A Conservative Reformer in Upper Canada: Charles Fothergill, Responsible Government and the “British Party”, 1824‑1840
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Whig treatments of the politics of early 19th century Upper Canada have tended to treat the reformers as a group unified behind the concept of "responsible government". As Graeme Patterson has pointed out, though, the concept of responsible government, which lay at the heart of much debate during the 1830s and 1840s, had a variety of meanings, ranging from the traditional Baldwinite view of ministerial responsibility for policy to an elected chamber of a sovereign legislature to the much simpler concept cf effective accountability of the colonial administration to imperial authorities. The author explores a distinctive variant upon the theme cf "responsible government" - that posited by the English-born reformer, Charles Fothergill. After a short, and not par- ticularly distinguished, career as a placeman, Fothergill was dismissed in 1826 for his activities in the House of Assembly. After three years in the mainstream cf reform politics, he broke with W.W. Baldwin, John Rolph and their adherents over the meaning cf responsible government, and proclaimed himself a "conservative reformer." Afterthe Rebellion, he became a tribune of the so-called "British Party" - a group of loyal, conservative, middle-class British immigrants who resented the dominance of the Family Compact. Though Fothergill shared the social conservatism which underlay the Bald- winite view of responsible government, he posited a less radical, more legalistic - and, to the author, more logical - alternative to ministerial responsibility.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".