Upper Canada before 1812

Some more analysis by Alan Taylor of Upper Canada "before the war."

To suppress sedition,, the government sought to control the flow of public information. In a stark contrast with the republic, the British restricted Postal Service in Upper Canada to official dispatches and to the letters of favored merchants. An American settler described Upper Canada as the land of "no mail, no post-offices, [and] no post riders." ... A Local schools worried officials, who feared that a little knowledge was dangerous in common minds, particularly when their teachers came from the United States. ... Distrusting local, common schools, officials preferred to fund only a few elite schools, one per district ,to educate the sons of gentlemen. ... Britons defined Upper Canada as a set of absences: as free from the social and political pathologies attributed to the United States. They celebrated the colony for lacking the land jobbing, Indian warfare, African slavery, Republican electioneering, libelous newspapers, majoritarian intolerance, and mob violence that blighted the republic.In 1792 Patrick Campbell boasted that the settler in Upper Canada could get "get lands for nothing, be among his countrymen, and run no risk of being ever molested by Indians, tarred or feathered." The British promoted Upper Canada more for what it was not, than for what it was.

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