-1st-edition-elly-vintiadis-editor/

ebookmeta.com
Good Research Practice in Non Clinical Pharmacology and
Biomedicine Handbook of Experimental Pharmacology 257 1st
Edition Anton Bespalov Editor Martin C Michel Editor
Thomas Steckler Editor
https://ebookmeta.com/product/good-research-practice-in-non-clinical-
pharmacology-and-biomedicine-handbook-of-experimental-
pharmacology-257-1st-edition-anton-bespalov-editor-martin-c-michel-
editor-thomas-steckler-editor/
ebookmeta.com

Case Studies of Building Rehabilitation and Design 1st

Edition João M. P. Q. Delgado

https://ebookmeta.com/product/case-studies-of-building-rehabilitation-
and-design-1st-edition-joao-m-p-q-delgado/

ebookmeta.com

Prey Book II Olivia Wolfe Thriller Series L A Larkin

https://ebookmeta.com/product/prey-book-ii-olivia-wolfe-thriller-
series-l-a-larkin/

ebookmeta.com

Genomics in the Azure Cloud (First Early Release) Dr.

Colby T. Ford

https://ebookmeta.com/product/genomics-in-the-azure-cloud-first-early-
release-dr-colby-t-ford/

ebookmeta.com

Humble Leadership The Power of Relationships Openness and

Trust 2e Second Edition Edgar H. Schein

https://ebookmeta.com/product/humble-leadership-the-power-of-
relationships-openness-and-trust-2e-second-edition-edgar-h-schein/

ebookmeta.com
Problem Solving Cases in Microsoft Access Excel 16th
Edition Ellen Monk

https://ebookmeta.com/product/problem-solving-cases-in-microsoft-
access-excel-16th-edition-ellen-monk/

ebookmeta.com
AI-Assisted Testing
1. 1_Enhancing_testing_with_large_language_models
2. 2_Large_language_models_and_prompt_engineering
3. 3_AI,_automation,_and_testing
4. 4_AI-assisted_testing_for_developers
5. index
1 Enhancing testing with
large language models
This chapter covers
Discovering how Large language models can help testing
Defining a mindset toward working with Large language models

In this book, we will be using large language models to enhance and

accelerate our testing activities—and what better way to introduce
ourselves to this technology than to ask one to create an
introduction for this book:

Hello! I am ChatGPT, a language model designed by OpenAI to

assist with a wide range of tasks and answer various questions.
Regarding the book, "How AI can be used to help support
various software testing activities," I would recommend "AI-
Driven Testing: Adding Intelligence to Your Software Testing
Practice" by Julian Harty and Mahesh Sharma.
This book explores the application of artificial intelligence (AI)
techniques to software testing and how it can help improve the
effectiveness and efficiency of testing processes. The authors
cover various topics related to AI-driven testing, including
machine learning, natural language processing, and computer
vision, among others.
Additionally, the book includes case studies, practical examples,
and best practices for implementing AI-driven testing in
different contexts. It is a valuable resource for software testers,
developers, and anyone interested in leveraging AI to improve
the quality of their software products.
This artificially generated response, which reads as if a human might
have written it, was created by sending a one-sentence instruction,
known as a prompt, to a large language model, or LLM:
ChatGPT, please introduce yourself and a book about how AI can
be used to help support various software testing activities.

To define what LLMs do and the potential they offer is both easy and
difficult, and to gain the most benefit from these tools is to find a
balance between the two. On the surface, LLMs work by simply
taking instructions from a user and responding with an answer using
natural language. But this simple explanation doesn’t do justice to
the potential that an LLM can offer us as we test, nor does it explain
the challenges we have to overcome to get the most benefit from
them. So before we begin our journey into the world of LLMs and
testing, let’s learn how LLMs can help us and what we need to be
aware of to successfully use them.

1.1 Recognizing the impact of AI

tools on testing and development
In the past, an individual who wanted to take advantage of AI would
be required to have the skills to develop, train and deploy an AI
model—or have access to a team of experts who could do it for
them, all of which would make the use of AI in day-to-day activities
an expensive and exclusive endeavor. But with the recent advances
in AI, specifically large language models, we’re now beginning to
benefit from what some refer to as a ‘democratization’ of AI.

The barrier to integrating AI into our day-to-day work has dropped

dramatically for everyone. Social media managers can now use LLMs
to generate catchy and engaging copy, analysts can summarize
unstructured data into clear and concise reports, and customer
support agents can rapidly generate bespoke responses to
customers with a few simple prompts. The potential of LLM is
available for more than just data scientists and AI scholars to take
advantage of, and that is no different for those of us who work in
testing and software development.

The value of good testing is that it helps to challenge assumptions

and educate our teams on how our products truly behave in given
situations. The more we test, the more we can learn. But, as most
professional testers will attest, there is never enough time to test
everything we want to test. So to help us test more efficiently, we
look to tools and techniques from automation to shift-left testing.
LLMs offer us another potential avenue to help us enhance and
speed up our testing so that we can discover and share more, which
in turn can help our teams to improve quality further.

What makes LLMs so useful is that they summarize, transform,

generate and translate information in a way that is easy for humans
to understand and that we, individuals responsible for testing, can
use for our testing needs—all of which is available through simple
chat interfaces or APIs. From assisting us in rapidly creating test
automation to providing support as we carry out testing ourselves, if
we develop the right skills to identify when LLMs can help, and
sensibly use them, then we begin to test faster, further and more
effectively. To help illustrate this concept and to give us a sense of
what we’ll be learning in this book, let’s look at some quick
examples.

Data generation

Creating and managing test data can be one of the most complex
aspects of testing. Creating realistic, useful and anonymized data
can make or break the success of testing, and to do it effectively can
be a drain on resources. LLMs offer the ability to generate and
transform data rapidly, speeding up the test data management
process. By taking existing data and converting it into new formats,
or using it to generate new synthetic data, we can utilize LLMs to
assist us with our test data requirements and give us more time to
drive testing forward.

Automated test Building

Similarly, LLMs' abilities to generate and transform can be used

during the process of creating and maintaining automation. Though
I would not advise having LLMs solely create automated tests for us,
they can be used in targeted ways to help us rapidly create page
objects, boilerplate classes, helper methods, frameworks and more.
Combining our knowledge of our products and our test design skills,
we can identify the parts of the automation process that are
algorithmic and structured in nature and use LLMs to speed up those
parts of the automation process.

Test design

Perhaps a less commonly discussed topic is how LLMs can help us in

the process of identifying and designing tests. Similar to automated
testing, the value of LLMs lies not in replacing our test design
abilities completely but rather in augmenting them. We can use LLMs
to overcome biases and blind spots by utilizing them to expand and
suggest ideas based on current test design ideas we might have. We
are also able to summarize and describe complex ideas in ways that
make them more digestible for us to springboard test ideas from.

These examples and more will be explored within this book to help
us better appreciate when and where LLMs can be used, and how to
use them in a way that accelerates our testing—rather than
hindering it. We’ll explore how to build prompts to help support us in
building quality production and automation code, rapidly creating
test data, and enhancing our test design for both scripted and
exploratory testing. We’ll also look at how we can fine-tune our own
LLMs that will work as assistants to us in our testing, digesting
domain knowledge and using it to help guide us towards building
better-quality products.

1.2 Delivering value with LLMs

Testing is a collaborative process and all members of a team are
responsible for testing. How we contribute to the testing process
differs based on our role and experience, but we all take part in it.
So throughout this book, we’ll approach the use of LLMs with a
critical mindset, discovering different ways in which we can use LLMs
to help enhance the various types of testing we do. The intention is
to give you the skills to identify and utilize LLMs to enhance and
accelerate your testing whether you are in a professional testing role
or a developer who contributes to the testing process, all of which
we can do by establishing some rules around the relationship
between ourselves and the LLMs we want to use.

1.2.1 Leveraging both human and AI abilities

Throughout this book, we’ll learn not just how to use LLMs but also
how to establish a working practice in which our testing benefits
from our abilities as well as from LLMs. The value of any tool,
whether it’s AI-based or not, comes not from its intrinsic features
but rather from the relationship between the user and the tool. We
can think of that relationship as an area of effect model, as shown in
Figure 1.1.

Figure 1.1 An outline of how tools enhance and extend the reach of
testing
What this diagram demonstrates is that in order to increase our
impact, we require a healthy relationship with tools that focus on
expanding and enhancing our core abilities. Without this balance, we
become too dependent on tools or ourselves. We can certainly rely
on our abilities, but our area of effect will be lesser, bounded by
constraints such as time, our attention, and biases. Basically, without
tools, we can do only so much. But, equally, we cannot defer all of
the work to tooling. Without an individual at the core, tools lack
direction. Yes, tools can be autonomous and set off to run by
themselves, but if they aren’t delivering feedback to a human, then
no value is being extracted from them. The area of effect is missing
its center. Synergy and symbiosis are words that can be equally as
loaded as artificial intelligence, but that’s what this book seeks to
help you with.

To help us better understand this relationship, let’s consider an

example in which we want to create tests for a file upload feature.
First, we receive a user story like this one:
As a paralegal
In order to store and share legal documents
I want to be able to securely upload documents
Acceptance criteria:
* Upload should support the following common file formats:
PDF, DOC, DOCX, TXT
* The maximum file size should be 20MB
* When a document is uploaded it should give a progress
update to the user
* Once uploaded, the document must initially be only
accessible to the person who has uploaded it
* A report of the upload and whether it was successful or not
will be stored in the auditing feature

From this, we decide to simply rely on an LLM to generate the work

for us—for example, sending a prompt like this:
Create tests for a file upload feature

Sending this prompt to an LLM like ChatGPT might return something

similar to this:
1. Test for File Upload Functionality:

Test Case 1.1: Upload a Valid File

Input: Choose a file with a valid format (e.g., .jpg,
.pdf).
Expected Outcome: The file is successfully uploaded,
and a confirmation message is displayed.

Test Case 1.2: Attempt to Upload an Invalid File

Input: Choose a file with an invalid format (e.g.,
.exe, .html).
Expected Outcome: An error message is displayed,
indicating that the file format is not supported.

2. Test for File Size Limit:

Test Case 2.1: Upload a File Below the Size Limit

Input: Choose a file smaller than the maximum allowed
size.
Expected Outcome: The file is successfully uploaded,
and a confirmation message is displayed.

Test Case 2.2: Attempt to Upload a File Exceeding the Size

Limit
Input: Choose a file larger than the maximum allowed
size.
 Expected Outcome: An error message is displayed,
indicating that the file exceeds the maximum size limit.

3. Test for File Overwrite Protection:

Test Case 3.1: Upload a File with the Same Name as an

Existing File
Input: Upload a file with a name that matches an
existing file in the system.
Expected Outcome: An error message is displayed,
indicating that a file with the same name already exists.

4. Security Tests:

Test Case 4.1: Attempt to Upload a Malicious File (e.g.,

virus)
Input: Upload a known malicious file.
Expected Outcome: The system should detect the
malicious file and prevent its upload, displaying a security
warning.

5. UI and User Experience Tests:

Test Case 5.1: Check for a User-Friendly Interface

Input: Use the file upload feature and evaluate the
user interface for clarity and ease of use.
Expected Outcome: The interface should be intuitive,
with clear instructions and feedback for users.

Test Case 5.2: Check for Proper Error Messages

Input: Attempt various erroneous actions during the
file upload process.
Expected Outcome: Error messages should be descriptive,
helping users understand and resolve issues.

6. Integration Tests:

Test Case 6.1: Check File Upload with Other Features

Input: Test file uploads in conjunction with other
features that depend on uploaded files (e.g., image processing,
document storage).
Expected Outcome: Ensure the uploaded files are
correctly processed and integrated with other system
components.

7. Performance Tests:

Test Case 7.1: Upload a Large Number of Files Concurrently

 Input: Simulate multiple users uploading a large number
of files simultaneously.
Expected Outcome: The system should handle concurrent
uploads without significant performance degradation or crashes.

8. Stress Tests:

Test Case 8.1: Upload Files Continuously for an Extended

Period
Input: Continuously upload files for an extended period
to assess system stability.
Expected Outcome: The system should not experience
memory leaks, crashes, or performance degradation during this
stress test.

At first glance, the response seems impressive. The LLM has

provided us with a list of different tests to consider, which gives us
the impression that we have everything we need to begin testing.
However, if we start to consider the response more carefully we start
to notice issues:

Test case 1.1 suggests testing with valid formats but offers
examples of formats our user story doesn’t support.
The suggestions from number 4 onward are shallow. For
example, the Security test offers a test to insert a malicious
file, but nothing else. Surely there would be other security
issues to consider?
The expected outcomes are also very broad for each test case.
For example, what does this mean: Error messages should be
descriptive, helping users understand and resolve issues.

LLMs are designed in a way to give a response, regardless of what

it’s been asked to do, and though that might sound useful, it
becomes problematic when the instructions it has been given are
vague. The example we’ve looked at isn’t being used to criticize the
capabilities of LLMs, but rather to help us appreciate that an LLM’s
response will be as detailed or as generic as the prompt it has been
given. This means the responses we’ve received from the LLM are
broad and vague because our prompt is vague. By not giving much
thought to what we want to ask an LLM to do, the absence of any
context or detail in the prompt means what has been returned is
pretty useless—a classic example of garbage in, garbage out.

This is what our area of effect attempts to define. To get value from
LLMs, we need to design prompts that are clear, contextual and
specific so that we can extract more value from an LLM. Instead of
deferring all responsibility to a tool to create the response we desire,
we instead appreciate that our understanding of a context and the
ability to distill that understanding into clear instructions are required
to create a prompt that will maximize the response from an LLM,
leading to better-written prompts, such as:
Act as a professional software tester and suggest test ideas
for the feature delimited by three hashes. All test ideas
should be focused on discovering issues that impact the quality
characteristics: Functionality, Data Integrity and Security

###
As a paralegal
In order to store and share legal documents
I want to be able to securely upload documents
Acceptance criteria:
* Upload should support the following common file formats:
PDF, DOC, DOCX, TXT
* The maximum file size should be 20MB
* When a document is uploaded it should give a progress
update to the user
* Once uploaded, the document must initially be only
accessible to the person who has uploaded it
* A report of the upload and whether it was successful or not
will be stored in the auditing feature
###

which, when sent to an LLM, returns a code sample like so:

Functionality:
Format Compatibility Testing:
Verify that the upload feature supports the following
file formats: PDF, DOC, DOCX, and TXT.
Attempt to upload files in various formats and ensure
that the system handles them correctly.
 File Size Limitation Testing:
Test whether the system enforces a maximum file size
limit of 20MB during the upload process.
Attempt to upload files larger and smaller than 20MB to
validate the system's handling of these cases.

Progress Update Testing:

Check that users receive real-time progress updates
while a document is being uploaded.
Verify that these updates are clear and provide
meaningful information to the user.

Data Integrity:
Document Content Verification:

Upload files with known content and compare the content of

the uploaded document with the original.
Ensure that the content remains intact and no data
corruption occurs during the upload process.

Document Privacy:
Test that uploaded documents are initially only
accessible to the person who uploaded them.
Attempt to access the uploaded documents using another
user's account to ensure that access control is enforced.

Data Auditing Verification:

Confirm that the system accurately records all uploads
in the auditing feature.
Verify that the audit logs include information such as
the timestamp, uploader, document name, and whether the upload
was successful.

Security:
File Type Security Testing:

Attempt to upload files with malicious content, such as

scripts or malware, and ensure that the system detects and
rejects them.

Access Control Testing:

Validate that the system properly enforces access
control by ensuring that other users cannot access the
documents uploaded by someone else.

Secure Data Transmission:

Ensure that the document upload process uses secure
communication protocols (e.g., HTTPS) to protect data during
transmission.

User Authentication and Authorization:

Verify that the system correctly authenticates and
authorizes users before allowing them to upload or access
documents.

Secure Data Storage:

Assess how the system stores uploaded documents to
ensure that they are encrypted or adequately protected against
unauthorized access or data breaches.

Session Management:
Test how the system manages user sessions, ensuring
that sessions are terminated after a period of inactivity to
prevent unauthorized access.

By creating a more focused and contextual prompt, we have created

a response that offers a richer range of suggestions for our testing.
This would not be achieved by an LLM alone, but rather through the
symbiosis of our skills to learn and frame our context into
instructions that LLMs can take and rapidly expand upon.

Activity

Try out the sample prompts we’ve explored in this chapter and see
what responses you receive. To get yourself set up with an LLM,
read Appendix A, which shares how to get set up and send a prompt
to ChatGPT.

1.2.2 Being skeptical of LLMs

Although a lot can be said about the potential of LLMs, we should be
wary of taking their abilities for granted. For example, consider our
introduction to this book from ChatGPT. It confidently recommended
to us that we should read the book AI-Driven Testing: Adding
Intelligence to Your Software Testing Practice. The problem is that
this book doesn’t exist and was never written by Julian Harty and
Mahesh Sharma. The LLM simply made up this title.
LLMs offer much potential, but they are not a solution for every
problem, nor are they a single oracle of truth. We will explore further
in Chapter 2 how LLMs use probability to determine responses, but
for now it’s important to be clear that how an LLM comes to a
solution is not the same way as we as humans do, which highlights
the second aspect of our area of effect model. We must use our
skepticism to determine what is and isn’t of value from an LLM
response.

To blindly accept what an LLM outputs is, at best, putting us at risk

of actually slowing our work down rather than accelerating it—and at
worst, influencing us to carry out testing that can have a detrimental
effect on the quality of our products. We must remind ourselves that
we—not LLMs—are the ones who are leading the problem-solving
activity. This can be difficult at times when working with tools that
communicate in a way that feels so human, but to do so exposes us
to the aforementioned risks. That’s why in our area of effect model,
we leverage our abilities to pick and choose the elements from the
LLM response that serve us well and reject and reevaluate how we
instruct an LLM when it responds in a way that is not satisfactory.

As we progress through the book and learn more about LLMs and
how they can contribute toward testing, we will keep our area of
effect model in mind so that you, the reader, will develop the ability
to use LLMs in testing in a way that is sober, considered and
valuable to you and your team.

1.3 Summary
LLMs work by taking a prompt, written by us, and returning a
response.
The popularity of LLMs is due to the ease with which they offer
access to powerful AI algorithms.
LLMs have helped many people in different roles and can also
help us in testing as well.
Other documents randomly have
different content
power of government rested with themselves and not with the
mother country. The remedy, he thought, should have been found
not so much by giving greater power to the Imperial It should have been
Government as by establishing in America itself an controlled from
within, not from
authority controlling the separate Assemblies of the without.
separate states, which body would have been a
‘Partner in the legislation of the Empire’.
It was no new conception that the states should have been in
some sense federated while still under the British flag. Various
governors, and men like Franklin, had proposed or contemplated
some such measure, in order to correct the weakness of the
separate provinces as against the common foe in Canada, while
Canada belonged to France, and in order to minimize the difficulties
which the Imperial Government found in dealing with a number of
separate legislatures at least as jealous of each other as they were
of the Home Government. But the Chief Justice’s retrospect was
based on somewhat different grounds. He would have The grounds on
had a federal legislature in order to control the which Chief Justice
Smith advocated a
provincial legislatures. He would have corrected General Legislature
democracy in America by, in a sense, carrying for British North
America.
democracy further. He would have nothing of the
maxim divide et impera; but, as democracy was born on American
soil, on American soil he would have constituted a popular authority
wider, wiser, and stronger than the bodies which represented the
single provinces. It was a very statesmanlike view. He saw that one
leading cause of the rupture between Great Britain and her colonies
had been the pettiness of the American democracies, the
narrowness of provincial politics, the intensity of democratic feeling
cooped up in the small area of a single colony as in a single Greek
city, the personal bitterness thereby produced in local politicians, and
the obvious semblance of oppression when a great country like
England was dealing with one small state and another, not with a
larger federated whole. A federal legislature would have exercised
home-grown American control over the American Assemblies; it
would have given a wider and fuller scope to American democracy,
enlarging the views, making the individual leaders greater and wider
in mind; it would have been the body with which England would have
dealt; and the dealings would have been those of ‘Partners in the
legislation of the Empire’. This was in his mind when he earnestly
recommended that the grant of constitutional privileges to the
Canadian provinces should be from the first accompanied by the
creation of a general government for British North America, including
the maritime provinces as well as Upper and Lower Canada.
But, if this general government was to be a partner The General
in the legislation of the Empire, it was clearly to be, in Legislature
contemplated by
the view of the Chief Justice, a subordinate partner. Chief Justice Smith
The last of his proposed additions to the Bill began in would have been a
subordinate
the following terms: ‘Be it further enacted ... that Legislature.
nothing in this Act contained shall be interpreted to derogate from
the rights and prerogatives of the Crown for the due exercise of the
Royal and Executive authority over all or any of the said provinces,
or to derogate from the Legislative sovereignty and supremacy of the
Crown and Parliament of Great Britain.’ In other words he re-affirmed
the principle, which the old colonies had rejected, that they were
subordinated to the Parliament of the mother country as well as to
the Crown; and he showed clearly in the clause empowering the
Crown to appoint Executive Councils apart from the Legislature, that
the Executive power was to rest not in British North America but in
Great Britain. The general government of British North America was
to be a partner in the legislation of the Empire, but not in the
Executive, and even in the legislative sphere it was to take a second
place. Theoretically, and to some small extent practically also, the
Dominion Parliament is still a subordinate partner in legislation, so
far as Imperial questions are concerned; but, since the The Chief Justice
days of Lord Durham, colonial self-government has did not contemplate
colonial self-
included control of the Executive in the colony. Chief government in its
Justice Smith had therefore not contemplated or fullest form.
foreshadowed the colonial self-government of the future.
But that he had not done so was not due to want of
statesmanship. He was rather still intent on seeking after a solution
of the problem which later thinkers and statesmen held to be
insoluble. The grant of responsible government in after times was
not so much an act of constructive wisdom as a wise recognition of
what was at the time impossible. To give to the colonial legislatures
the control of the Executive was to remove them practically from the
control of the mother country, and thereby to concede to these
communities the full right of self-government. The first corrective of
this grant was on similar lines to those which Chief Justice Smith
prescribed, viz., to federate the self-governing communities in a
given area, to place their separate legislatures under a general
legislature, and, as the legislatures controlled the Executive, to limit
the provincial executive authorities by a general executive authority,
the control being exercised from within not from without, and small
democracies being rectified by creating from among themselves a
larger and a stronger democratic body. It still remains for the wisdom
of the coming time to carry the constructive work further; if human
ingenuity can devise a practical scheme, again to extend the
principle of democratic representation and control; and to constitute
a body which, with the Crown, shall, alike in legislation and in the
sphere of the Executive, make the great self-governing provinces in
the fullest sense partners in the Empire. In short, the point which it is
here wished to emphasize is that whereas self-government was
conceded not as a solution of the problem but as a final recognition
that the problem was insoluble, men have come to realize that after
all what was intended to be final was only a necessary preliminary to
the possible attainment of an object, which had been relegated to the
land of dreams and speculations.
The views of the Chief Justice were not embodied in The Act of 1791.
the law which was eventually passed in 1791. Pitt had
pledged himself to deal with the Canadian question in the session of
1790, but in that year Great Britain was on the brink of war with
Spain, owing to the seizure by the Spaniards in 1789 of British
trading vessels in Nootka Sound, an inlet of what is now known as
Vancouver Island. The matter was adjusted by the Nootka Sound
Convention of 28th October, 1790, after which Vancouver began his
voyages of survey and discovery along the Pacific Coast of North
America; and, the hands of the British Government being free, a
Royal Message to the House of Commons, dated the 25th of
January, 1791, announced that it was the King’s intention to divide
the province of Quebec into two provinces to be called Upper and
Lower Canada, whenever His Majesty was enabled by Act of
Parliament to make the necessary regulations for the government of
the said provinces. The message further recommended that a
permanent appropriation of lands should be made in the provinces
for the support of a Protestant clergy.
On the 4th of March Pitt introduced the Bill. On the Proceedings in
23rd of March Lymburner was heard at the bar of the Parliament.
House on behalf of its opponents. He took objections, among other
points, to the division of the province, to the creation of hereditary
Legislative Councillors, to the small number of members who were to
constitute the Assemblies, and to making the Assemblies septennial
instead of triennial. The passage of the Bill through Committee in the
House of Commons was chiefly remarkable for the historic quarrel
between Burke and Fox on the subject of the French Revolution
which was dragged into the debate. There was no real opposition to
the measure, though Fox opposed the division of the province, the
hereditary councillors, the small numbers assigned to the
Assemblies, and the large provision made for the Protestant clergy.
The duration of the Assemblies was reduced from seven years to
four, and the number of members in the Assembly of Lower Canada
was raised from thirty to fifty. Thus amended the Bill was read a third
time in the House of Commons on the 18th of May, and received the
Royal Assent on the following 10th of June, one of its sections
providing that it should take effect before the 31st of December,
1791, and another that the Councils and Assemblies should be
called together before the 31st of December, 1792. It had been
intended that Dorchester should be present in London during the
passing of the Act, in order to advise the Government on points of
detail, but the dispatch informing him that the Act had already been
passed crossed him on his way to England.
The omissions from the Act are as noteworthy as its Omissions from the
contents. The Bill, both as presented to Parliament Act.
and as finally passed into law, contained no description of the line of
division between Upper and Lower Canada, or of the It contained no
boundaries of the two provinces. In the draft which definition of the
boundaries of
Grenville sent out in 1789 there was a blank space, in Upper and Lower
Canada.
which Dorchester was invited, with the help of his surveyor-general,
to insert a description of the boundaries; but, wrote Grenville in his
covering dispatch, ‘there will be a considerable difficulty in the mode
of describing the boundary between the district of Upper Canada and
the territories of the United States, as the adhering to the line
mentioned in the treaty with America would exclude the posts which
are still in His Majesty’s possession and which the infraction of the
treaty on the part of America has induced His Majesty to retain,
while, on the other hand, the including them by express words within
the limits to be established for the province by an Act of the British
Parliament would probably excite a considerable degree of
resentment among the inhabitants of the United States.’ Grenville
accordingly suggested that the Upper Province might be described
by some general terms such as ‘All the territories, &c., possessed by
and subject to His Majesty and being to the West or South of the
boundary line of Lower Canada, except such as are included within
the present boundaries of the government of New Brunswick’.
Uncertainty as to what was or was not British territory affected
among other matters the administration of justice. It was from this
point of view that Dorchester mainly regarded it when he wrote in
reply to Grenville, ‘the attainment of a free course of justice
throughout every part of His Majesty’s possessions in the way least
likely to give umbrage to the United States appears to me very
desirable’. He returned the draft of the Bill with the blank filled in with
a precise description of the dividing line within what was beyond
dispute Canadian territory, and with the addition of some general
words including in the Canadas all lands to the southward ‘now
subject to or possessed by His Majesty’, but he reported at the same
time that the Chief Justice was not satisfied that the terms used
would answer the purpose. Eventually the Government left out the
whole clause, omitting also all reference to another difficult point
which had been raised and which had affected the administration of
justice in connexion with the fisheries in the Gulf of St. Lawrence,
viz., the boundary line between Lower Canada and New Brunswick.
Parliamentary debate on a very awkward question was thus avoided,
and the Act contained no provision which could give offence to the
United States.
 But it was absolutely necessary to draw some How the
dividing line, and to give some description of the boundaries were
boundaries, however vague. Accordingly the following defined.
very cautious course was taken. A ‘description of the intended
boundary between the provinces of Upper Canada and Lower
Canada’, being Lord Dorchester’s clause with the omission of the
general words referred to above, was printed as a Parliamentary
Paper,[202] while the Bill was before the House; and this line of
division was embodied in an Order in Council issued on the following
24th of August, with the addition of the words ‘including all territory to
the Westward and Southward of the said line, to the utmost extent of
the country commonly known as Canada’. The line of division was
set out again in the new commission to Lord Dorchester, which was
issued on the 12th of September, 1791, the two provinces of Upper
and Lower Canada being specified as comprehending all such
territories to the Westward and Eastward of the line respectively ‘as
were part of our said province of Quebec’.
On the important subject of administration of justice Administration of
the Act was almost silent. One section only had Justice hardly
mentioned in the
reference to it, constituting the governor or lieutenant- Act,
governor and Executive Council in either province a
court of appeal in civil matters, as had been the case in the
undivided province. Nor was any attempt made to Nor did it contain
define the powers of the Legislative Council and any definition of the
respective powers
Assembly in relation to each other; but, in sending out of the two
the Act, Dundas, who had succeeded Grenville, Chambers.
reminded Dorchester of ‘the disputes and disagreements which have
at times taken place between the Councils and Assemblies of the
different colonies respecting the right claimed by the latter that all
Bills whatsoever for granting money should originate with them’, and
he laid down in general terms that the principle, ‘as far as it relates to
any question of imposing burthens upon the subject, is so consistent
with the spirit of our constitution that it ought not to be resisted’.
Out of the fifty sections which composed the Act, no Contents of the Act.
less than thirty-two related to the constitution and
legislative powers of the Councils and Assemblies in the two
provinces. In Upper Canada the Legislative Council was to consist of
not less than seven members, and the Assembly of not less than
sixteen. In Lower Canada the minimum fixed for the Council was
fifteen, and for the Assembly fifty. The electoral qualification was, in
the country districts, ownership of real property to the net annual
value of forty shillings, and in the towns of £5, or in the alternative in
the latter case a rental qualification of £10 per annum.
Of the remaining sections eight related to the Provision for
endowment and maintenance of Protestant clergy and Protestant clergy.
to providing parsonages and rectories for the Church of England.
The wording of these sections, and the system of clergy reserves
which they introduced, proved a fruitful source of controversy in after
years. The Act continued the existing system by which Roman
Catholics paid their dues to the Roman Catholic Church, while the
tithes on lands held by Protestants were applied to the support of a
Protestant clergy. It then went on, in accordance with the terms of
the Royal Message to the House of Commons, to provide that there
should be a permanent appropriation of Crown lands for the
maintenance and support of a Protestant clergy, bearing a due
proportion to the amount of Crown lands which had already been
granted for other purposes, and that all future grants of Crown land
should be accompanied by an appropriation, for the same object of
maintaining a Protestant clergy, of land equal in value to one-
seventh of the amount which was granted for other purposes. The
intention was that the establishment and endowment of Protestant
clergy should proceed pari passu with the alienation of lands for
settlement, so that each township or parish in either province should
have its Protestant minister. So far the general term Protestant was
used, but provisions followed authorizing the erection and
endowment of parsonages or rectories in every parish or township
‘according to the Establishment of the Church of England’, the
incumbents to be ministers of the Church of England, and to be
subject to the ecclesiastical authority of the Church of England
bishop. It was also enacted that, while these provisions relating to
religion and to Crown lands might be varied by Acts of the provincial
legislatures, before any such Acts received the Royal Assent, they
were to be laid before the Imperial Parliament, and, if either House
presented an Address to the King praying that His assent should be
withheld, such assent could not be given. The Act, though obscurely
worded, in effect established and endowed the Church of England in
both provinces alike, while confirming the rights which had already
been conceded to the Roman Catholic Church. The provision made
for the Church of England was, at any rate on paper, very ample,
inasmuch as, while Crown lands were being assigned for its
maintenance, the liability of Protestant land-owners to pay tithes was
not abolished. Dundas, however, in his dispatch which enclosed
copies of the Act, intimated to the governor that it was not desired
permanently to continue the burden of the tithe, if the land-owners
would in lieu subscribe to a fund for clearing the reserve lands and
building the parsonage houses. Fox attacked these sections in the
Act, and he also criticized a suggestion which Pitt made that a
Church of England bishop might be given a seat in the Legislative
Council.
It may be noted that the Act specifically mentioned The first Church of
the Bishop of Nova Scotia as the spiritual authority for England bishops in
British North
the time being over such ministers of the Church of America.
England as might be appointed to the two Canadas. The Bishopric of
Nova Scotia dated from 1787, and was the first, and in 1791 the
only, Church of England bishopric in British North America, the
Bishop—Bishop Inglis, having been a Loyalist clergyman in the city
of New York. In 1793 a separate Bishop of Quebec was appointed,
and in 1799 the Secretary of State authorized the building of a
metropolitan church at Quebec, which was completed for
consecration in 1804, and at the centenary of which in 1904 the
Archbishop of Canterbury was present. There were indications at
this time that the Protestants in Canada, most of whom were not
members of the Church of England, might be inclined to unite within
it, and it was hoped that the building and endowment of a
metropolitan church might tend to such union and to placing the
Church of England in the position of the Established Church of
Canada.
The provisions in the Act which related to religion were followed by
three very important sections dealing with land tenure. The main
grievance of the settlers in Upper Canada was met by Provisions relating
providing that land grants should there be made on to land tenure, and
to taxation by the
the English system of free and common soccage. The Imperial
Parliament.
same system was made optional in Lower Canada at
the will of the grantee, but in that province the seigniors were not
finally abolished until the year 1854. In 1778 an Act of Parliament
had been passed[203]—too late in the day—which abolished the tea
duty in the North American colonies, and laid down that no duty
should in future be imposed by the British Parliament on any colony
in North America or the West Indies for revenue purposes, but only
for the regulation of commerce, and on the understanding that the
net produce of such duties should be at the disposal of the colonial
legislatures. Similar provisions were inserted in the Canada Act of
1791, and, in introducing the Bill, Pitt explained that, ‘in order to
prevent any such dispute as had been the cause of separating the
thirteen states from the mother country, it was provided that the
British Parliament should impose no taxes but such as were
necessary for the regulation of trade and commerce; and, to guard
against the abuse of this power, such taxes were to be levied and to
be disposed by the Legislature of each division.’
Thus Canada was endowed with representative institutions, and
entered on the second stage in its history as a British possession. It
was divided into an English province and a French province, in order
as far as possible to prevent friction between two races not yet
accustomed to each other. For the English province English land
tenure was made the law of the land, in the French province it was
only made optional. Taxation of members of one religion for the
upkeep of another found no place in the Act, nor did taxation of a
colony by the mother country for the purposes of Imperial revenue.
The popular representatives were in the main given control of the
moneys raised from taxes: and no doubt was left as to who had the
keeping of the people’s purse.[204] On the other hand the Executive
power was left with the Crown, and the waste lands provided
possibilities of a revenue by which the government might be
supported apart from the taxes, and by which an Established Church
might be maintained apart from the tithes. The Imperial Parliament
too retained the power of regulating commerce, while making no
money out of the colony by any commercial regulations. It was in
short a prudent and tolerant half-way Act, wise and practical in view
of the times and the local conditions, and it was evidence that
England and Englishmen had learnt good and not evil from the War
of American Independence. A study of Canadian history, with special
reference to the Quebec Act of 1774 and the Canada Act of 1791,
and the results which flowed from them, leads to the conclusion that
in either case the British Government of the day tried most honestly
and most anxiously to deal with a very complicated problem on its
merits; that every effort was made by the ministers of the Crown to
mete out fair and considerate treatment to the majority of the
resident population in Canada; and that those who framed and
carried the laws guided themselves by living facts rather than by a
priori reasoning. But it is also impossible to resist the conclusion that
at almost any time from 1783 onwards, until the Canadian Dominion
came into being, there was little to choose between the arguments
for retaining a single province, and those for constituting two
provinces. In any case it was inevitable that the provisions of the Act
of 1791 should give rise to new complications of various kinds; and
apart from specific questions, constitutional and otherwise, there
were two very practical difficulties which necessarily arose from the
division of the province of Quebec. The first was an Executive
difficulty, of which more will be said presently. From the date of the
Act there was increasingly divided authority in the Canadas. The
second was a financial difficulty arising from geographical conditions.
One of the two provinces had the keeping of the other, so far as
regarded access from and to the sea.
As the line of division was drawn, Upper Canada, Financial difficulties
like the Transvaal at the present day, was compelled between the two
provinces.
to import all sea-borne articles through territory under
the administration of another government, either through Lower
Canada or through the United States. The St. Lawrence being the
high road of import and export, Lower Canada commanded the trade
of Upper Canada. Therefore, in order to collect a customs revenue, it
was necessary for the Upper Province either to establish customs
houses on the frontier of Lower Canada—a measure which would
probably have been ineffective and would certainly have involved
much inconvenience and expense, or to come to some arrangement
whereby a certain proportion of the duties levied at Quebec, which
was the port of entry of Lower Canada, would be handed over to the
administration of the Upper Province. The latter course was taken,
and in 1795, a provisional arrangement was made, by which the
proportion was fixed for the time being at one-eighth. The record of
what followed is a record of perpetual friction, of commissions and
temporary arrangements confirmed by provincial Acts. It was
suggested that the boundaries of the provinces should be altered,
and that Montreal should be included in and be made the port of
entry of Upper Canada, but the suggestion was never carried into
effect. As the population of Upper Canada grew, the discontent
increased. In 1818 one-fifth of the duties was temporarily assigned to
Upper Canada. Then a complete deadlock ensued, which ended
with the Imperial Canada Trade Act of 1822. By arbitration under the
terms of that Act the proportion which Upper Canada was to receive
was in 1824 raised to one-fourth; and when Lord Durham reported, it
was about two-fifths. In his report Lord Durham referred to the matter
as ‘a source of great and increasing disputes’, which only came to an
end when the two provinces were once more united under the
Imperial Act of 1840.
The Canada Act took effect on the 26th of December, 1791.
Dorchester was then in England, and Sir Alured Clarke, Lieutenant-
Governor of the province of Quebec under the old system and
Commander of the Forces in British North America, was acting for
him. Under the new Act Clarke was appointed The position in
Lieutenant-Governor of Lower Canada, while the Canada when the
new Act came into
Lieutenant-Governorship of Upper Canada was force.
conferred upon Colonel Simcoe, both officers being
subordinate to Dorchester as Governor-in-Chief. Dorchester had left
Canada on the 18th of August, 1791, and did not return till the 24th
of September, 1793. His prolonged absence was unfortunate in more
ways than one. Technical difficulties arose owing to the absence of
the Governor-in-Chief, for, as soon as the new Act came into force,
Clarke’s authority was confined by his commission to Lower Canada.
The practical effect too was that Simcoe started on his new charge
with a free hand and found it irksome, when Dorchester returned, to
take a second place. Added to this were the complications caused
by the French declaration of war against Great Britain in February,
1793, the hostilities between the United States and the Indian tribes
on the border land of Canada, and the persistent and increasing
bitterness in the United States against Great Britain, caused partly
by sympathy with the French Revolution and the intrigues of French
agents, and partly by the British retention of the frontier forts and
supposed British sympathy with the Indians.
However, the political arrangements in Canada were carried into
effect without any appreciable friction. Clarke, a man of judgement
and discretion, did not hurry matters in Lower Canada. He divided
the province into electoral districts, and summoned the Legislature
for its first session at Quebec on the 17th of December, 1792, when
the Act had been in force for nearly a year. The session then lasted
into May. Simcoe arrived at Quebec on the 11th of November, 1791;
but, as no Executive Council had yet been constituted for Upper
Canada, he could not be sworn in as Lieutenant-Governor and take
up his duties until the following midsummer, Upper Canada being in
the meantime left without any governor or lieutenant-governor. In
July, 1792, he issued a proclamation at Kingston, dividing Upper
Canada into districts, and on the 17th of September the new
Legislature met for the first time at Newark, on the Canadian side of
the Niagara river, near where that river flows into Lake Ontario. The
Lieutenant-Governor fixed his head quarters at ‘Navy Hall’, a building
constructed in the late war for the use of the officers of the naval
department on Lake Ontario. It stood by the water’s edge, nearly a
mile higher up the river than Newark; and on the bank above, in the
war of 1812, covering the buildings below, stood the historic Fort
George. The session was a short one, closing on the 15th of
October, but important work was done. English law and procedure,
and trial by jury, were established, while proposals for taxation and
the state of the marriage law gave a field for difference of opinion
and debate. When the session was over, Simcoe reported that he
found the members of the Assembly ‘active and zealous for
particular measures, which were soon shown to be improper or
futile’, and the Council ‘cautious and moderate, a valuable check
upon precipitate measures’.[205]
John Graves Simcoe, the first Lieutenant-Governor Simcoe.
of Upper Canada, was the son of a naval officer who
died when serving under Admiral Saunders in the fleet which helped
to take Quebec. The son, who derived his second name from
another sailor, his godfather Admiral Graves, was born in 1752. He
was born in Northumberland, but after his father’s death, his mother
made her home in Devonshire. He was educated at Exeter Grammar
School, at Eton, and at Merton College, Oxford, and he joined the
army in 1771, when he was nineteen years old. He served with much
distinction in the War of Independence, in which he commanded a
Loyalist Corps, known as the Queen’s Rangers. When the war
ended, he held the rank of lieutenant-colonel. After his return to
England in bad health he spent some years at his family home in
Devonshire, he married, and in 1790 became a member of
Parliament, sitting for the borough of St. Mawes in Cornwall. His
Parliamentary career was very short, for in 1791, before he was yet
forty years of age, Pitt appointed him to be Lieutenant-Governor of
Upper Canada. He left Canada in 1796, and soon after he reached
England he was sent out as Governor to St. Domingo. After a few
months in the island, the state of his health compelled him to come
home. He became a lieutenant-general, and was appointed to be
Commander-in-Chief in India in succession to Lord Lake, but he
never took up the appointment. Prior to going out he was sent to
Lisbon in 1806 on a special mission, was taken ill, and brought home
to die. He died at Exeter in October, 1806. There is a monument to
him by Flaxman in Exeter Cathedral[206], and in Canada his name is
borne by Lake Simcoe.
He was not only a good soldier, but a capable, vigorous, public-
spirited man, well suited in many ways to be the pioneer governor of
a new province. He was strong on questions of military defence and
a great road maker. He made Yonge Street, the road from Toronto
north to Lake Simcoe, called after Sir George Yonge then Secretary
of State for War and afterwards for a short time Governor of the
Cape; and he made Dundas Street, christened after the Secretary of
State for the Colonies, which then started from the point on Lake
Ontario where the city of Hamilton now stands and, running west,
connected with the river Thames.
Toronto owed much to him, but not under its present York or Toronto.
name. The name Toronto had been borne in old times
by Lake Simcoe, and on the site of the present city of Toronto the
French had in 1749[207] built a fort, named Fort Rouillé. The place
had come to be known as Toronto, but in 1792[208] the new name of
York came into vogue, and in the autumn of the following year, 1793,
Simcoe reported that that name had been officially adopted ‘with due
celebrity’, in honour of the successful storming of the French camp at
Famars near Valenciennes by the force under the command of the
Duke of York on the 23rd of May, 1793. It was not until 1834, when
the city was incorporated, that the old name of Toronto was restored.
Simcoe wrote of Toronto Harbour as ‘the proper naval Simcoe’s views as
arsenal of Lake Ontario’; but it was not here that he to the seat of
government for
would have placed the seat of government. Strongly Upper Canada.
convinced of the necessity of opening communication
between Lake Ontario and the upper lakes, without making the long
round by the waters of Lake Erie and the Straits of Detroit, in 1793
he explored the peninsula between the three lakes of Ontario, Erie
and Huron; and on a river, running westward into Lake St. Clair,
known at that date as the La Tranche river and afterwards as the
Thames[209], a place which was christened London and where there
is now a city with 40,000 inhabitants, seemed to him to be the most
suitable site for the political centre of Upper Canada. His view was
that the seat of government should be inland, presumably because it
would be more central in respect to the three lakes, and also
because it would be further removed from the danger of raids from
the neighbouring territory of the then unfriendly republic. It is
interesting to note that, in a dispatch expressing an opinion to the
above effect, Simcoe added that sooner or later the Canadas might
be divided into three instead of two provinces and Montreal be made
the centre of an intermediate government. Dorchester held, as
against Simcoe, that Toronto should be the seat of government, and
his view prevailed. The Legislature of Upper Canada met at Newark
for the last time in May, 1796, shortly before the fort of Niagara on
the opposite side of the river was handed over to the Americans,[210]
and from 1797 onwards, Simcoe having left in the meanwhile, it met
at Toronto.
Before Dorchester returned to take up again the duties of
Governor-in-Chief, Simcoe had formed definite views Friction between
as to the civil administration and the military defence Dorchester
Simcoe.
and

of Upper Canada; and it is not surprising that the

keen, active-minded soldier and administrator, who was little more
than forty years of age, did not on all points see eye to eye with the
veteran governor now verging on seventy; or that, when he differed,
he was not inclined to subordinate his opinions to those of
Dorchester. Thus we find Dorchester sending home correspondence
with Simcoe with the blunt remark that the enclosures turned on the
question whether he was to receive orders from Simcoe or Simcoe
from him. In his long official career Dorchester had been much tried.
At the time of the War of Independence, he had been badly treated
by his employers in England and had felt to the full the mischief and
inconvenience caused when those employers divided their
confidence and communicated with one subordinate officer and
another, thereby encouraging disloyalty and intrigue. The
correspondence of these later years points to the conclusion that the
iron had entered into his soul and that, with the weariness of age
growing upon him, he had become somewhat querulous, unduly
apprehensive of loss of authority, and over-sensitive to difference of
opinion. There seems to have been no love lost between him and
Dundas, while the latter was Secretary of State, but all through the
last stage of his career the key-note was dread of divided authority.
We have seen that he had not favoured the policy of Dorchester’s views
dividing the province of Quebec into two provinces, inCentral
favour of a
Legislature
and that he had shown sympathy with Chief Justice and a strong
Smith’s proposals for establishing a general Executive.
government for British North America. In the summer of 1793, after
the Canada Act had come into force but while he was still in England
on leave, he raised again this question of a central government for
all the King’s provinces in British North America, receiving an answer
from Dundas to the effect that the measure would require a new Act
of Parliament and that in Dundas’ opinion it would not add to the real
strength or happiness of the different provinces. After his return to
Canada Dorchester took up his text again, laying stress on the
necessity of welding together the different provinces. In existing
conditions he saw a revival of the system which had caused rebellion
and the dismemberment of the Empire. While the United States were
pursuing a policy of consolidation, the aim of the King’s Government
seemed to be to divide and sub-divide and form independent
governments. All power, he continued, was withdrawn from the
Governor-General, and instructions were sent directly from home to
inferior officers, so that the intermediate authority was virtually
superseded. Everything was favourable to insubordination, and the
fruits of it might be expected at an early season. This was in
February 1795, when the governor was smarting under what he
considered to be unjust censure by the Home Government; and,
though he remained in Canada for some time longer, he continued to
show, by the tone of his dispatches, that he entirely disapproved of
the existing régime. In November, 1795, he wrote of ‘all command,
civil and military, being disorganized and without remedy’; in the
following May he wrote that ‘this unnatural disorder in our political
constitution, which alienates every servant of the Crown from
whoever administers the King’s Government, leaving only an
alternative still more dangerous, that of offending the mass of the
people, cannot fail to enervate all the powers of the British Empire on
this Continent’; and in June he wrote, that the old colonial system
was being strengthened with ruinous consequences.
It is not easy to decide how much ground there was for his
complaints. If the situation was difficult, the difficulty had partly arisen
from the bad custom, of which he had availed himself, of allowing
governors and other holders of posts in the colonies to remain for an
inordinate time at home while still retaining office and receiving the
pay attaching to it. At the very time when he was most wanted in
Canada to carry out the division of the two provinces, and to make
the central authority of the Governor-in-Chief strongly felt from the
first, he had remained away for fully two years, thereby allowing the
new system to come into being and to make some progress before
there was any Governor-in-Chief on the spot. Coming out to Canada
he found the Lieutenant-Governors corresponding direct with the
Home Government, and it was hardly reasonable to insist that they
should be debarred from doing so, provided that, as the Duke of
Portland, who succeeded Dundas, pointed out, the Governor-in-
Chief was supplied with copies of the correspondence. An analogous
case is that of Australia at the present day. The governors of the
separate states correspond directly with the Colonial Office, sending
copies of important dispatches to the Governor-General of the
Commonwealth. Had Dorchester not been absent, Relations of the
when Simcoe took up his appointment in Upper Governor-in-Chief
and Lieutenant-
Canada, and had his mind not been prejudiced by Governors.
bitter memories of the days of Germain, it is possible
that friction might not have arisen. On the other hand the limits of the
authority of the Governor-in-Chief and of the Lieutenant-Governors
in the British North American provinces seem not to have been
clearly defined, with the result that, as years went on, the Governor-
in-Chief gradually became little more than Governor of Lower
Canada, and the Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada became, in
civil matters, governor of that province in all but the name. When
Lord Dalhousie was appointed Governor-in-Chief, Sir Peregrine
Maitland, then Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada, asked the
Secretary of State for a ruling on the subject; and Lord Bathurst’s
answer, dated the 9th of February, 1821, was that ‘So long as the
Governor-in-Chief is not resident within the province of Upper
Canada, and does not take the oaths of office in Upper Canada, he
has no control whatever over any part of the civil administration, nor
are you bound to comply with his directions or to communicate with
him on any act of your civil government. To His Majesty you are
alone responsible for the conduct of the civil administration’. If, on
the other hand, the Governor-in-Chief were to take up his residence
in Upper Canada and be sworn into office, the Secretary of State laid
down that the functions of the Lieutenant-Governor would be entirely
suspended. By this date, therefore, the two appointments had
become exclusive of each other. At a later date, when Lord Durham
was going out to Canada, Lord Glenelg, then Secretary of State,
emphasized still more strongly the independence of the Lieutenant-
Governors. When sending Lord Durham his commission, he wrote
on the 3rd of April, 1838, of the position which the Governor-General
or Governor-in-Chief had up to that date held in regard to the other
provinces. ‘With the title of Governor-General, he has, in fact, been
Governor of the province of Lower Canada only, and has been
prohibited from resorting to any of the other provinces, lest his
presence should supersede the authority of the respective
Lieutenant-Governors, to whose administration they have been
confided.... Hitherto it has not been the practice to carry on official
correspondence between the Governor-General and any of the
Lieutenant-Governors. The Governor-General and the Lieutenant-
Governors have severally conducted their separate administrations
as separate and independent authorities, addressing all their
communications on public affairs to the head of this department, and
receiving from the Secretary of State alone instructions for their
guidance.’ The result of dividing Canada into two provinces was
necessarily to create two governors. One was intended to be
subordinate to the other, but the subordination gradually became
nominal only. The political problems of Lower Canada were so
difficult and so important as to absorb the full time and attention of
the Governor-in-Chief; no railways or telegraphs facilitated
communication; and the British North American provinces, instead of
being controlled by a central executive authority, for good or evil
went their own way.
It has been seen that during Dorchester’s first government, he had
experienced no little difficulty in dealing with Livius, the
contumacious Chief Justice of Quebec. In the earlier period of his
second government, he had, on the contrary, a wise and loyal fellow
worker in Chief Justice Smith. Soon after the governor returned to
Canada for the last time, towards the end of 1793, Smith died and
his place was taken by Osgoode, the Chief Justice of Upper Canada,
who did not enjoy Dorchester’s confidence to the same extent as his
predecessor. But Osgoode’s appointment was made the occasion for
putting into practice a reform which Dorchester, to his lasting honour,
had urgently pressed upon the notice of the Imperial Dorchester’s
Government, the abolition of fees and perquisites, and opposition to fees
and perquisites.
the payment of judges and other public officers by
adequate salaries alone. Dorchester himself, when he first took up
the government of Canada in 1766, had refused to take the fees to
which he was legally entitled; and in the last years of his Canadian
service he wrote on this subject in no measured terms. In a dispatch
dated the last day of December, 1793, and written in connexion with
the vacant chief justiceship, he referred to the system of fees and
perquisites as one which ‘alienates every servant of the Crown from
whoever administers the King’s Government. This policy I consider
as coeval with His Majesty’s Governments in North America, and the
cause of their destruction. As its object was not public but private
advantage, so this principle has been pursued with diligence,
extending itself unnoticed, till all authority and influence of
government on this continent was overcome, and the governors
reduced almost to mere corresponding agents, unable to resist the
pecuniary speculations of gentlemen in office, their connexions and
associates’. He added that whatever tended to enfeeble the
Executive power in British North America tended to sever it for ever
from the Crown of Great Britain. Subsequent dispatches were to the
same effect. In June, 1795, he reported having disallowed certain
small claims by subordinate officers, expressed regret that
gentlemen in Britain should look to America for a reward for their
services, and laid down that officers should be paid sufficient
salaries to place them above pecuniary speculations in the colonies.
The next month he wrote in the same strain with reference to the
Customs officials and the collection of revenue: and a year later he
again insisted that such officers should not receive indirect
emoluments, that the local administration should not be warped and
made subservient to fees, profits, perquisites ‘and all their dirty train’,
and that the national interests should not be sacrificed to gentlemen
who possessed or were looking out for good places for themselves
and their connexions. Running through the dispatches is insistence
on the principle that the Executive must be strong, that it can be
strong only if the officers are duly subordinate to the representative
of the Crown, that loyal subordination can only be produced by
paying proper salaries and abolishing perquisites, and that the loss
of the old North American colonies had been largely due to abuses
which had lowered the dignity and the authority of the Crown,
alienating from it the confidence and the affections of the people.
The censure, if censure it can be called, which Dorchester
Dundas had passed on Dorchester, and which caused criticized by
Dundas for plain
the latter to tender his resignation, was connected with speaking as to the
the attitude which Dorchester felt it necessary to take Americans.
up towards the United States after his return to Canada in the
autumn of 1793. The Treaty of 1783 had settled, or purported to
settle, the boundaries of Canada as against the United States, but it
had not settled the boundaries of the United States as against the
Indians, and the Indians manfully maintained their right to the
territory north of the Ohio river. In November, 1791, an War between the
American force under General St. Clair, who had AmericansIndians.
and the

commanded at Ticonderoga at the time of Burgoyne’s

advance, was badly defeated in the Miami country to the south-west
of Lake Erie. The British Government and the Canadian authorities
made various efforts to mediate between the contending parties, but
the government of the United States was not disposed to accept
such mediation, though British officers were asked to be present at
conferences which were held in the summer of 1793 between
representatives of the various Indian tribes and commissioners of the
United States. No result came from these negotiations, the Indians
demanding that the Ohio should be the boundary, the Americans
definitely refusing to comply with the demand, and in the following
year fighting began again.
The French Revolution had for some years been gathering
strength. In the autumn of 1792 France had been declared a
Republic; and the execution of the King on the 21st of American sympathy
January, 1793, was followed on the 1st of February by with France.
a declaration of war against Great Britain. The French also declared
war against Spain, the power which now held New Orleans and
Louisiana west of the Mississippi. The position in North America
became at once very critical and very dangerous. Popular feeling in
the United States ran strongly in favour of France. The Republicans
of the New World were enthusiastic for the people who had enabled
them to gain their independence and who, having put an end to