Treason always labours under disadvantage when it makes preliminary arrangements; and it is often obliged to found combinations on defective data, not reckoning upon disturbing forces and the sudden appearance of the unforeseen. But if so in ordinary cases, what must it have been when, in Upper Canada, sympathy with the French and dissatisfaction with existing Upper Canadian institutions ended in a determination to combine forces and make a common cause.

Each province had its distinct enemies; but distance was one common to both. They were divided from the metropolis and arsenal of the Empire by ocean, storm, and wooden ships; and tracts of native roadless wilderness, long stretches of roads of mud and corduroy, and the intercepting reserve, helped to keep man from man. A huge place; and the badness of its affairs was in proportion to its size. With no hint of the future iron belt from Atlantic to Pacific, all travel was by stage, a painful mode, and costing some $24.00 from Montreal to Toronto; or if by water, in long flat-bottomed bateaux rowed by four men, Durham boat, barge, or the new ventures, steamboats, where as yet passenger quarters were in the hold.

The element of Upper Canada was crude, and the homesick letters of the new-come emigrants sighed over the rude surroundings. But perhaps the rudest thing which the settlers of ’37 found was the apology for a form of government then offered to them. An idea had prevailed in the home countries that Canada was the best of the colonies. But this idea was dispelled by Mackenzie; those of his earlier writings which reached Britain rendered such a sorry account of Canadian happiness that people who had confidence in his book thought twice before they risked fortune in what evidently had become his country through necessity.

Some time previous to the publication of his book (“Sketches of Canada and the United States”), he had been good enough to write Lord Dalhousie, “So far, your Lordship’s administration is just and reasonable.” To him Canadian affairs were like a falling barometer, soon to end in storm, and there was every ground for the statement of a United States editor that Mackenzie constituted himself the patron or the censor of the race.

There was no iron hand in a silken glove about the oligarchy; the hand was always in evidence to Mackenzie and his kind, and Canada was not a whit better than Kingsley’s apostrophized land.

It is easy at this time of day to cast reflections upon the ruling class of that period, a class chiefly composed of sons of officers in the army and navy, for the most part gentlemen in the conventional sense of the term—a crime laid to their charge by some who could not forgive it. They naturally came to centre in themselves all offices of honour and emolument; and the governors, all gentle if some foolish, looked to them for counsel and support, before time was allowed for reflection, the governors so cleverly governed that they knew it not. Gifts of the Crown naturally followed, and the great Pact grew richer, alongside of that older Compact of the sister province. It is a case for “put yourself in his place.” The burden and heat of the day had fallen on these men; they but followed the instinct to reap where one has strawed, and carried out to the letter the axiom that unlimited power is more than mortal is framed to bear.

“The tyrannical government of palace pets” furnishes pages of misgovernment. It took a clear head, a steady will and a true heart to cling to British connection and the Union Jack, when desperation made some determined to be rid of the Toronto rule, which was to them odious, unjust, intolerable. And yet, when we review that epoch of dissolution and transformation, the errors and shortcomings of either party, the two sides of the dispute stand out so clearly that we wonder anyone could then think he was altogether right. “Flayed with whips and scorped with scorpions,” one side said, “there is no alternative but a tame, unmanly submission or a bold and vigorous assertion of our rights as freemen;” while the other, by the mouth of its governor, likened Canada, standing in “the flourishing continent of North America,” to a “girdled tree with drooping branches.” Certainly, the simile was good; and with all justice to the side of Tory or Reformer, Royalist, Rebel, Loyalist and Loyalist, a retrospective glance discloses a knife on either side busy at the process of girdling. “What is the best government on earth?” asks a school-book in use in Duncombe’s District and printed in Boston for Canadian schools; “A Republican Government like the United States,” is the unqualified next line. “What is the worst government on earth?”—“A Monarchical Government like that of England and Canada.” “Can the King of England order any man’s head cut off and confiscate his property?”—“Yes.” “Will you, if the occasion arrives, rise up and rebel against such a government as yours, and join the States?”—“Yes, with all my power and influence.” The Yankee school-master, a chief agent of this propaganda, was one of the first prisoners.

The Family Compact believed the chief beauty of government to be simplicity, the foremost tenet loyalty to one another. But men outside the Pact, every whit as much gentlemen and each in turn bearing his part of that heat and burden, awoke to a sense of individualism, each to realize that he was a unit in the commonweal.

The forerunner of the new dispensation was Robert Gourlay. And what and if his sorrows had so overwhelmed his wits, he yet was the founder of public opinion in Upper Canada; nor is it less true that the first outcome of his martyrdom was that life was made harder for those who dared to follow where he had failed.

“Whaur ye gaun, Sawndie?” “E’en to the club just to conthradick a bit;” and Mackenzie, right as he was in many points, leaves us in no doubt as to his descent and his ability to “conthradick” for pure love of so doing. Also his club covered a wide area, and his influence over a tract as wide as his ability to contradict was phenomenal.

Passing the line between the Canadas, Glengarry showed the change from French to British ways. Not only were the features and tongues of the inhabitants different, but there was an entire absence of that thrifty, snug cottage comfort which distinguished the half-brother below. With outsides unfinished, no taut lines about them, both houses and original huts proclaimed a people undaunted by obstacles and surmounting them by indifference to detail. Here all were loyal. Stories of the famous Glengarry Fencibles of 1812 took up the leisure hours, and the spirit of the Loyalist fighting bishop was paramount. That prelate would not tell his people how to vote, but he talked of “these radicals who aim at the destruction of our Holy Religion;” and this word to those already wise was sufficient.

Next came Prescott, once La Galette, well built on a rocky prominence, the site of a former entrenchment, a place mentioned in old French diaries from the time of La Salle, the white of its tall, massive tower, roofed with a tin dome and built out on a rounding point covered with evergreen, making an abrupt feature in the river bank. Enormous sails flapping in the breeze proclaimed its functions, and a fort in process of erection, not having a moiety of its aggressive strength of appearance, lay near it. Here the people were of two minds, many ready to be sympathisers in a movement though lacking the force to be leaders; prominent men, some of them, and wishing for a lead, while others, living in the remote shadow of the dominant party, were so securely attached to crown and flag that they were ready to defend that party for the sake of the flag whose exclusive property it seemed to be.

Farther on, as the river broadened towards the chain of lakes, came Kingston, its “agreeable, genteel society accommodated in houses of stone and wood,” also much divided by party. In the harbour ships of war stood close to the shore, where blockhouse and fort commanded the entrance. Fort Henry, begun in ’32, had by February, ’36, cost England more than £50,000; its area did not exceed an acre, the walls, massive outworks and aspect evidently conveniently designed for the success of the enemy. A few more years were required for its completion and to level the glacis; but although unfinished it was to be the theatre of a tragedy. In its finished state it has been described as a colossal monument to military stupidity. From the top of the inner fort lie in view the famous “cow pasture,” Dead Man’s Bay where some fourteen men were drowned during construction of the fort on Cedar Island, and Shoal Tower, all points of arrest to the eye in that ever-beautiful scene. Several old war-ships left from 1812 were in 1831 kept at the dockyards, shingled over and protected, some fated later to be sunk as useless, one to be burnt to the water’s edge. Hard by there was a dockyard, furnished with every article of naval stores required for the equipment of ships of war. Two seventy-fours, a frigate, a sloop of war and eleven gunboats reposed under cover on stocks. They were not planked, but men employed for the purpose replaced decaying bits of timber, and it was estimated that in little more than a month they could be got ready for sea. Immense sums had been expended during that war upon unnecessary things, unaccountable ignorance having sent the woodwork of the frigate Psyche to a country where it could have been provided on the spot at one-hundredth of the expense and in one-tenth of the time necessary to convey it there. Even wedges had been sent, and the Admiralty, full of salt-water notions, was paternal enough to include a full supply of water casks for use on Lake Ontario, where a bucket overboard could draw up water undreamed of by Jack tars, from a reservoir through which flowed nearly half the fresh water supply of the globe. Clearly, details of geography were not included in the lists for those bright youths who were preparing for the Admiralty, and nowhere in Canada was the foolish touch of a prodigal-handed parent seen to more advantage than in Kingston.

Across the lake at Sackett’s Harbour was a ship of 102 guns, apparently put together in a substantial manner in forty days from the day the first tree used in her construction was cut down. Peace declared, she was never launched; and, agreeably to the terms of the treaty, which called for the abolition of an armed force on the lakes, six or seven more American vessels were sunk in the harbour and, in the parlance of their owners, were “progressing to dissolution.” Green timber might have proved as good a vehicle for the squandering of money as imported wedges and water-casks.

But although there was then this show of vessels in Kingston, a practical military man of ’37 records that the dockyard was a grazing ground, that the Royal Engineers’ department did naught but patch up barracks in much the same state as the ships, not a ship, boat, sail or oar was available, and that sad havoc had been made by the twenty-two years of profound peace and disuse in harness, waggons, carriages, limbers, wheels, drag-ropes and other munitions of war. The powder would not light, and moths had destroyed blankets and bedding. Artillery with no horses to the guns, and part of the 66th regiment, represented the military force at the half-finished fort.

At Kingston Her Majesty’s accession was proclaimed on a certain Monday in August of ’37 by Mr. Sheriff Bullock and the other authorities, but “the procession was meagre and pitiful in the extreme.” And this state of affairs was because of the dislike “manifested by many to petticoat government.”

Farther on, the peninsula of Prince Edward should have been the very paradise of loyalty if any inference were to be made from its nomenclature: Adolphusburg, Maryburg, Sophiasburg, a transatlantic inventory of major and minor royalties. But, although it had sent forth a Hagerman, the Bidwells were there too, all champions in the coming struggle for what each loyally believed to be the right. Every town and hamlet along that immense waterway had heard the call of Mackenzie from either lips or pen, and some dwellers in each had responded.

With York is reached the centre of grievance, the house of hate, where the principals in the coming struggle dwelt in a succession of patched-up peace, revolts, domineering unfairness, harsh punishments and secret reprisals, a panoramic play in which the first act was tyranny and the last revolution. Some of the by-play reads childishly enough. Mackenzie’s stationery shop in King Street contained window decorations of the most soul-harrowing kind, and all belonging to the era of belief in eternal punishment. The asperities of Mackenzie’s truly Presbyterian enjoyment had not yet been softened by a Farrar or a Macdonnell. The prints there displayed depicted Sir Francis Bond Head, Hagerman, Robinson, Draper and Judge Jones as squirming in all the torments of a realistic hell, relieved by sketches of a personal devil whose barbed tail was used as a transfixing hook for one or other of these Tories, the more conveniently to spit and cook him. The Canadian ejaculations of former times, “May an Iroquois broil me,” or “Tors mon âme au bout d’un piquet” (Twist my soul on the end of a fence rail), were forever routed. Like Pope and an interrogation point, Mackenzie was a little thing who would ask questions, any crookedness about him being the peculiar twists and turns made possible by nature to his rapier-like tongue. His paper heralded the day of Carlyle and Doré, anticipating the former’s “gloomy procession of the nations going to perdition, America the advance guard.” When he thus bearded these lions in their dens they promptly called—through the government organ—for the suppression of the first issue of this obnoxious paper; further, that the editor should be banished, and the entire edition confiscated. Vituperative, he had a command of uncomfortable words fitted to every circumstance, his ability to scent out abuses phenomenal. But he was not banished, nor his pen and pencil confiscated, nor yet did his influence stop at this point in the long journey from Glengarry to Windsor. And why should such a pen be confiscated? While the Family Compact were expelling Mackenzie, imprisoning Collins, and hunting to death any poor stray printer who dared put his want of admiration of them in type, no less great a person than their King was feign to be out of his wits because he was not only libelled but had no redress. He laments the existence of “such a curse ... as a licentious and uncontrolled press,” and of a state of things which renders the law with respect to libellers and agitators a dead letter. Poor King, happy Family Compact; Canada had no dead laws if the people who administered them wished them quick. “The Irish agitators, the reviews and, above all, the press, continue to annoy the King exceedingly;” but Earl Grey said the only way with newspaper attacks was the Irish way, “to keep never minding.” Also Lord Goderich writes to Sir John Colborne in ’32: “I must entirely decline, as perfectly irrelevant to any practical question, the inquiry whether at a comparatively remote period prosecutions against the editors of newspapers were improperly instituted or not.” It is needless to look beyond Mr. Mackenzie’s journal to be convinced that there is no latitude which the most ardent lover of free discussion ever claimed for such writers which is not enjoyed in Upper Canada. Had he looked beyond Mr. Mackenzie’s journal he would have found the Reformers called “juggling, illiterate boobies—a tippling band—mountebank riffraff—a saintly clan—Mackenzie a politico-religious juggler.” The Reform Parliament was “the league of knave and fool—a ribald conclave;” and Mr. Ryerson, when under a temporary cloud, was called “a man of profound hypocrisy and unblushing effrontery, who sits blinking on his perch like Satan when he perched on the tree of life in the shape of a cormorant, to meditate the ruin of our first parents in the Garden of Eden!”

Following the frontier line, Niagara, looking like a “dilapidated hennery,” had not much in the aspect of its feeble fort to awe the rebellious spirits. They remembered the cruel sufferings of Gourlay, the demolition of Forsyth’s property, and could not be awed back into what had technically come to be known as loyalty by any associations of “Stamford,” or by the leavening power of the U. E. Loyalism which abounded in that district. Thence on to the hamlets of Dunnville and Port Dover, past the Dutch settlement called the Sugar Loaves—six conical hills rising from the low ground near the lake—to where that old lion, Colonel Talbot, perched midway between Niagara and Detroit, on Lake Erie, dared any among his many settlers to name a grievance. Thence to Amherstburg and Windsor, and on to Goderich, youngest of them all, and beyond which was primeval wilderness, a matted and mighty forest on which clouds and thick darkness still rested—known only to the savage, the wild beast, or perhaps to some stoic of the woods who was hustled out of his dream of quiet by the hunt after that ever-receding point of the compass, the West. Over such an area did the influence of this small, almost childish figure of a man extend. And up and down the land within this water-bound border, in outlying interior townships, did his message penetrate until, as the seasons advanced and the times grew ripe, he seemed to hold within the hollow of his small palm—a palm never crossed with gold—the power for which Governor and Council schemed without tiring or maintained by the right of might.

As early as ’34 the Canadian Alliance had been formed, not local in aim, but “entering into close alliance with any similar association that may be found in Lower Canada or other colonies.” The democratic tendency of its resolutions caused it to be called revolutionary by the governmental party; but then anything outside of that party was “rebel.” When matters focused between Sir Francis and that which he called his “low-bred antagonist, democracy,” evenly balanced persons became “notorious republicans;” Postmaster Howard, who came of ultra-loyal stock, was deposed from office chiefly because his son, a lad of ten, read a radical newspaper; and we find an “old dyed-in-the-wool Tory, a writer of some note,” afterwards saying: “When I look back over events which were thought all right by the Loyalists of those times, I only wonder there were not thousands of Mackenzies and Papineaus.” Might with the Loyalists made right; Mr. Hagerman would not “stoop to enquire whether this act was right or wrong, it was sufficient for him the House had done it.” It was clear, too, that the Chief-Justice himself was no student of George III. in the meaning of the word “mob,” and it was exasperating to the last to hear themselves spoken of as “a few individuals,” their serious conclaves as “casual meetings,” their petitions as “got up by somebody or other.”

The Alliance was pledged to disseminate its principles and educate the people by gratuitous issues of political pamphlets and sheets. The series of meetings organized to bring the people together showed sympathy with Papineau throughout. Lloyd was the trusted messenger sent to convey that sympathy; but at first it was not a sympathy backed up by physical force. “Much may be done without blood” was the keynote of its temperate tone. Yet, as where Papineau’s own disclaimers of physical force were heard, in Upper Canada the meeting ended in drill; Brown Besses were furbished up, and the clink of the blacksmith’s hammer might be heard in any forest forge busy fashioning into shape the pikes which were made in such shape as to be equally happy in ripping or stabbing.

In November, ’37, Papineau sent despatches to Upper Canada by the hands of M. Dufort, with an appeal for support as soon as they should have recourse to arms there. The mission carried Dufort still farther west, and in Michigan a Council of War was held, embracing many names prominent in that section. Cheers for Papineau and “the gallant people of the sister province” were tempered in their enthusiasm by fears in some minds that there was a disposition to establish the Roman Catholic as a dominant or State Church in the Lower Province. State Church, they said, was one of their own most formidable enemies. At one meeting those composing it were called upon to divide, those in sympathy with Papineau to go to the right of the chairman. Only three remained on the left. The sympathy, which was general, grew more enthusiastic over common woes. “They,” (the British) said Papineau, “are going to rob you of your money. Your duty then is plain. Give them no money to steal. Keep it in your pockets.” The women of the country, handsome and patriotic, were exhorted to clothe themselves and their children in a way to destroy the revenue, and to assist the men to prevent the forging of chains of undue taxation and duty. “Henceforth there must be no peace in the province, no quarter for the plunderers. Agitate, agitate, agitate. Destroy the revenue, denounce the oppressors. Everything is lawful when the fundamental liberties are in danger.” In his newspaper Mackenzie calmly discussed the probability of their success under the question: “Can the Canadians conquer?” drawing a picture of two or three thousand of them, headed by Mr. Speaker Papineau, muskets on shoulders, determined to resist and finally throw off British tyranny. He argued that they could conquer, everywhere, except that “old fortalice, Quebec,” the daily sight of whose sombre walls, no doubt, was instrumental in keeping her own citizens the quietest in those troublous times. He pointed out how their organization was better than dreamed of by Lord Gosford, how as marksmen they were more than a match for the British Atkins, how the garrison might possibly desert rather than fire, how blood would tell and Britons over the border come flocking to the Canadian standard; how no House of Commons would spend fifty or sixty millions to put down rebellion in what was already “a costly encumbrance,” and how the men who commanded these malcontents were, as already shown, renegade regular or dismissed militia officers.

At one of these outside meetings emblems, devices and mottoes were even more significant than words. On one flag was a star surrounded by minor stars, a death’s head in the centre, with “Liberty or Death;” another showed “Liberty” surrounded with pikes, swords, muskets and cannon, “by way of relief to the eye.” In another decoration Father Time discarded his scythe and rested his hands in an up-to-date fashion on a cannon. A Liberty Pole one hundred feet high was contemplated in imitation of the Papineau pole; but methods likely to be successful under skilful French management came to naught with the clumsier Anglo-Saxon. Certain it is, no poet had yet arisen from that hot-bed of poesie, treason, though doggerel adorned many flags. The concluding lines in one effort show Pegasus’ attempt to settle into a steadier trot: “Ireland will sound her harp, and wave
Her pure green banner for your right;
Canadians never will be slaves—
Up, Sons of Freedom, to the fight!”

But Ireland’s other arm was waving a banner of a different colour. Orangeman followed Liberal with the usual results, fights and many black eyes; horsemen then escorted the organizers of the meetings; and after threats of assassination and guns snapping in the pan, angry cavalcades of hundreds of carriages and mounted men, quiet at the shilelah’s point was in most instances gained. The pretended constitution was announced a humbug, the people living under the worst of despotism. Discontent, vengeance and rage were in men’s hearts.

Two years before this period Mackenzie had visited Quebec, one of a deputation to cement the fellowship existing between Reformers of the two provinces. They found many of their grievances identical, and their oneness in determination to overcome them would, it was hoped, prove to Canadian and English authorities alike that “the tide was setting in with such unmistakable force against bad government that, if they do not yield to it before long, it will shortly overwhelm them in its rapid and onward progress.”

Truly the progress had been rapid and onward. It was now “Hurrah for Papineau” in every Upper Canadian inn where the two hundred meetings held in this year of ’37 might happen to rendezvous. And yet there were some who opined that Mackenzie’s bark was worse than his bite; who, with Lord Gosford and the Provincial Governor, did not apprehend a rebellion. The province was, in the words of its Governor—in his opinion—more tranquil than any part of England; and because there was a demand for Union Jack flags it was argued that if people loved that flag they would willingly die for the oligarchy. To many minds, the Pact was the most untrue and disloyal element in the province; and according to the point of view the sides unfurled these significant bits of red and blue bunting, each man defining to his own satisfaction the meaning of that vexed word loyalty.

The Hon. Peter McGill had said at a loyalist meeting, “... the organization (to repel rebels), that it may combine both moral determination and physical force, must be military as well as political. There must be an army as well as a congress, there must be pikes and rifles as well as men and tongues.” The answer to these wise words, useful to either side as containing solid truth for each, was a miserable attention, an exhibition of incompetence on the rebel side towards that necessary military wing, and on the Governor’s side the answer was the removal of all the troops in the province. The one party was no longer the superior of the other; with the dreadful difference that there was unanimity on the loyalist side, as against jealousies and multiplicity of leadership on the other.

It so happened that in the year ’34, partly in compensation to him for his expulsion from the House of Assembly, Mackenzie had been raised to the dignity of first Mayor of York, and, as in the words of his own rhyme, changed the name to the far better Canadian one of Toronto: “Come hither, come hither, my little dog Ponto,
Let’s trot down and see where Little York’s gone to;
For forty big Tories, assembled in junta,
Have murdered poor Little York in the City of Toronto.”

Calendars tell us that the pillory was abolished in ’37. When reading the life of Mackenzie one would imagine the statement a mistake, so popular did pillory methods seem. So far as unmerited obloquy, misrepresentation at home and abroad from those who pretended to despise and at heart feared him, personal insult, outrage, hard words, kicks from men who made up in inches what they lacked in justice, could constitute a pillory, Mackenzie had for years stood in it metaphorically, the old conditions being carried out faithfully, since practically it had been a punishment thought meet for authors and publishers of seditious pamphlets. A wise man has said: “Whereas before, our fathers had no other books but the score and tally, thou hast caused printing to be used; and contrary to the king, his crown and dignity, thou hast built a paper mill.” In certain cases, too, the persecution was unpopular, and the intended disgrace became a species of triumph. A public pillory and stocks were still part of the actual machinery of government in Little York, and unfortunately for his own good name Mackenzie celebrated Toronto’s first year by using the stocks and otherwise conducting himself in a way mortifying to his friends, most satisfactory to his enemies, and calculated to still further alienate those members of the Reform party to whom he seems to have been personally objectionable even when his mistakes of judgment did not run the length of seditious writing or putting women in the stocks.

But extraordinary acts and extraordinary words were not confined to Canada. It was reserved for a member of Parliament, a British statesman, to pen words the repetition of which alone was sufficient to overturn the feelings of the majority of the thinking and well-intentioned portion of the colony. Never did Tory press or Tory lips tire of abusing saddle-bag doctors and saddle-bag ministers as the purveyors of treason, the latter, in guise of Methodist preacher, supposed to scatter seeds of faith and sedition with the same hand. Strangely enough, Dr. Ryerson, the most prominent Methodist in the country, was Tory enough to provoke the wrath of the radical Mr. Hume. In a letter to Mackenzie, so abusive that all must wonder a gentleman could write it, Hume made the clergyman an object of abuse in words which stamped the receiver as well as the writer everything their most ardent enemies desired and believed them to be.

That letter did more for Loyalism in Upper Canada than the concentrated action of Governor, oligarchy, and Tory press could ever do to hurt it. Mackenzie, to work off a private spleen of his own against Dr. Ryerson, published the obnoxious document without comment. Vain was it for its author to hasten to say “that the misrule of the Government of Canada, and the monopolizing, selfish domination of such men as had lately (though but a small faction of the people) resisted all improvement and reform, would lose the countenance of the authorities in Downing Street, and leave the people in freedom to manage their own affairs.” The mischief was done. On the one hand, many of the most reputable of that body through which amelioration of condition might be hoped to come were forever divorced from a party that could voice such sentiments; and on the other, it placed a weapon ready to the hand of those men who, the incarnation of Toryism, honestly believed themselves to be the only conservers of loyalty left. By noon of that day, in May, ’34, when the “copious extracts” were published by Mackenzie, he and the writer of them were execrated by many who, an hour before that electrical sheet was issued, had been friends or silent sympathisers.

The whole country was under baneful domination; but not of the mother-land. Great provocations had brought just condemnations, and the match was about to be put to the torch. The rights of the people and the prerogative of the Crown bade fair to become parallel lines that could not meet. Some still believed in a brighter future; but the few streaks of light which they declared they could discern in that darkest hour before dawn were blood-red. Day was to be ushered in with much woe, although more than one writer has been found to call Rebellion “a magniloquent word” as applied to all the unsettled humours of the land in that episode of Canadian history.

Had Shakespeare, born to still further glory, tarried till Canadian times, he might have added a syllable or so when he wrote “The devil knew what he did when he made men politic.” But then, a contemporary diary of his time tells us: “I have heard it stated that Mr. Shakespeare was a natural wit, but had not any art at all;” and he would have needed both to do justice to the Canadian question.

That which was called “the almost romantically loyal Canadian population” had diverse ways of showing loyal enthusiasm, when (to quote Mackenzie in after years), a “person known as Victoria, the sovereign of England and the Canadas,” came “to keep up the dignity of that article called a crown.” Te Deums were sung in the French cathedrals, it is true, but many in the congregations rose and walked out. But at the coronation illuminations in Toronto, although one transparency quoted the words of the late king, “The Canadas must not be lost or given away,” another came as rider to it, “The Constitution, the whole Constitution, and nothing but the Constitution.” For many in Upper Canada were as dissatisfied with the portions of that system imported by Governor Simcoe as their French brethren were. Here as there the broad basis of it, the Will of the People, was a dead letter.

Happily for Toronto on that occasion it had that British characteristic which, however Tory might abuse Whig, or Reformer predict the ruin of everything Tory, made all men unite—for the day at least—in fealty to the young Queen, and, more wonderful still, in good-will towards one another. Elsewhere there were forecasts of petticoat government, when “the speech from the throne would dwell chiefly on embroideries, nurseries and soap.” How were they to know that the slim and beautiful young fingers which held the sceptre were strong, tenacious, and of an even touch, or that the girlish form held a mother heart large enough and to spare for her own and every bairn within her realm.

So did the shuttles angrily fly to and fro in the warp and woof of coming catastrophe in the year when Her Majesty came into her inheritance of discontent.

The Canadas at Westminster.

“I put not my faith in Princes, for that would be forgetting the rules of Holy Writ; but, begging your pardon, I still put my faith in Peers.”

“‘I am glad I am not the eldest son,’ said the younger Pitt when he heard of his father’s elevation to an earldom; ‘I want to speak in the House of Commons like papa.’”

“A politic caution, a guarded circumspection, were among the ruling principles of our forefathers.”

The man who wrote the letter calculated to create trouble and promote that already begun was quite a personage in the Radical wing of the House of Commons. A Scotchman from Montrose, born in 1777, he was son of a captain of a trading vessel; the father’s early death left this Joseph and numerous brothers and sisters to the care of a mother who was a woman of extraordinary perseverance and energy. She kept a small stand on market-day in Montrose, and Fox Maule, afterwards Lord Panmure, seeing young Joseph there, was seized with the whim to apprentice him to a druggist. A subsequent apprenticeship to surgery and a voyage to India led to his study there of the native dialects, a knowledge of which he made such good use that in the war with the Mahrattas he became interpreter, an office of emolument and honour. He returned to Britain at the peace of 1807, and began a tour there so minute and exhaustive that he visited every manufacturing town. He then went as thoroughly through Southern Europe, and with his head thus equipped entered the House as Tory member for the borough of Weymouth in 1812, calculated to make a figure there and carry much weight through native ability and wide experience. Once more he tried his rôle of interpreter between those who could not or would not understand each other. His opponents found it impossible to tire or baffle him; repulses were thrown away on him, and he returned to the charge, unconscious, ready to repeat a hundredth time that which they had declared unreasonable.

“What manner of man is Joseph Hume?” asks The Noctes. “Did you never see him?” says North. “He is a shrewd-looking fellow enough, but most decidedly vulgar. Nobody that sees him could ever for a moment suspect him of being a gentleman born. He has the air of a Montrose dandy at this moment, and there is an intolerable affectation about the creature. I suppose he must have sunk quite into the dirt since Croker curried him.” “I don’t believe anything can make an impression on him. A gentleman’s whip would not be felt through the beaver of a coal-heaver.” He was, in fact, short, broad, stiff, square and copperfaced. He exhibited the uncouthness of the Scot in relief, and his speech, in all the worst of the Scotch brogue, “barbarous exceedingly,” baffled description. “Depend upon it, Joseph will go on just as he has been doing.” And he had been going on from his place as Radical member for Montrose. Added to all, he was a master of detail. In spite of his earnestness, he often convulsed the House with his Scotch bulls when he intended most to impress. Expatiating on the virtues of the French-Canadians, he exclaimed, “I say, sir, they are the best and gentlest race in Europe (laughter), aye”—waxing hotter—“or in Africa” (roars of laughter). Sir Francis Bond Head did not scruple to say that Hume was the greatest rebel of the lot, and, in his turn, Hume made a furious attack on Sir Francis. However, he was just as vigorously answered by Lord Grey, and then the morning papers said “that Hume had not been able to make Head.” Politics were so bitter then that all Reformers were rebels. Hume’s letter of March 29th, 1834, in which he says, “Your cause is their cause, your defeat would be their subjection. Go on, therefore, I beseech you, and success, glorious success, must inevitably crown your joint efforts,” sounds as if Sir Francis might have had reason for his opinion. By 1839 a public dinner had been given this erstwhile Tory, in testimony of his eminent public services and constant advocacy in the cause of reform. Says North, “Why, a small matter will make a man who has once ratted rat again. We all remember what Joe Hume was a few years ago!”

“A Tory?”

“I would not prostitute the name so far, but he always voted with them.”

“Why, no wonder ... he hates the Tories. They never thought of him while he was with them, and now the Whigs do talk of Joe as if he were somebody. But, as John Bull says,

It was a time of general unrest and suspicion, just from the likelihood of change and the alarming precedents set up. No two men could be seen anywhere in the same neighbourhood without arousing ideas of coalition, hope, suspicion and a host of feelings—as, for instance, when “Mr. Roebuck was seen in a quarter which left little doubt that he had been with Lord Brougham. It is very generally thought that something is about to happen.” Mr. Roebuck, like Mr. Hume, was a marked man and an out-and-out Canadian sympathiser. He, according to a well-known and accredited newspaper, “was paid by the Lower Canadian House of Assembly to expatiate on grievances, and to declare at all times and in all places to those who have no personal acquaintance with the Canadas that the people there are restless, dissatisfied, yearning for republican institutions, and that unless the never-ending, still-beginning concessions they require are granted, another American war must be the result.” The effect of his words was weakened by his appearance, which was that of a boy of eighteen. “If we do not immediately take active measures,” was Sir John Colborne’s antiphon from across the sea, “to arm and organize our friends, the province (Lower Canada) will be lost to us.”

He did organize—“Why, slaves, ’tis in our power to hang ye.” “Very likely,” came the answer, “’tis in our power, then, to be hanged and scorn ye.”

What in Canada were called Roebuck’s “remarques ordinaires” were constant philippics against administrative abuses there. He wanted some means to be found as remedy for the defects. He laboured unceasingly. In speeches, writings in journals and pamphlets and periodicals, in season and out of season, he lost no chance to plead the cause of the Canadas. Naturally, he was “abusive and ridiculous” in these letters to such as did not agree with him. Had his nomination been properly confirmed, his income as agent would have been £1,000 a year; but the want of it did not slacken his efforts. “While such is the nature and conduct of this petty and vulgar oligarchy, I beseech the House to consider the peculiar position of the people over whom they domineer.” He then goes on to draw a picture of the superior scene across the St. Lawrence; a natural enough picture to be drawn by an American, born with prejudices in favour of his native land. He goes on: “With such a sight before them it is not wonderful that the Canadian people have imbibed the free spirit of America, and that they bear with impatience the insolence, the ignorance, the incapacity and the vice of the nest of official cormorants who, under the festering domination of England, have constituted themselves an aristocracy, with all the vices of such a body, without one of the redeeming qualities which are supposed to lessen the mischiefs which are the natural attendants of all aristocracies. It is of a people thus high-spirited, pestered and stung to madness by this pestilential brood, that I demand your attention.”

But the Canadians, though grateful, were aware he did not always act with prudence in their behalf. He and Mr. Hume together had presided at a meeting where the latter declared that Canada was of no advantage to Britain. But they gave him and all who mentioned them kindly in the House of Commons—O’Connell, Pakington and others who had spoken for them—their heartfelt thanks.

Labouchere, French by descent, stood up in their defence and vindicated their claims. “I look upon the Act of 1791,” said he, “as the Magna Charta of Canadian freedom,” and contended that a more rigid following of Pitt’s intentions would have resulted in better things. He denounced the prejudice of one race against another, nor deemed a council so altogether British wholesome government for people so entirely French. The French had many champions in that historic chamber. Sir James Mackintosh, author of “Vindiciæ Gallicæ,” a man whose whole bias of mind had been turned and held fast by French revolution, equipped by nature with all the powers and attributes of statesmanship, and who had brought all to bear on home politics and legislation in the broadest imperial sense, was not the least of these. He had undertaken, years before the blooming of that bitter blossom, the Canadian aloe—tenacity of life is one of its virtues,—the successful defence of a French emigrant for libel on the consul; his residence in Bombay, as Recorder, had been famous for his wholesome administration between British and native rights; he had strongly opposed “the green bag and spy system;” had voted against the severe restrictions of the Alien Bill, and had moved against the existing state of the criminal law; so that he did not speak, as many did on Canadian affairs, without special or collateral experience. He wanted the dependency governed on principles of justice, few and simple; protection against alien influence, and freedom to conduct their own affairs and manage their own trade. “A British king see now assume
Judicial sovereignty, ‘coutume,’
And that of Paris cease to reign
Throughout the Canada domain.”[2]
He even allowed merit to that old coutume in comparison with affairs as they existed under British law, and in sarcastic humour ran a parallel between them.

When “Quebec first raised the legal courts
For Does or Roes to hold their sports,”2
the spirit of the Conseil Souverain was one which did not at the Conquest migrate to the new body: “Nous avons cru ne pouvoir prendre une meilleure résolution qu’en établisant une justice réglé et un Conseil Souverain dans le dits pays, pour y faire fleurir les lois, maintenir et appuyer les bons, chatier les méchants, et contenir chacun en son droit.”

Sir James now held the Governor responsible for the existing state of affairs; he accused the Colonial Minister of appealing to the sympathies of the House in favour of British interests only. Were the twenty thousand British to be privileged at the expense of the four hundred thousand French? Were the former to be cared for exclusively, their religious sympathies so fostered as to bring about Protestant domination? Again he draws a parallel between what Ireland was and what Canada might become, and in the name of heaven, his eloquence aided by large grey melancholy eyes, adjured them solemnly that such a scourge fall not a second time upon any land under Britain’s sway. “Above all, let not the French-Canadians suppose for a moment that their rights or aspirations are less cared for by us than those of their fellow-adult colonists of our own blood.... Finally, I look upon a distinction in the treatment of races and the division of a population into distinct classes as most perilous in every way and at all times.”

Then Melbourne rose to reply that nothing was as unsafe as analogy, particularly historical analogy.

And Lord Aylmer thought, after an extensive tour of the French province, giving all these questions earnest consideration, that the best way to settle the question was to bring in thousands of the Irish to the colony; the Eastern Townships he estimated could take five hundred thousand, and the valley of the Ottawa one hundred thousand. These painstaking, conscientious governors generally left England laden with minute instructions, and came on the scene with exact directions as to their action. The Canadians, first credulous, afterwards wary and lastly suspicious, shrewdly guessed that many of the “impromptus” were in the Governor’s pocket; they also knew that Lord Glenelg was a Reformer in London and a Conservative in Quebec. They believed that orders publicly given carried with them secret advice not to have them enforced, as they were meant “only to blarney the Radicals.” And Papineau had told them that the same hand which wrote the King’s speech penned the answer to it. When the Irish emigrant did come he brought the cholera with him, and Jean cried out again that legislation and emigration only meant fresh trouble.

The amount of thought bestowed upon the Canadas by these statesmen no one, not even the most discontented Canadian, denied. But the mistaken data from which many of the arguments were drawn maddened some; and aristocratic mannerisms, when brought into contact with the democratic Upper Canadian, gave offence. There was a great deal of the picturesque about Jean Baptiste, and of him much was known; retiring governors and officers took with them bulky note-books full of anecdotes. In Upper Canada there was nothing of the picturesque, and the same note-books, developed into goodly volumes, tell us it in print without flinching. True, those intent on learning had Basil Hall’s Sketches, with accounts of Hall’s five thousand two hundred and thirty-seven miles of travel; but though the former were beautifully done the latter were meagre, and with the exception of Niagara make the Upper Province as uninteresting as its own crows. For foundation they had Charlevoix; but, says Charlevoix, “The horned owl is good eating, many prefer his flesh to chickens. He lives in winter on ground mice which he has caught the previous fall, breaking their legs first, a most useful precaution to prevent their escape, and then fattens them up with care for daily use.” Could housewife with Thanksgiving turkey do more!

Now a good many of those who came after Charlevoix and reported on us took him—perhaps unconsciously, perhaps conscientiously, for Charlevoix was a good man—for a literary model, pushing to the extreme limit their rights and privileges as travellers. They read, did these mighty and well-meaning statesmen, in their leisure hours. Nor in later years were the English less credulous when Canadian curiosities came to them bodily. When a party of Indians were nightly attracting large and wondering masses of the classes, one of the Royal Household, with two others as white as himself, one of the trio six feet two of apparent savagedom, arrayed themselves as magnificent Bois Brûlé, a Sac and a Sioux respectively, to appear before a brilliant array of fashion, wealth and beauty, carry out an unusually thrilling programme and be loaded with gifts by the spectators. The “interpreter” of the three got into rather a mess through his attempt to interpret too much, and in a final frenzy of dancing they danced off some paint made liquid by their desire to be honest in giving enough for their lavish remuneration. An earl in the audience failed to recognize his brother in one of the chief actors, voice and speech being disguised by a rifle bullet held in the mouth. The sequel was the return of the presents and a chase home to lodgings, followed by a yelling crowd of ragamuffins who turned out to be truer savages than those whom they termed Hopjibbeways. The Indian came first in romantic interest to the Englishman, particularly when got ready for an audience by a clever manager. To hear a handsome, strapping Bois Brûlé sing “To the land of my fathers, white man, let me go,” was enough to draw tears. Next in point of interest to this link between red and white came the habitant. The Upper Canadian was very tame after these two, and Toronto was but “a place of considerable importance ... in the eyes of its inhabitants.”

Another writes of travel by water as he finds it in America: “There is no toothbrush in the country, simply I believe the article is entirely unknown to the American toilet. A common towel, however, passes from hand to hand, and suffices for the perfunctory ablutions of the whole party on board.” No man in England would take the trouble to contradict this; it was much easier to buy the book, read, be amused, and believe—as he did with the Indian party.

Much as Mackenzie was instrumental in doing for his country, he was scarcely a person to make his province interesting when he presented himself in London.

“Now Willie’s awa’ frae the land o’ contention,
Frae the land o’ mistake and the friends o’ dissension;
He’s gane o’er the waves as an agent befitting
Our claims to support in the councils o’ Britain,”
sang a Canadian bard in 1832, when Mackenzie, with his monster grievance book under his arm, set sail for the Home Office.

The quiet of the vessel after his late life in Little York was irksome; so this stormy petrel went aloft one night in a howling tempest, no doubt in a fit of home-sickness, and remained for hours at the masthead. Scarcely had he descended when one of the sails was blown away.

“Then there the Reformers shall cordially meet him,
An’ there his great namesake, King William, shall greet him.”
He lost no time in putting himself in communication with Hume, Roebuck, Cobbett and O’Connell, and with Lord Goderich, then Colonial Secretary; but just how far the meeting was cordial, with those from whom cordiality was expected, only a long comparison of data can show. Even then our opinions had weight, as in ’31 when Brougham wrote: “Dear Lord Grey, the enclosed is from a Canadian paper; they have let you off well, as being priggish and having a Newcastle burr, and also as not being like O’Connell.” Mackenzie was in the nick of time to see that wonderful sight for eyes such as his—a great aristocracy bowing to the will of a great people—to hear the third reading of the Reform Bill. He was lucky enough to get into that small gallery in the House of Lords which accommodates only some eighty persons. He noticed that but few peers had arrived, and that a number of members from the Lower House stood about. To stand they were forced, or sit upon the matting, for there were neither chairs nor benches for them—a state of things highly displeasing to the fiery little democratic demagogue perched aloft, anxious to hear and determined that others should yet hear him.

At the Colonial Office he was simply a person interested in Canadian affairs, and useful as one able to furnish information. But he furnished it in such a discursive manner and adorned it with so much rhetoric that the Colonial Secretary found his document “singularly ill-adapted to bring questions of so much intricacy and importance to a definite issue.” The impression Mackenzie might have made was nullified by the counter-document adroitly sent in ahead of his own by the Canadian party in power, wherein a greater number of signatures than he had been able to get appended to dissatisfaction testified to satisfaction with affairs as they then existed in the Upper Province. The customary despatch followed. Some of Mackenzie’s arguments were treated with cutting severity; but an impression must have been made by them, for the despatch carried news most distressing to the oligarchy, which was modelled after the spirit of St.Paul,—that there should be no schism in the body, that the members should have the same care one for the other.

To these Tories of York it was all gall and wormwood. Nor could they accept it. Mackenzie had spent six days and six nights in London, with only an occasional forty winks taken in his chair, while he further expressed himself and those he represented. His epistolary feat was regarded by the Upper Canadian House with unqualified contempt, and Lord Goderich’s moderately lengthy one as “not calling for the serious attention of the Legislative Council.” Mackenzie had ventured to predict in his vigil of ink and words that unless the system of the government of Upper Canada was changed civil war must follow. But peers also sometimes have insomnia and know the distressing results; so he was warned: “Against gloomy prophecies of this nature, every man conversant with public business must fortify his mind.” The time was not far distant when he might say, “I told you so.” The Home Office listened with great attention, but observed close reticence in regard to itself. The Colonial Minister looked upon such predictions as a mode to extort concessions for which no adequate reason could be offered. Nevertheless, the two Crown officers who were Mr. Mackenzie’s most particular aversions at that time had to go. The weapon of animadversion sent skipping across seas for the purpose of his humiliation had proved a kind of boomerang, and the Attorney-General and Solicitor-General were left free to make as many contemptuous expressions as they pleased concerning the Colonial Secretary and his brethren, being looked upon by the last-named as rebels themselves, since they had, “in their places in the Assembly, taken a part directly opposed to the assured policy of His Majesty’s Government.” Such is the strength of point of view; for the libellous rebel doing his busiest utmost against them was to them “an individual who had been twice expelled” this same House of Assembly. Under the first affected hauteur of the dismissed officials there had been many qualms; the Attorney-General thought it ill became the Colonial Secretary to “sit down and answer this rigmarole trash” (Mackenzie’s hard work of seventy-two sleepless hours), “and it would much less become the Canadian House of Assembly to give it further weight by making it more public.” One, a little more sane, thought that if Mackenzie’s papers contained such an amount of falsehood and fallacy, the best way to expose such was by publication. But a large vote decided that it should not go upon the Journals, and the official organ called Lord Goderich’s despatch an elegant piece of fiddle-faddle, ... full of clever stupidity and condescending impertinence. The removal of the two Crown officers was described as “as high-handed and arbitrary stretch of power as has been enacted before the face of high heaven, in any of the four quarters of this nether world for many and many a long day.” The organ’s vocabulary displayed such combinations as “political mountebank—fools and knaves—all fools and knaves who listened to the silly complaints of the swinish multitude against the honourable and learned gentlemen connected with the administration of government.”

Whenever time dragged withal in the Upper Canadian House they re-expelled Mackenzie and fulminated anew against “the united factions of Mackenzie, Goderich, and the Yankee Methodists.”

Mackenzie’s friends lost no time in celebrating what was to be a short-lived triumph: