Until the 1850’s, Francophones constituted a majori t y o f the Canadian population; since Confederation the reverse has been true, and increasingly so. The co n t inued growth of the French Canadian population was due almost exclusively to a phenomenally high birthrate to which immigration has added hardly at all. It was in this context, then , t h a t t he scarcity of arable land in Quebec’s Saint Lawrence river valley coupled with the density of the area’s population and periodic economic crises, prompted Francophones, in the last three quarters of the nineteenth century, to migrate in ever-increasing numbers to the adjacent province of O n t a rio. Needless to say, their Church accompanied t h em. During this same period, Irish immigrants also began coming to Canada, as a result of the critical conditions prevalent in Ireland in the mid-nineteenth cent u r y . Although Ontario had previous settlements of Francophones in its southwestern tip, the phenomenon of large-scale Catholic immigration, both French and English, became a subject o f c oncern and a s pringboard for nativist feelings among Ontario’s Protestant Angl ophone population. At the outset, during the eighti e s and nineties, the main conflict was religious; the Protestants, led by the Orangemen, and the Pro t e s t a n t Protective Association (1891-1897), feared a Catholic takeover of their country, and the Catholics, in spite of their ethnic differences, st u ck together in order to ward off the attacks of the Protestants. Within this context, schools became the foci of debate, the Catho l i c s wanting full equality in tax-sharing for their public (but separate) schools. Indeed, Ontario had a system of public (or common) schools, all subject to the Ontario Department of Education, but wherein local school boards could declare their schools denominational, and thereby become “ Separate” schools. The P rotestants as a rule w a n t ed one faith, one flag and one language. The issue which was allegedly a religious conflict at its inception, slowly transformed itself in the three decades between 1 883 a nd 1913 into an explicitly ethnic, linguistic and cultural conflict, and the Roman Catholics who had resisted the Oran g emen’s sallies in unison during the eighties and nineties, became progressively more divided al ong li nguistic and cultural lines. By 1910 the latter is s u e took precedence over the P rotestant-Catholic